EditorialsBy Matt Bud, Chairman, The FENG

Most of us in the financial community find talking on the telephone to be one of the more challenging things we do. I believe the primary reason is that most of our work is accomplished in written form. When we do present our work to the boss or to our peers, it is usually done face to face and to a very large degree, we set the agenda. In other words, we know the topics and the typical questions that are going to be asked and we are prepared for them. It is for this reason that working the phone can be difficult for us. (Actually, it is probably difficult for everyone!) If you think about the communications aspects of [ Read more… ]

I have over the years had endless discussions with our many members on the topic of disguising your age or generalizing your background and despite my best arguments, I find people still doing it. Hopefully it is not the same people. (Why don’t they listen to me?) Actually, I am not whining. Everyone in our membership is an adult many times over. Still, in times of stress and with advice coming from all directions, much of which is in significant disagreement, it is hard to choose. Others provide compelling opinions as to why this or that is correct. It’s just that they usually don’t past the “smell test.” All advice needs to be benchmarked by your own logic. Put yourself [ Read more… ]

Sailing can be a very simple or a very complicated activity. It depends on how you want to approach it. To get from here to there can be planned on a very simple basis or a very complicated basis. For example, if you are sailing across Long Island Sound from North to South to a particular destination, it doesn’t hurt from a planning stand point to consider the fact that the dominant wind in our part of the world is southwest. In addition, the tidal current which you also should consider runs East and West, so you have to know the state of the tide. At its full force, it can be pushing you in one direction or another at [ Read more… ]

I know that all of us take great pride in being “out of the box” thinkers, but there are situations that taking an innovative approach is the same as shooting yourself in the foot. One of those situations is in being innovative with the standard resume format. The traditional resume begins with your contact information: name, address (including email address) and your phone numbers. A summary, much like your 90-second announcement should follow. Next is your work history in reverse chronological order with a short definition of what each company’s business is all about, your titles and the years you held them and for your more recent jobs going back say 15 years, some accomplishments. You end with your educational [ Read more… ]

At some point during a long job search I often get an email from a member in which the primary message is about “the futility of it all.” Having been out of work myself for almost two full years in 1991 and 1992, I guess I can say I’ve been there and done that. Being out of work is never easy, and but it is especially hard on those of us who are older. It’s not just that employers are looking to cut costs and our big salaries are a good target, it is also that we are at that point in our lives when we are faced with particularly large financial obligations. This could be college for our teenagers [ Read more… ]

I know many of you will find it hard to believe, but we are now in a golden period for networking, networking and MORE networking. So, I hope you will please have at it. A lot of people believe that holiday times and especially the period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve are the worst times for networking, but they’re dead wrong. During this time between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, let’s start with the idea that it’s PARTY TIME! Even though the stock market is falling (and rising), companies will have planned holiday gatherings. It’s hard not to! While they may not be the elaborate events we all remember from our early days of employment during other [ Read more… ]

As you may remember from the song of this same name, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. I know they thought of it first and popularized it, but it is very much like your membership in The FENG. The only difference is you can check out, but I hope you won’t. If you take a moment to look around the room at other job search related networking meetings and chat it up with the members of that group, one of our unique features will become a little more obvious. In The FENG members are expected to always be members. Their involvement may change. Sometimes it becomes greater. Sometimes it becomes less. But, the security [ Read more… ]

It is always difficult to explain why you trust someone. In our daily encounters out in the world we come across all kinds of folks. Most of the individuals we do business with on a daily basis don’t have to be our friends, and the nature of the exchanges we have with them don’t even require that we trust them. As an example: purchasing gas. As long as we can bring ourselves to trust the gas station attendant not to pour the gas into the back seat of our car, there isn’t really much at risk. And, since we probably put this exchange on our credit card, there is no possibility that the value received isn’t the amount we paid. [ Read more… ]

A long time ago I read a book by Dodge Morgan. Those non-sailors among us will probably not recognize his name, but in his 50’s, Dodge decided to sail solo around the world on a sloop especially designed for him. (I also bought the video of his voyage and heard him speak about his trip, but we won’t get into that.) The area around the equator is referred to by sailors as the doldrums. Ships making passages around the world could be assured of spending an inordinate amount of time trying to cross this part of the ocean. This is in contrast to the southern ocean where the wind blows almost non-stop all year around because there are no land [ Read more… ]

Ever the wise sailor, I always (well, almost always) check the weather forecast before heading down to the boat to go out for the day. This may or may not be a valuable activity. My wife jokes that in her next life she wants to be a weather forecaster. They never have to be right and they still get paid. I have to agree that they are frequently wrong, and sometimes I have taken their prognostications to heart and they have caused me to miss a perfectly good sailing day. (As you may know, the sailing season is very short – it is less than 52 weeks per year, so I hate to miss even one day.) There is also [ Read more… ]

