We bundle Leisure, Tourism, Travel, Hospitality, and Food into one macro-category. There is significant overlap and transfer of executives between these related activities. Clearly, these industries suffered during the Covid-19 lockdowns. These industries have taken some time to recover, but that recovery is now well underway. For example, international visitors to the US were up 128% in 2022 v…

Once upon a time, a resume may well have served its purpose as a chronological recounting of a candidate’s titles. It listed responsibilities, employers, and dates of employment, but that is not a helpful strategy anymore. In fact, it might be helpful to think of a resume essentially as an exclusionary document. Today a resume is more the reason you are NOT considered for a position than the re…

Square Peg / Round Hole –  Hundreds of executives come to us for help each month. Most cannot honestly or accurately answer this marketability question often because they lack perspective. The majority of people change jobs infrequently. We can fill this gap because we help executives obtain their ideal positions every day and we’ve been doing it for more than three decades. Our clients gener…

Give yourself a promotion. Guidance from a parent, a relative, a coach, a teacher, or perhaps a spiritual leader typically gives us direction early in life. Often we grow to expect this input from others and we utilize it to define our futures. With luck, we have positive role models and helpful input, but, of course, sometimes the input is more about how not to be in the world—laden with nega…

Introduction Advertising and marketing used to be so simple. Broadcast, print, point of sale… the options were limited and there were relatively few outlets. It seemed at least as if access to any given audience was highly controlled by a small cadre of media outlets. However, the proliferation of “outlets” over the last decades is astounding. Speaking only of “newsrooms”, one source says, “…w…

Ever since humanity invented “tomorrow” as much as 160,000 years ago the day after today has held a special place in our pantheon of excuses for not doing something now. After all, to quote Orphan Annie, “How I love you, tomorrow! You’re always a day away.” In other words, tomorrow actually never arrives. It lingers just over the chronological horizon, anticipated but never actually experienced…

Introduction: The Market for Executives At the Barrett Group we have seen 32 clients receive offers or land senior executive positions in the last four weeks—all of them at compensation levels much higher than those quoted below by Indeed (an on-line jobs market). So we believe that the market for executives is strong, particularly the unpublished market where three-quarters of our clients typ…

With apologies to George Gershwin, it is summer time in the northern hemisphere and while many executives think finding their next executive opportunity must wait until the fall, our clients know better—and they make it look easy. In fact, some three dozen of them landed employment contracts or attractive offers during the past month! They earned exciting titles such as: COO (Apparel). V…

Introduction Frankly, it may be impossible to separate several related industries fairly. This is why we bundle Financial Services, Banking, Insurance, Accounting, Wealth Management, Investment Banking and Capital Markets under the general umbrella of Financial Services. As one source puts it: “Over the past two years, the financial services industry has demonstrated its ability to successful…

Chili Pepper Blues and Your Professional Future Some like it hot. For example, I love chili paste on virtually anything, ideally the Huy Fong product with the rooster on the bottle. Others prefer Sriracha. But we spicy food lovers are likely to be disappointed as “Crop issues due to severe drought in Mexico have plagued the red jalapeno chili pepper crop and re­sulted in nationwide shor­tages …