When Corporate Sh*T Happens: Proven Career Strategies to Survive, Thrive, and Succeed

By Andrew L. Oliver

In today’s challenging job market, no single set of rules can be followed to ensure you won’t lose your job because of a merger, a layoff, outsourcing, or automation. You can, however, use certain skills to reduce the odds of becoming unemployed.

In When Corporate Sh*t Happens, Andrew L. Oliver provides you with career advice to guide you through each phase of your career, whether you are just starting out, trying to climb the ladder to success, or fighting age discrimination as an older person in the workplace. This guide offers self-assessment tools for identifying your ideal job and gives strategies for

• succeeding in your job,
• monitoring the company’s health,
• surviving when the company plans to downsize,
• finding a new job in less time with less financial and personal stress,
• surviving a merger,
• surviving a layoff,
• surviving unemployment, and
• bulletproofing your career.

Using Oliver’s personal and professional experience as a backdrop, When Corporate Sh*t Happen takes you step-by-step through your career, providing the advice and tips you need to be successful in good times and bad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532064067

Andrew L. Oliver

Andrew L. Oliver is a businessman, teacher, author and philanthropist who specializes in helping businesses and people achieve their goals and maximize their potential. He believes that humans are designed to live 120 years and are only using a fraction of our potential. Please visit www.burpeebillionaire.com to learn more.

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Copyright © 2019 Andrew L. Oliver.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6407-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6408-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6406-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019904502

iUniverse rev. date: 05/31/2019

CONTENTS

Introduction

Memorable Advice

The Career-Management Life Cycle

How to Read This Book

Chapter 1 Strategies for Finding a Great Job

Self-Assessment Tools for Identifying Your Ideal Job

The Stages between Each Level on the Ladder

Ask: Create a Strong Elevator Pitch

Seek: Marketing Techniques to Land Leads

Knock: World-Class Networking Strategies

Strategies to Consider after Losing a Job

Create an Outstanding Résumé

Rules for Effective Résumés

Create Effective Cover Letters

Create an Effective Business Card

How Managers Select Who Gets Hired

Seven Success Points for Chapter 1

Chapter 2 Strategies for Succeeding in Your Job

Create Your Hundred-Day Plan

Become More Valuable

Think Like a Free Agent

Be Your Boss’s Chief of Staff

Understand the Performance-Review Process

Make Your Manager Define Exceptional Performance

Consistently Exceed Expectations

Please Multiple Bosses

Know and Minimize Your CLAs and CLEs

Seven Success Points for Chapter 2

Chapter 3 Strategies for Monitoring the Company’s Health

Disappearing Doughnuts

Missed Quarterly Earnings

Layoff Rumors

Management Consultants

Foreign Competitors

Your Company Is Not an Industry Leader

Seven Success Points for Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Strategies for Surviving When the Company Plans to Downsize

Be Essential to the Success of Your Company

Analyze Whether Your Position Is in Jeopardy

Invest in Your Freedom Fund

Seven Success Points for Chapter 4

Chapter 5 Strategies for Surviving a Merger

Is Your Company the Big Fish or the Small Fish?

Understand the Merger Rationale

Analyze Your Value to the Merger Team

Seven Success Points for Chapter 5

Chapter 6 Strategies after Surviving a Layoff

Realize the Bottom Just Got Closer

Anticipate More Layoffs

Prepare to Work Twice as Hard

Maintain Contact with Former Colleagues

Seven Success Points for Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Strategies for Surviving Unemployment

Elvis Has Left the Building

Understand Your Unemployment Benefits

Reduce Personal Expenses

Find or Form a Support Group

Make Physical Fitness a Top Priority

Seven Success Points for Chapter 7

Conclusion

About the Author

Appendix

Success Ladder Worksheet

I-BARS Action Verbs

Recommended Books for Résumés and Cover Letters

For all who seek success in work

and in life, despite inevitable setbacks—I hope you will find in this book the information, inspiration, and motivation necessary to thrive in the twenty-first century.

