Careers: Interviews

Anthony Hill

Does your personality type have relevance for your career? To answer that, we turned to Kip Parent, CEO of Keirsey.com, which markets the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, and Edward Kim, managing director of Keirsey's professional services division at Synergy Leaders.

Social networking sites offer IT job seekers the resources to find peers with similar skills and learn more about employers. But candidates should be aware that the online outlets also provide employees a glimpse into the personal lives of potential hires. That can be good or it can be very bad, according to Rona Borre, president and CEO of Instant Technology, an IT recruiting and staff augmentation firm in the US. Borre recently talked with Denise Dubie about how new technologies can boost or torpedo job searches.

Bruce Marcus, the executive vice president and CIO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, answers questions about moving into leadership positions, dealing with a difficult boss and the impact of the economy on IT.

Q&A with Randall Craig, the president of Pinetree Advisors discusses some of the ideas in his book Personal Balance Sheet: A Practical Career Planning Guide.

IT professionals with strong technical backgrounds can drum up some great ideas for start-up companies, but they often lack the business acumen to keep those companies afloat. To help these would-be captains of industry, Computerworld recently spoke with Ken Blanchard, the best-selling co-author of The One Minute Entrepreneur and The One Minute Manager to gain insight on the steps that technology entrepreneurs should take -- and avoid. Step one: Remember the basics.

What if half the men in science, engineering and technology roles dropped out at midcareer? That would surely be perceived as a national crisis. Yet more than half the women in those fields leave -- most of them during their mid- to late 30s.

When Anne Mulcahy took over as CEO of Xerox in August 2001, the outlook for the company to which she had devoted 25 years of her life could hardly have been bleaker. Xerox was over $17 billion in debt, bankruptcy appeared inevitable, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating alleged accounting irregularities.

Ram Murthy, the director of application systems at the Peace Corps, answers questions about education, certifications, leadership and dealing with slackers.

MMORPGs -- massively multiplayer online role-playing games -- like World of Warcraft, Eve and EverQuest may be the best simulators of tomorrow's business environment. So say Byron Reeves, Thomas W. Malone and Tony O'Driscoll in this month's Harvard Business Review. The authors found that these games closely mirror the evolving world of business: distributed decision-making, rapid response, ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority.

Michael Schrage has some advice, and it's not just for IT managers.