Preparing for a new position in business is important as well. Yet, there is little out there that has a solid preparation plan for Cubicle Warriors to plan for a new position.

“The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan” is a book that outlines the plan for an executive transition to a new role. Think at the CEO or Senior Vice President titles in a larger corporate organization and you have where the book focuses. I’ve used these types of books for my own personal management before and I wanted to try this one as a guide for knowledge workers in preparing for a new position. The book offers up the right stuff:

• A seven-step process to use for managing the 100-day transition to a new role
• Downloadable forms to use as a way to document the 100-day transition
• Focus on relationship building and not just organization charts
• Understanding the politics of the organization and ensuring a good communications plan
• Excellent techniques to determine information about the company and the role being taken

The book even addresses the importance of SMART goals and how to use them in a performance review, a personally important point as I include it in the How to write your performance review course in Cube Rules Products.

Alas, when the authors state their case for the new leader, they really do mean CEO’s and other corporate executives. The information in the book was tough to translate for the leaders of where business meets the cubicle.

Cube Rules Rating: Two Cubes of Five where I didn’t see much value; you might

The book basically outlines the types of consulting services a corporate executive would use (isn’t it great that they can use consultants to plan their job?) in transitioning to a new position. Some of the techniques and steps could be of use to a new manager going into a new position, but would be tough for knowledge workers to use.

Related posts:

1. The single most important action to take on your performance review
2. Book Review: New Job, New You
3. Book Review: Beyond Bullet Points
4. Book Review: Never Eat Alone
5. Book Review: The Executive Rules

And there is significant financial news affecting Cubicle Warriors this week.

Government takes over Freddie and Fannie

Over the weekend, the Treasury announced that it would be taking over Fannie and Freddie and providing cash – as much as needed – to maintain and preserve their debt ratings. The shareholders will lose virtually everything, of course.

The reason for the takeover?

Stock markets jumped after the U.S. government’s decision to launch what could be its biggest federal bailout ever, in a bid to support the housing market and ward off more global financial market turbulence.

But Rogers said in the long term the move spelled trouble.

“This is madness, this is insanity, they have more than doubled the American national debt in one weekend for a bunch of crooks and incompetents. I’m not quite sure why I or anybody else should be paying for this,” Rogers told “Squawk Box Europe.”

When the government bails out company, it means YOU are having your tax dollars bail out companies. Foreign governments – who have supplied the dollars to support the deficit – are starting to call those dollars home. And, the bailout may not even work.

The stock market opened some 300 points higher, but have lost half the gains as I write this. And the gains, even at the 300-point level, are not even enough to make up for the losses last week.

For Cubicle Warriors, it means the financial crisis is far from over and that spills over into all sorts of industries. You can expect 6.1% unemployment to go up.

Another bank CEO replaced

At Washington Mutual, Kerry Killinger is out as CEO.

As Cube Rules Members noted in their exclusive reports, the bank replaced its executive in charge of banking several weeks ago. Today they announced this change in leadership.

Given the fact that they received a $7-billion capitol infusion several months ago that is now under water, have filed a “memorandum of understanding with the Office of Thrift Supervision concerning aspects of its operations,” and the stock continues to tank, you can expect wholesale changes in the management of the bank. And more layoffs. Last I checked today, the stock was down almost 15% more after the announcement.

Laying off 10,000 people at a time

With the unemployment rate over 6%, who should be laying more people off? In a provocative article – with good reasons provided – here are the 12 companies that should be laying off 10,000 people this year:

Ford, Sears, Citigroup, WaMu, Rite Aid, AT&T, Circuit City, Gap, Merck, AIG, Blockbuster, and IBM

A thoughtful, but scary, read.

Cube Rules News

It’s good to be back in the swing of things. I’ve had issues with my site not being up and running as much as I would like. Last week, this site moved over to a different server after two or three weeks of not having 99% uptime.

This weekend, I also changed the way I upgrade the software on the site and though it was thoroughly tested after the upgrade, I was greeted this morning with a 500 internal server error. That has now been fixed.