INTRODUCTION

T he goal of this book is to provide you with career advice that will guide you through each phase of your career, whether you are just starting out, are trying to climb the ladder to success, or are older and fighting age discrimination in the workplace. This is the book I always looked for in bookstores but was never able to find. Although there are hundreds of books on how to do a specific job well or how to motivate yourself to be more efficient and effective at your job—and you can certainly find in autobiographies the decisions successful people made in their rise to the top—I know of no book but this one that takes you step-by-step through your career, providing the guidance you need to be successful in good times and bad. I will lead you through the maze of career hazards that can occur in our globalized economy.

It’s not what happens to you that will define your career; it’s the actions you take when bad things happen that make all the difference. You should not worry when shit happens, because the good advice you will learn in this book will shield you from the pain of such unfortunate events as downsizing, offshoring, being assigned work that is not fulfilling, being passed over for a promotion, earning less than you deserve, and losing your job to robotics or automation. My unique background has allowed me to be both the giver and receiver of unfortunate news, and my goal is to provide you with career counsel that enables you to survive, thrive, and succeed in any situation.

Memorable Advice

In this introduction, I will share some advice I received at the beginning, middle, and near the end of my career that made a dramatic impact on my direction and career success. I was lucky to have these three wonderful individuals in my life. Unfortunately, many people are not so lucky, so it is my hope that with this book, I can play that role for you, guiding you through every career option and obstacle that you will face.

If you don’t want to read my story, please jump directly to the section titled How to Read this Book to understand the book’s content and decide which chapter will give you the most benefit for the particular phase of your career. Honestly, I am a private person and would rather not share this personal information with you. But my goal in sharing my story is to show you how the advice I received shaped who I am, and to give you insight as to how the principles discussed in this book were formed. In my career, I have had countless mentors who have provided the guidance you will receive in the chapters that follow, but this book is not my autobiography; it is a strategic road map.

The first piece of advice I want to share with you came from my father, who had an award-winning career in the US Air Force and parlayed that into success in corporate America. At the time, I was a sophomore at Rutgers University and about to flunk out of school. I had followed the suggestion of Dr. Fertig, the team dentist, at the end of my freshman year to major in premed. Dr. Fertig spent most of his days on campus hanging out with the athletes, and I asked him what he did for a living, since he had so much time to spend with us. He said he was a successful dentist with a thriving practice and only worked three days a week. That was all I needed to hear, and I signed up for premed classes the next semester.

Unfortunately, I had been a less-than-stellar student in high school and got into college on my athletic ability. It took me only half a semester of physics, biology, advanced mathematics, and chemistry to understand that I was in deep trouble and would quite possibly flunk out of school. I called my father for some advice, and what he told me changed my destiny. He said I should major in computer science. He went on to explain that because the field was relatively new compared to other majors, I would have equal footing with everyone in the world and the color of my skin would not matter. Furthermore, he believed that computers were the wave of the future (having seen the impact they were having in the air force) and every company would need computers, so I could work for any company in the world.

As you read this book, we are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and computers are a part of everything we do. Back then, however, computers were a nonessential novelty item. Programming languages were just being invented. Microsoft consisted of two people—Bill Gates and Paul Allen—and was being run out of Bill’s parents’ house. The state-of-the-art computer system at Rutgers required the writing of binary codes with a number-two pencil on punch cards and then loading those cards into a card reader to execute your program. A printout of your results came twenty minutes later. My point is that majoring in computers was a gamble, not a sure thing.

And yet that gamble paid off big. When I graduated four years later, I was one of the first African Americans, if not the first, to earn a degree in computer science from Rutgers University and the only African American from Rutgers to earn a computer science degree that year. I had job offers from top corporations, and over the course of my career, I have worked for some of the most prestigious companies in America. I originally accepted a job offer from IBM but later turned it down and took a job with Bell Telephone Laboratories. Back then, Bell Labs, as it was affectionately called, was the premier technology company in the world. It was the Google or Facebook of its day. Bell Labs sent all MTS (members of technical staff) new hires to a top-ranked school full-time with a salary to get a master’s degree. My focus in grad school was on artificial intelligence—again, thanks to good advice from my father, who foresaw the day when computers would fly planes and analyze complex business decisions.

During my career at Bell Labs, my focus was on computer automation. Computer automation was changing the business landscape of the entire country. The tacit agreement from the 1940s to the mid-1990s was that American corporations were paternal or maternal entities that took care of their employees with lifetime employment and benefits. Companies like Ma Bell, Papa IBM, and GM were coveted places to work because they implicitly offered employment for life.

