In my experience, it’s better to have soft skills like managing people, selling, networking, and creativity than to have hard “real” skills. “Real skills” are easy to outsource or automate.
If the company dies, exactly who would be providing you with a parachute?
That’s been my experience with the few CEOs I know. I’m sure there are some CEOs out there who schedule “important meetings” around tee time, but I haven’t met them. Those I know are more likely to be taking work with them and holding conference calls while on vacation, sending you Blackberry messages from their kids’ soccer games, and freaking out because they can’t get cell phone calls on a one hour flight. It’s all about work with them. Not a life I’d want.
Sales would be the worst for me. I hate following up leads, hate cold calling, hate “asking for the sale,” and, while I don’t mind having a large portion of my compensation “pay for performance” (e.g. bonuses being a large part of my compensation), I’d hate working for commissions. I’d feel like every vacation I took meant I was earning less.
I think marketing is the best (which is probably why I do it). You’re often right up with the latest company strategy and management decisions. You interact with the top brass, but you don’t have the same level of stress and excessive demands on your time that they do. Plus, the job involves a good mix of quantitative and creative work.
Yeah, there is some BS involved. But I don’t think you can make a habit of it. You can BS your way up to a point, but it does catch up with you. Eventually, you have to launch your product or campaign. When results come in, you really can’t spin the numbers all that much. You can maybe bluff your way through one failed campaign, but not two.
My father, in sales, is being made redundant. When he started his career, the industry was filled with small indpendants to sell into. Now its a few superstores who don’t need salespeople - they buy based on branding. For example, lets say you rep groceries and work for a small grocery brand in the upper Midwest. There are few truly independant grocers to sell into anymore - you are selling to Supervalue. And if you rep “Mom’s Cake Mix” Supervalue doesn’t care about you - they care about General Mills. And General Mills doesn’t need a professional sales person to rep into Supervalue, they need an account babysitter, because it isn’t like Supervalue is going to not carry the General Mills brand.
The small independants, to get leverage, form buyers groups, to operate on the same level as the major players.
Any function, except a few at the top, can be outsourced. Most companies don’t do their own marketing - a soft skill that involves creativity - they hire outside experts to brand and market. But that still leaves plenty of jobs in advertsing and marketing.
Sort of. The problem with soft skills is that it’s easy to walk over to you and say “So what is it that you do again?” at layoff time, and when you say something about “leveraging the strategic value chain to achieve results through human capital” it would be pretty easy to just point you to the door.
My vote for best corporate function would be the training portion of HR. It is subject to outsourcing, but if you have the job it is pretty good. It’s also possible to be outsourced and do related types of training for many companies, still not a bad deal. Recruiting is a lot like sales, I’d really lump them together. And any sales job loses points with me due to quotas set by people who work backward from how much money they need rather than forward from how much is sold now and what would a plausible increase be.
My vote for worst would be any form of audit, from finance to HR to IT. You will have no friends. You will live in a sea of ethical gray areas. Everytime your name is spoken, it will be with a little sinking growl sound.
I have to agree with what others have said. You consistantly demonstrate a lack of knowledge of anything remotely having to do with the business world.
Echoing what others have said, the people who make CEO or partner in their firms are the people who live and breath their work. They work weekends and travel constantly and have been doing this since they started working. I received an "Out of Office email from one of my clients dated Sat and Sun. Yeah…I call that the “weekend”. Normally I don’t feel a need to tell people I’m not working.
Most people burn out and quit long before ever reaching that level. The people we are talking about don’t burn out because work is what they do and who they are.
Right on time, Fortune magazine, cover-dated 20 March 2006 has an article “A dozen SUPER ACHIEVERS tell how they stay ahead in the fast lane”
Yep, EC, these are the cushiest jobs you could ever have. Here’s a hit with a clue-by-four. There are more needs for a CEO than there are CEOs. This puts CEOs in a good position to negotiate their contracts. However, one does not get a parachute unless one has demonstrated that one is worth a parachute. They are not candy just handed out to the old-boys network. The old-boys that get them have busted their buns for decades in high-pressure, high-profile positions and have proven themselves.
Tru dat!
Please excuse any typos. This was transcribed from a printed article, not copy & paste.
You clearly have never worked for a public company that takes its business seriously. The CEO does have a set of very demanding bosses, they are called shareholders, and the vast majority aren’t card carrying, parachute wearing, fortune 100 CEOs.
My own opinion:
Worst - corporate level quality. Some people love it, but I don’t think these guys ever have a meeting go 100% positively. Screw that… not even 50% positively. If there wasn’t a problem on the agenda, some idiot will dig one up and ambush them with it.
Best – Marketing. Lot’s of interaction, more opportunities to succeed than fail, and generally seen as more of a growth position than 2nd best, corporate level sales.
In my experience, marketing people are held in contempt by most everyone. If you like the job, though, go for it, because there’s nothing better than doing what you like to do.
“A good manager is fungible.”
Including other marketing people…
I was in marketing and the toughest part of it is demonstrating what you do. If you are good at your job people don’t usually see it.
Unlike sales, there isn’t usually a tangible or measurable result, you cost a lot and if the company is losing money, they cut you first, although they shouldn’t.
That is a good call. Consulting firms tend to take young people, make them do audits on things they barely understand themselves, and drive them into the ground in short order. The work is very detail orientated and most people do hate them because no real good can come from an audit as far as the regular employees are concerned. I have had a few run-in’s with auditors because they were trying to analyze things themselves when they didn’t have the understanding to do so and then present it at the top (you try walking into a company you have never seen before, grab stacks of paper and computer files and figure out what is going on in a short amount of time. It is very difficult).
