Today, we continue to run excerpts from my new book, Always Be Job Hunting , to give you the flavor of the book and encourage you to check it out on Amazon.com

Chapter 4: Learning on the Job

Looking back all these years later, I’m struck by the hubris with which I took my first management job. I really did think I knew it all and started out with that attitude, alienating people who’d been at their jobs there for decades by the time I’d arrived. I subsequently lived through working for new managers who did the same thing to me. I’ve wish they had listened to me by using the resources at hand rather than quickly dismissing the insights of people who’d been on the scene before they arrived.
I guess in some ways I’ve been paid back for the mistakes I made in that first management job. Life’s funny when it does that to us isn’t it?

Getting back to discussing that first management job, I started as the managing editor (a title my new boss let me pick) of six weekly north and northwest suburban Chicago newspapers in January, 1979 just after one of the biggest snow storms in the area’s history. Another huge story was the recent arrest of mass murderer John Wayne Gacy, who was charged with the murders of 33 teenage boys and young men. He’d lured his victims to his home and buried most of them in the crawl space beneath his house – a house that was in Norwood Township, the circulation area of one of our newspapers. The Gacy case still remains one of the most gruesome in Illinois, and U.S., crime history.

Intrigued? Then click here to buy the book on Amazon today, in either paperback or Kindle edition.