Much as I hate using cliché phrases as the one above, I don’t really know if there is a better one to describe the process of self-examination that is required when faced with looking for another “work opportunity.” (I call them work opportunities instead of jobs, because they don’t generally last long enough these days to be dignified with that “job” label.) Of course, I should preface my comments with the very obvious fact that changing industries or professions in any job market is very difficult. There are plenty of folks who are “local candidates,” or from the “required” industry. Competing against them in any sense isn’t an even contest, but competing rarely is as much fun as folks make [ Read more… ]

I know you will all find this hard to believe, but there was a time when The FENG only had 20 members. In May of 1995, I was invited by Ed Devlin, the then Chairman, to join what was at that time The Fairfield County Financial Executives Networking Group. (Ed had recently taken over from Don Gonsalves who started the group in 1991.) Being a bit of a computer expert, especially compared to Ed, I volunteered to act as social chair and take in resumes, adding them to what we now know as our membership directory. Believe it or not, we actually discussed job leads at meetings as there was no evening newsletter. Some of our founding members such as [ Read more… ]

People who know that my wife and I are into sailing often ask us what we most enjoy making for dinner when we are on the boat. My standard response is reservations. The hard part is, of course, picking the restaurant. Are we in the mood for Mexican food, Pizza, French, Italian, or Chinese? Fortunately for us, although you can’t always tell by the name of the restaurant what they serve, all restaurants have enough common sense to stake out their areas of expertise when being listed in the telephone book, or in the many local brochures available at our favorite harbors. No restaurant would consider keeping their area of expertise a secret. It just wouldn’t be good for business. [ Read more… ]

I don’t know if you have noticed, but all of the job leads from The FECG include a sentence that says “You may forward this to other members of The FENG if you are aware of their background and/or interest in this kind of opportunity.” I wish all the job leads in our newsletter had this sentence. If only our eyes weren’t so bad, and the job leads for our particular areas of expertise so few and far between, I suppose all members could be expected to read the newsletter for themselves and catch all the opportunities that were a fit for them. However, we really do need other members watching out for us. Yes, all of us are responsible [ Read more… ]

I am not going to suggest to you that the world of The FENG is a perfect place. That said, I hope that someday we will be recognized as one of the organizations that “started it all.” We all know that common courtesy is very rare in today’s world, which makes you wonder why they call it common courtesy. Perhaps they should call it rare courtesy, or come up with another name for it entirely. It is so very easy to give in to the existing pattern of discourtesy and start acting that way ourselves. In the environment of job search, it is rare that the submission of your resume generates an acknowledgement. Hitting reply doesn’t sound like it is [ Read more… ]

When I first got into sailing as a young man (I was in my 30’s), my father-in-law suggested we take a class – what a concept! Sailing is actually pretty simple. First, you can’t sail directly into the wind (I wonder why?). Next, never spit into the wind. And finally, if you feel yourself getting seasick, get yourself over to the lee rail. (Okay, this one takes a little explaining. The lee rail is on the opposite side of the boat from where the wind is coming from, so it is sort of a corollary of the second rule.) I suppose I should add that if you are just off the wind, the sails are all pulled in tight, hence [ Read more… ]

One of our members wrote to me a few years ago seeking some career advice. It seems his firm is restructuring and his job is being eliminated. That said, he has some “work opportunities” that are available to him, (some at his current firm) but all of which are a little off task to his primary skill areas. Not that he can’t do them, it is more a question of how this will affect his career and whether or not he should just take a severance package and look for a “real” job. I don’t think it will come as a shock to any of you if I mention that there is no one right answer to finding a way [ Read more… ]

For almost a decade I was Chief Financial Officer of an Advertising Agency. In addition to learning how to deal with a wild and crazy bunch of folks, I learned a lot not only about the advertising business, but also about advertising in general. One of the facts that I learned was that a good advertising campaign could get customers to try the product. (We were a very creative shop!) In some cases, we were so good at what we did that we almost put some of our clients out of business. Sounds odd, but oh so true. Promising 10 and delivering 5 is about one of the worst things you can do. In the context of job search, I [ Read more… ]

I don’t know if all of you know it, but I started my career in retailing at B. Altman & Company, one of the old line “Carriage Trade” retailers in New York City, and an interesting place to be sure. To be successful in this retailing segment you had to treat your customers’ right. All merchandise was returnable, and to the amazement of this Internal Auditor at the time, was accepted for full credit even when sometimes it hadn’t been purchased in the store. It is this “the customer is always right” attitude that I try to apply in The FENG to our many audiences. If there is something we are “doing” to one another or to some group outside [ Read more… ]