Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
Posts focus on what not to do in the workplace, based on examples from television, film, and other popular media.
Drugs are no laughing matter, except of course when it comes to the referenced exchange between Charlie Sheen’s character and Jeannie Bueller in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Yet, when it comes to our celebrity news cycle, drug use is as prevalent as steroid use has become in baseball. The latest scandal involves Nigella Lawson, most […]
For decades the most heated gender-related dispute in the world of Archie Comics was whether Archie was more into Betty or Veronica. But a recent lawsuit by five white male executives of Archie Comics against the company’s female co-CEO is enough to whiten Reggie Mantle’s hair. The five men (and one woman) allege that Nancy […]
I’m not shy about going back to the well. Last month I posted some lessons HR professionals could take from Billy Beane’s roster management of the Oakland A’s, as told in the bestseller, Moneyball. For my money, Beane’s innovations as GM of the cash-poor A’s put him in the upper ranks of baseball executives among […]
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably heard about Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, Rob Ford. No, I don’t mean that term in the figurative sense or as a commentary on some outlandish political policy he has chosen to pursue. I mean it quite literally, as Rob Ford admitted in […]
As discussed in our previous blog post, the Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin scandal has dominated the sports and national headlines. Lost somewhat in the midst of an Incognito-Martin-centric sports news cycle were the recent health scares of Denver Broncos coach John Fox and Houston Texans coach Gary Kubiak during week 9 of the NFL season. Fox, […]
Suspended Miami Dolphins offensive lineman and last-guy-to-realize-people-save-voice-mails-and-texts Richie Incognito is 6’3″ and weighs 319 pounds. He is (was) a member of the Dolphins’ players leadership council, and he was a 2012 Pro Bowler. Incognito, however, may finally be facing an insurmountable opponent: the corporate employment lawyer. The Dolphins put Incognito on indefinite suspension after reportedly […]
The late Michael Crichton had an interesting contrarian streak for a popular fiction novelist. In one of his last novels, State of Fear, he stuck his thumb in the eye of the global warming/climate change “consensus” (it remains the only novel I remember reading that had footnotes). Readers saw his contrarian streak a decade earlier, […]
As an avid Parks and Recreation fan, I cannot help but love the chemistry between newlyweds Leslie Knope and Ben Wyatt. Long before they were joining their dysfunctional families via a wedding with a punch heard round the world and a unity quilt (complete with a patch dedicated to waffles, of course), these two were […]
This season, the network that originally brought you “COPS” is giving the oversaturated police-television show market a somewhat fresh take through its cop comedy called “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” The show stars Andy Samberg as Det. Jake Peralta, a “talented, but carefree” (Fox’s words—not mine) detective dealing with his new hard-nosed, rule-following boss, played by Andre Braugher. […]
Some colorful (ahem) corners of the Internet were abuzz this week after a report surfaced that an anonymous adult male fan of the cartoon show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was fired from his job after admitting his fandom to his coworkers. The firing of this “brony” (and let’s just assume for the sake of this […]