Hau Ngo

For the better part of a year, the Inventory Stock Quantity and Valuation report was an embarrassment to the IT Director at St. Jude Medical, a global medical devices company in Minneapolis, MN.

The report required a hefty 15-hour downtime of the company’s reporting systems at month-end, yet more often than not it would display a clearly incorrect inventory valuation of $0.00, for a firm that has an annual revenue of $5.6 billion (2014).

How could the IT Director persuade his business counterparts to trust the information from his systems when he could not depend on it for consistent results himself?

[Read more…] about Case Study: How To Save $54,000 In Maintenance Costs With One Diagnostic

I used to get a cold sweat when I spoke to more than one person at a time.

Just the idea of speaking up at team meetings would make my heart race and my stomach uneasy. 🤢

Even something routine as a daily status call would send my nerves into the dreaded fight-or-flight mode.  (FYI. I would often rehearse my 1-2 sentence updates before every meeting and hope no one asked a follow-up question.)

Fast-forward a few years and I just delivered my first presentation, live and in-person … and at a national conference, no less! 😬

[Read more…] about Overcoming Professional Anxiety

Famine.

It’s the gap between projects that most freelancers (and full-time employees of consulting agencies) fear.

It’s the downtime between projects that you were too busy to worry about when you were putting out fires for your clients.

Even the best freelancers often find themselves in this situation, especially if you have committed nights and weekends to solving your client’s urgent problems and ignored your own (which I am often guilty of).

So how do you get through the famine-cycle quickly and not sell your self-esteem in the process?

[Read more…] about Is Your Job Search Missing This Critical First Step?