Wednesday, September 19, 2012

"Keep your head down"

It is almost a proverb in sinking companies, that the way to survive is to quietly do one's job and "keep one's head down."  That said, is it wise?  If you keep your head down, you end up possibly keeping your job with a sinking company (yay for pathetically small raises!), but your resume shows nothing for it.  At worst, you lose your job anyways--which is the likely outcome for a business with the "siege mentality" to begin with.

If, on the other hand, you "keep your head up," you do risk losing your job as managers look for people to blame, but you also--to use the analogy--have the opportunity to find and destroy those business "machine gun nests" that are plaguing your company, and whether or not you succeed, it looks good on your resume.

Plus, in most countries, the worst thing that can happen is to lose one's job, as running actual machine gun nests to remove problematic employees is not quite legal.

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