Most young professionals realize early in their careers that, at some point, skill in generating business will be an important determinant of their success. However, many believe that, in the early stages of their career, they do not have much opportunity to develop these skills. This could not be further from the truth.

In our experiences covering more than 75 litigation matters involving software and project failure, the same themes, allegations and defenses appear time and time again (see Figure 1).  Depending on the specific facts, some arguments are persuasive, others are red herrings.  Our experience suggests some high-yield practices for not only preventing project problems, but for winning in court -- should it come to that. 

A Shift in How You See Your Boss

If you expect any of the following, you are in luck:

• To be given clear direction
• To have a more comprehensive benefits package
• More executive vision
• To be fully informed
• To be accepted for who you are
• To have clearly articulated ethical guidelines
• To be told what is needed from you
• To have more crisply defined roles and responsibilities
• To have effective conflict resolution
• To have your opinions appreciated
• To have your feedback consistently considered

Many problems at work can be solved with one simple idea:

Your boss is your best, most important customer.

A huge percentage of the chaos created when working on any team in any institution stems from the broken parts of the relationships between those of higher and lower status in the organization.

Here are some commonplace, poorly informed attitudes and maladapted behaviors that can be observed in almost any corporation...

A perfect boss doesn't take care of those who work for him. He is much more effective than that. Some bosses act on the impulse to play the parent to subordinates.  They cannot resist the temptation to respond to childishness with "parentness."  When the perfect boss encounters immature behaviors among his subordinates -  behavior that simply begs for a parent's touch from his boss's hand - he just will not give in. He understands a simple, sad truth: a parent's touch will forever stay missing if it was missing when it was originally needed. A boss's touch won't help.

Sally Ride calls our attention the fact that many kids in the US today are turned off by science, math, and engineering, starting as early as fourth grade. Here's a look at some of the statistics and reasons that both boys and girls are opting not to pursue careers in these fields, the implications this may have for our future, and what Sally Ride Science is doing about it.

I recently had the opportunity to interview the former CEO of a small energy sector company (who wishes to remain anonymous) that specializes in building control systems for gas turbines and turbocompressors. Their international client base uses these systems in gas pipelines, oil and gas production and transmission, electrical power plants, chemical processing plants, and the like. A serious malfunction of software or hardware could lead to destruction in seconds. Consequences could include loss of life and downtime costs up to millions of dollars per day. Thus, hardware redundancy and flawless software are essential. This company, which has delivered several hundred such systems, has maintained a perfect record of no in-operation software problems for the past 15 years. An in-house team of merely six engineers developed all the critical control software, using a development process also developed in-house. Here are some lessons that the company learned along the way.

Many professionals approach the task of giving advice as if it were an objective, rational exercise based on their technical knowledge and expertise. Alas, giving advice is almost never an exclusively logical process. Rather, it is almost always an emotional "duet" played out between the advice giver and the client.