But times were changing, with computers increasing in power, data capacity, and data transmission speed—allowing intercontinental programming and real-time video and text communication over another new invention called the internet. Globalization was the new buzzword, and it was taking root and changing the entire agreement between companies and workers. Offshoring, automating, M&A (mergers and acquisitions), and right-sizing became the new ways of doing business, and my leading-edge automation skills placed me in the middle of all the action for the coming decades. Employment for life—working at a single job out of high school or college until retirement—was a thing of the past.

The second piece of career advice I will share came from Morris Landis, a dear friend and my first career mentor. I first met Morris the summer of my sophomore year at Rutgers. My father worked for the insurance company that the Landis family owned, and I was hired to deliver the mail as a summer intern. My father told me that when I met Morris for the first time, I should tell him that I was on the Rutgers track team. When I did so, Morris told me stories of his conquests as a track star at NYU. Three hours later, we had become fast friends.

Our friendship was instantaneous but also a little strange—as Morris was a successful Jewish multimillionaire real estate developer in his fifties and I was a skinny black teenager still in college—but we remained good friends until his death in his early eighties. Morris’s mannerisms and appearance reminded me of the late Howard Cosell, the famous ABC sports broadcaster. His nickname for me was handsome Andy. In the early part of our friendship, he tried to get me to invest in real estate, which was his specialty. Later, he tried to partner me with some of his family businesses.

What Morris did not realize was that I had become a successful IT professional working for a premier corporation. At one point, we had a rift in our friendship when he told me quite frankly that I should be more successful financially by that point and that maybe he was wasting his time giving me advice that I was not taking. That harsh criticism offended me, and we did not speak for about three years.

Then one day, my father told me he’d heard that Morris had fallen sick, and I reached out to the family to find out how he was doing. Morris called me back, told me his health was just fine, and suggested that we should get together. We met for lunch at the Somerset Diner, and I apologized for ignoring him—but I also told him honestly that I did not want to invest in real estate or run a business. I wanted to be a successful executive. He then said, Why didn’t you tell me that? I could help you do that, and help me he did.

It was the beginning of the summer, and he invited me to come spend a weekend at his beach house at Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where we would map out a plan for me to become a successful executive. In this introduction, I will share only a sample of the advice Morris gave me. Much of his wisdom is sprinkled throughout the chapters of this book.

His first suggestion was to understand how my company makes a profit and then make sure that everything I do helps the company make money. He said that every job in the corporation must in some way help the company make a profit; otherwise, that function is useless and will eventually be eliminated.

His second suggestion was to make my boss extremely happy by doing excellent work. I asked Morris, What does excellent work look like? He told me it’s whatever your boss thinks is excellent. You must always ask for feedback and always deliver on that feedback

Morris was a very strategic thinker, and he gave me plenty of details and a road map on what I needed to do. We woke early and stayed up talking (mostly Morris) all night until one or two in the morning working on the plan. We met at his beach house for one weekend every summer for the next five years refining the plan, and within those five years, my salary almost tripled. I received promotions every year, starting as a team leader and eventually accepting a position as a senior director for the MetLife insurance company. I realize this rapid growth would not have happened if a successful businessman had not been willing to help me develop a strategic plan to move up the ladder and show me the keys to success.

The third piece of advice I’ll share with you here came from Ed Berko, who was the senior executive heading up the investment risk department for MetLife. Every month, MetLife sponsored a program called An Evening with an Officer. It was a dinner where a senior executive would give a speech to inspire and inform the junior managers. I was amazed at how brilliant, how sharp, and how well rounded Ed was, and after his speech, I asked him if we could meet for lunch. He agreed, and this was the beginning of our brief mentor–mentee relationship.

Ed’s advice came at a time when I was struggling with an impending layoff. The time period was the latter part of 2007—the beginning of the worst recession our country was to face since the Great Depression. Times were hard, and I realized that my job was in jeopardy. Fortunately, I had an opportunity to move to another department and serve as chief of staff for one of the senior vice presidents in sales. This was a job I really didn’t want to do, but taking it would allow me to avoid being laid off.

When we met for lunch, I explained that I might lose my current job, but I did have an opportunity to