Archives for May, 2008
Golden Giving: Volunteer Overseas With a Paycheck
While some of us are content to pick up a hammer to help Habitat in our communities, others have wanderlust wrapped around their desire to help others. During the last week, likely your heart has broken or at least felt a wee bit blubbery with news of the human suffering from tragedies in Myanmar and […]
Small Firms Invest in Sabbaticals, Too
Many people assume that only Fortune 500 companies can invest in sabbatical programs for their employees, but that’s just not the case. Take Standing Partnership, a St. Louis-based public relations agency with 26 employees and about $3.5 million in revenue in 2007. The firm began its sabbatical program 12 years ago, and “it’s one of […]
Please Hang Up and Try Again: Disconnecting In a Meaningful Way
It took the first half of Lisa Girouard’s sabbatical (see yesterday’s post) just to ramp down, she says. “It was about three to four weeks before I felt like I wasn’t just on vacation.” Once she really disconnected, Lisa found that her thinking process got more creative. “Not doing email everyday was probably the biggest […]
Europe and Real Estate: A Hybrid Sabbatical
A senior sales account manager with Intel, Lisa Girouard had her first sabbatical in June/July of 2007. Eight weeks’ paid. For the first half of her time off, Lisa and her 11- and 14-year-olds traveled three weeks in London, Paris, and Italy, where the kids learned a lot about the kinds of food and arts […]
Let Them Work in Their Pajamas!
If your manager still thinks compressed work weeks, working from home, sabbatical programs and arranging your work around your life is a bunch of softy bull, ask her or him how much more misinformation forms their leadership credo. Researchers Grzywacz and Casey at Wake Forest concluded clear and definite bottom-line benefits associated with just such […]
A Sabbatical in Myanmar
Billie Madha and her mother left Myanmar (then Burma) in 1976, when Billie was 15. They thought they’d never see their family again. And it was a big family. Billie’s mother was one of 18 children. More than 20 years later, on her first sabbatical with Arrow Electronics, Billie got to take her mother back […]
Wanna Be Better? Choose Simon.
We all have an oh-I-am-so-above-that side. So many of you will be appalled at this confession: I watch American Idol. Faithfully. My husband just poked his head in my office, looked at me then at the TV. (It’s Wednesday, folks, America has voted. Someone is going to get ELIMINATED.) He pathetically shrugs his shoulders. Potentially […]
Back in Six Months - Making It Count
Scott H. was high enough up at Wrigley to get a six-months’ sabbatical, even though the company has no formal sabbatical program. “I created the sabbatical for my own development,” he said. At 44, he’d worked at breakneck pace for the past 20 years and was now head of the company’s global research group, with […]
Time and Your Soul
Ten years before Oprah found Eckhard Tolle and started extolling virtures of “the present moment” via 10 Monday night classes full of way too much SKYPING (you can down load them here,) Jacob Needleman moved many of us to examine just what the hell we were doing with the time in our lives and our […]
Super Sized Sabbaticals
Who offers the most sabbaticals every year? McDonald’s. And they’ve been offering them for years. The fast-food king offers one to company staff every after every 10 years of service. Eligible employees get 8 weeks’ paid to go and do whatever their hearts desire. Every year, thousands go. Thousands! Even the CEO. The company has […]
Sabbatical Talk on the Career Couch
Today’s New York Times had an article by Eilene Zimmerman on “The Gainful Way to Use a Sabbatical.” Zimmerman discusses how to make the most of time off and how to pitch the concept to your manager. She includes perspectives from a number of consultants and experts, and the article is worth a read. I’d […]