The first rule of technology is to have it be reliable. Not reliably unreliable. I’m optimistic that these infrastructure issues are now behind us.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Career Management Monday, September 29, 2008
2. Career Management Monday, September 15, 2008
3. Career Management Monday, October 06, 2008
4. Career Management Monday, October 13, 2008
5. Career Management Monday, November 3, 2008

No one has heard of Warrior Boot Camp — but it will be vitally important to you, as a member of the 40-million knowledge workers on the planet.

You see, most people come to this blog searching for things critical to survival on Corporate Earth: networking with others, developing personal brands, understanding their manager and management, translating Corporate Speak, wondering how long their position will last, and even the very basic — but critical — job skills of writing goals and performance reviews.

They come to this site because they want to learn about those things they struggle with at work — but there is no one to teach them. Not their manager, nor their coworkers, or their colleges with the fancy business degree offerings. With over thirty years experience in Fortune 100 companies as both a manager and an individual contributor, I’m in a unique position to help people navigate a career in a cube — to help them become the successful Cubicle Warrior.

The conference, SOBCon08 — the Successful and Outstanding Blogger Conference — will help launch Warrior Boot Camp. The objective coming out of the three-day conference on May 4th is simple and daunting: construct an actionable business plan for Warrior Boot Camp that I will begin to execute the minute I get home.

While the presentations about building businesses will be what I’m learning, the lessons from the keynote presenters will also speak directly to you:

• Anita Bruzzese from Gannett USA Today, a good friend, will speak about online reputation management. In today’s global economy, your teammates — and hiring managers — come from across the globe and will learn about you from your online reputation.
• Brian Clark will speak to online business models that work. This addresses how to know and differentiate the right business model for what we do. It is the same in our careers: knowing what our strengths are and how to leverage them to success.
• Lorelle VanFossen presents focusing your business to get noticed — the exact same thing needed to stand out in our own careers.
• Chris Garrett will present the concept that working hard on a blog doesn’t come close to working smart. We’re told all the time that we need to work smarter, but few tell us how. Chris will tell us. In addition, Chris has expert knowledge about how to leverage blogs and online businesses. If I am fortunate to be able to work with him, I’m asking how I can leverage Warrior Boot Camp to maximize the different types of teaching my readers need about career management.
• Chris Brogan will speak on social media choices that produce. LinkedIn? Facebook? Blogs? Social site flavor of the month? Now what? We all need to know what and how social media choices will help us achieve our objectives and build our personal brand.
• David Bullock presents a sales model that converts. We don’t think that our career is about selling — but it is all about selling and producing. How to convert what we do so our managers understand our value on the team is not talked about near enough.
• Liz Strauss will talk about building an irresistible offer. Liz can ask you ten questions and come up with the answer that has evaded you for years. She’s done it with me. Wouldn’t you like to discover what your irresistible offer is for companies you’d like to work with?
• Finally, Wendy Piersall will talk about success management. Wendy, by all measures, is successful in her business; yet she is in the process of turning it all upside down by re-branding everything. Building a business — or changing jobs, companies, and careers — is exciting, stimulating, and frightening all at the same time. How to navigate the shoals should be of interest to all of us.

I’ll be sharing all of these lessons with you after I get back.

At the conference, the business plan for Warrior Boot Camp will be built with the help of my own smaller mastermind group. I’ll help build their plans and they will help build mine. We will all be people we can talk with as we implement these plans after the conference; it is networking extraordinaire. Having expert support from people who are experts in their own right who also helped mold your business plan is a powerful indicator of success.

The skills I’ve developed in Corporate America should come into play at the conference as well. The ability to see the central issue that needs addressing amongst the chatter, noise and interruptions of every day life should be important. Clearly understanding process and how it affects success will be critical as plans are built. Those strengths, combined with a long history of successfully executing change in the workplace, should provide value with my team. I can’t wait.

My desire is to have each of you become a Cubicle Warrior. Warrior Boot Camp is the next level of work to do just that.

Scot

Related posts:

1. Cube Rules Products
2. Welcome to Cube Rules — Career Management for Cubicle Warriors
3. Cube Rules Philosophy
4. Career Management Tips from Cube Rules: Introduction
5. Thanks for your Cube Rules Newsletter Subscription