Frank Mulligan's Page

After a year of non-stop bad news it is good to see little shards of light emerge from the darkness. The recent European Chamber Business Confidence Survey 2009, done in conjunction with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, produces the necessary illumination.

The confidence booster is to be found in the fact that 37% of the 300 European companies surveyed said that China is now a more… Continue

The best person to sell a new job to a candidate is the one who is actually doing the job right now. Selling by brochure, by company values, or by marketing material is simply less effective.

Instinctively we all agree with this, but how do we know it is true?. Surely there is value to selling the company hard, and creating some excitement about the position. Well, there is actual research to back the idea that an honest approach is the best approach.

The psychological concept that underlies t… Continue

Firing staff is an emotionally charged task that many HR and management staff are being asked to perform right now in China.

Some cases of firing are simple responses to the economic downturn but HR should be aware that not everything is what it seems. There are many ways to skin a cat.

Set out below are some of the tactics that should be considered around the theme of firing. Many are being used right now. Some methods have hidden agendas, and others deliberately hide layoffs:

A … Ban overti… Continue

In an Op-Ed column in the New York Times, David Brooks tackles the notion of an emerging group in the United States that he refers to as the formerly middle class.

This is a vast swathe of unhappy professionals who, in their halycon days(last month), would consume lattes, IPods and SUVs with the reckless abandon of a cashed out dot com millionaire. They now find that what they had become to believe were c… Continue