Managers told us repeatedly that they would bend over back­ward to retain women who add value. It seems obvious to us. You are in a much stronger position to demand the work life you want if your company wants to keep you. Let’s not kid ourselves. If your bosses think you’re of marginal benefit, they’re […]

You want to change your work schedule because the current hamster wheel is making your life intolerable. You may even be tempted to quit altogether but want to give your employers a shot at making it work. If so, you haven’t really got a huge amount to lose. And even if you aren’t ready to […]

There are literally hundreds of different ways you can shape the work deal you want. Remember Stephanie Hampton? She’s our public relations whiz at Marriott hotels. After years as a full-on workaholic, she’s now scaled back to a four-day week. Guess how she got her four-day week? She asked! It took her a ridiculously long […]

katty I was twenty-nine years old and living in Tokyo as a foreign correspondent for the BBC when I found out I was preg­nant with my first child. I phoned up my best friend, a col­league from work, and burst into tears. "I don’t know if I want kids. What about my career? No one […]

There are of course professions that absolutely require your physical presence at specific times. It’s not possible to get a knee operation from a surgeon who’s out playing with her chil­dren in the park. In these cases, being cunning doesn’t imme­diately pay off in terms of time away from the office, but it can bring […]

When you put all these separate strategies and techniques together you may find that you can actually create a flexible schedule on your own—without even asking permission, negotiating a new deal, or, most critically, taking a pay cut. Let’s face it—some com­panies just aren’t prone to offering you the possibility formally. It will be up […]

We can guarantee with absolute certainty that there will come a time in your professional life when, however savvy you are about rejecting perfection in favor of “good enough,” about delegating, self-promoting, and delivering those strategic yeses, you will have no choice but to assert yourself with a big, definitive NO. It can be career […]

A key nexus of working smarter not harder and being a savvy self-promoter is to focus on the high-profile assignments that your boss really cares about. That’s how you get the biggest bang. And in learning to recognize those moments, you will come to see that occasionally there are assignments that might threaten to wreak […]

Would it make sense to give away Nobel Prizes anonymously? Are Pulitzer winners kept under wraps? Do CEOs who navigate a successful merger hide the fact? No, of course not. And for good reason. The world likes winners And self-promotion is a basic part of business life. Informing others of a success is just as […]

The most successful people—the Big Picture Thinkers—don’t try to do everything. Instead, they hand things off. It’s better for them, better for their boss, and it’s better for their company too because it allows younger talent to flourish. As the boss of her own communications company, Christine Heenan had to learn the art of delegation. […]