If one of your favorite holiday movies happens to be the 1994 version of “Miracle on 34th Street,” you might get a career lesson from what happened at the fictional Cole’s department store.Kris Kringle told customers where to buy their toys, even if it meant sending them to a competitor. People at Cole’s were stunned at first, but then decided to make it a marketing campaign: If Cole’s didn’t have something the customer wan...

You just know that big-time networker Susan RoAne would love Joaquin Andujar, a Major League baseball pitcher in the 1970s and 1980s, especially because of the quotation he is most famous for. “My favorite word in English,” he once said, “is ‘youneverknow.’ ”And that, in essence, is why people who make the biggest gains out of networking are those who aren’t constantly thinking about how they can advance their own agenda.“S...

A survey released this month says that Americans have gotten more confident about the job market than they have been in at least two years — but that doesn’t exactly mean that people are dancing in the streets.In the random sampling of 1,017 full-time workers nationwide conducted by Right Management Consultants, three-quarters of people responding say they believe that there is little or no chance they will lose their jobs...

When the newly constituted jury announced that it had quickly reached a verdict in the Scott Peterson trial, pundits flashed back to another notorious double-murder case: when O.J. Simpson was acquitted in 1995.But this jury found Peterson guilty in the first-degree murder of wife Laci and second-degree murder of their apparently unborn son, Conner, even though the evidence didn’t seem as overwhelming as the evidence had be...

In his long-awaited successor to “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” workplace guru Stephen Covey includes an anecdote from Muhammad Yunus, an economics teacher in Bangladesh 25 years ago. Yunus ended up making a big change after meeting a woman who was basically stuck in poverty over a matter of small change.She put together bamboo stools, but couldn’t afford to pay the equivalent of 20 U.S. cents to buy the bamboo....

A close presidential election is a lot like a workplace shakeup — even though, in America’s case, there isn’t much of physical shakeup.It’s not like we’re getting a new CEO or merging with Mexico, certainly, but the results told a sizable minority of our “workforce” that it isn’t going to get its way. On the surface, partisan Democrats had lots of things going their way in this election — a vulnerable incumbent, a questiona...

In their latest book, authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton tell the tale of one woman who started working at a low-level job for a bank. During the bank’s promotion to sell mutual funds, she worked especially hard and was able to bring in $1.2 million. So what did she get as a reward for all that effort? A mug.Just call this a hunch, but something tells me that if she had lost the bank $1.2 million, she would have gotte...

Ten years ago, Christopher Reeve was best known as Superman, but Reeve and everyone else knew that he was merely a good actor portraying a character — that Reeve was a normal man, not a hero.All that changed, of course, when Reeve broke his neck in May 1995 after being thrown from a horse. He was paralyzed from the neck down, and had to fight off feelings of depression and thoughts of suicide.The accident left him as anythi...

The guy who wrote such books as “Hey, Idiot!” and “What’s the Number for 911?” has found another gold mine of a source for true-life tales of humanity and stupidity. That helps to explain Leland Gregory’s latest collection of insanity, “Idiots at Work: Chronicles of Workplace Stupidity” (Andrews McMeel).Some of the stupidity featured in Gregory’s book is fairly predictable, such as one job hunter’s resume that included this...

There are some terrific — and scary — anecdotes in “Making It on Broadway: Actors’ Tales of Climbing to the Top,” a book by David Wienir and Jodie Langel. One intriguing aspect is how many actors in ensembles are so bored that they end up goofing off as a way of keeping their sanity.This usually happens when the performers are told exactly what to do, and treated more as breathing scenery rather than actors. One anecdote de...