Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door (4 page)

• Executive recruiters can be an excellent information source. Consider regularly contacting the recruiter who placed you in your job and building a trust factor so that he or she might share information about industry trends and issues.

• Financial analysts always monitor quarterly financial reports to see if a large number of executive stock options are exercised. It’s public information for public companies, and you can access it over the Internet.

• Watch your boss. Often in impending crises, managers are given strict orders not to say anything. That causes more than a few people to button up about everything. When you notice a sudden outbreak of tight-lippedness, an alarm bell should start clanging in your mind.

• Stay on the lookout for unusual corporate behaviors. Analysts in the Middle East always keep a watchful eye when a government stocks up on hospital beds in a potential hot spot or when the spouses and children of top leaders in a particular district are all abroad at the same time. Similarly, is the personnel department working unusually late hours? Are corporate meeting rooms blocked out for some unexplained period? One corporate insider I knew always sensed something was afoot when the number of bags coming out of the corporate shredder room suddenly spiked.

• Vendors and suppliers can be rich sources, especially ones who have been around long enough to read the tea leaves. A major reduction in raw materials orders is a nearly certain signal that production is going to be cut back.

• Let’s say your boss, unbeknownst to you, has picked up a tip that the ax will soon be swinging. He or she is out on the market aggressively shopping the next job opportunity with competitors. That may cause a competitor to call you or a colleague, aware that a feeding frenzy for available candidates may be in the making. Be aware of any sudden change in the level of competitor interest in recruiting people from your firm.

• If a competitor’s headquarters has a nearby watering hole, there is often much to be learned just by dropping by on a Friday evening and listening to the chatter. Competitors make it their business to learn about the ups and downs of rivals and may talk about the other guys far more freely than they would their own business.

• Because there was such certainty you would win, your supporters never organized a cohesive campaign to back you.

• Your biggest advocate was the retiring marketing director, who—larger than life—chimed in with impromptu endorsements and gratuitously diminished the competition.

• You failed to brush up on the details of your own achievements in consumer affairs several years ago and slipped up in responses to questions in your own interviews.

• A whole new group of entry-level marketing staff members had staged a relentless campaign with management saying that a grassroots change was needed in marketing management, one that was highly responsive to the Internet age.