This is what I do now, and I think it’s the best job I’ve ever had. Yes, it’s a lot like being a fireman where your pager might wake you up at 3:00 in the morning, but the company pays handsomly for those kinds of standby people. And frankly, most of the time there aren’t any big fires and I can spend days on end working from home in front of the fireplace (in the winter) or at the pool (in the summer).
Demonstrate what we do? Marketing managers don’t do a whole lot of anything! Instead we figure out what other people need to do, tell them to do it, tell them how well they’ve done it, and then get the credit (or blame) for their work! 
All kidding aside, what I mean by that is most of what I do is project management.
For example, I myself don’t write the copy, create the designs, buy the media or materials, conduct the research, pull industry data, create and manage mailing lists, etc. I work with internal groups and outside vendors who do most of that. My job is to manage the overall project (e.g. determine the budget, hire those internal and external groups, manage deadlines, set goals, review and approve everyone else’s work, obtain management and legal approvals, etc.); make the decisions; and bear responsibility for the success or failure of the project.
As you move up the ladder, you don’t even do most of the project management yourself. Instead you identify projects the company needs to take on, assign people to those projects, and review/evaluate their progress.
Being successful in my job is often more dependant on the “soft” skills (managing dealines, motivating people who may or may not report to you, recognising an opportunity, selling a concept to upper management, etc.) and less on the “hard” skills (though you do need a solid base of statistical, writing, and presentation skills as well as a good eye for creative).
IMHO, I have long thought that the worst job in any company is the lowest level manager. While I am a software developer myself, this probably applies to anyone in a comparable position.
“Section Manager” or whatever your company calls it, has enormous responsibility, almost no authority whatsoever, and unless their own manager is very good, very little guidance despite the fact that this is usually a first management job for most people in the position. These folks are usually still expected to produce technically, on top of which they have to guide the people beneath them, gather and distribute the requirements for their folks, go to endless meetings at which they are the most junior person there (and therefore given about as much credence as a monkey!), make and be held to schedules, find out what their people need to produce and get it for them, etc. I’ve held the position twice in my career, and of course, worked under it for the rest, and I’ve had about eight jobs over the years. I’ve never seen a section manager whose job I would like to have, and I will certainly never go into it again myself - I’d flip burgers first! Whenever responsibility and authority are not in sync, it’s a bad situation, and this mangement level is the poster child for that particular condition!
In a company that is really focused on marketing, the marketing dept. will set a plan for a certain level of sales, not to be confused with the complementary sales plan. That’s pretty measurable. If sales and top mgmt. bought into that plan, you will either see sales and marketing working closely together, or one pushing the other to hold up their end of the bargain. The former is best, but the latter is better than no interaction at all.
Also, marketing driven revenue tends to be a pull through, rather than a push. Pulls from indirect customer further up the food chain usually indicate this is happening. Again, marketing will plan on which of these customers they will reach.
Any questions? Yeah, you in the back…
I think it varies by the state of the economy. When times are good, staff positions are great-the company is making lots of money, so being the “Vice president of Corporate Diversity” is a fun joob: few headaches and good pay. When times get bad though-staff positions are the first to go! Marketing is a mixed bag-in some companies, it is a vital department…but if you are a marketing guy for toilet paper, nobody really needs you. Finance/accounting are good. The trick to staying alive 9in the corporate jungle) is this: do your job VERY well, and NEVER write things down-if you document your methods, the company will fire you and replace you with a new MBA. Also, always keep something in reserve…if you know that the VP of Finance is stealing, document it and keep records of his dealings…it can be invaluable if a hatchet man decides to cut your head off!
Admin assistant. You are utterly unappreciated and unvalued. Your work (and thus your presence) is only noticed when you mess up or something goes wrong. All the hard (hard=physical, mental, skilled) work you do is unnoticed. People treat you like an idiot and take advantage of your low position and make you do things that are totally not your job. The tasks that nobody else wants to do end up as yours (cleaning out the file room, fixing the stapler, properly formatting someone’s utterly incompetently formatted document) regardless of whether you have any qualifications whatsoever to do it (in particular I’m thinking of cleaning out old files, an admin assistant is in no position to know what files are useful, what are not, and what would be the best way to file them.)
There is usually no room for upward mobility, many is the office I have been told that admin assistants are pigeonholed as such and will never be able to advance. So if you ever do want a better job, you know that your current experience will probably not even make it on to your resume.
Despite the fact that there are few people in the office who can do your job (as evidenced by the tasks people dump on you because they can’t do it properly themselves), there is no such thing as an accomplishment or achievement that you can point to, unless it’s something like “reorganized the filing system” or “successfully kept the maintenance cabinet stocked” or “maintained effective relationships with the courier company.”
You are always at the bottom of the barrel, so any employee who is having a bad day or feels like a power trip is able to take it out on you, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.
The pay is always shit.
It is often convincingly argued that powerlessness is a great cause of unhappiness, illness, depression, miseries of all kinds. Admin assistants are completely powerless, and (unlike, say, maintenance people) they have to spend their days face-to-face with all the legions of people who have power over them.
And the kicker is that all sensible people know the value of a good admin assistant. Bosses are just never required to say so, or to pay them accordingly, or to in any way formally recognize their value. The good ones do, but mostly the only way you know you’re valued is because you haven’t gotten sacked.