For decades, corporations have routinely settled lawsuits, including those that are frivolous, trumped up, and downright larcenous by paying the plaintiff a nuisance settlement to go away. I have personally witnessed this on a large scale in the employment arena where many, if not most wrongful discharge and discrimination suits are resolved in this manner, regardless of the merits of the case.

Looking at each case unto itself, a negotiated settlement is quite often the cheapest, most expeditious resolution, in that it represents a lesser expense than the cost of going to court.

But the cases don’t stand unto themselves. Over time, the less industrious and less principled elements of our society are attracted to the free meal, like moths to a light. In the main this occurs because there is absolutely no downside risk. If for some reason you don’t cash out in a given case, you move on, with no material penalty.

Over time, organizations develop a reputation either as fighters or easy marks, and plaintiff’s attorneys learn who they can make an easy living off of and who it’s best to stay away from.

A more  dangerous version of that same sick game is now being played on the high seas off the coast of Somalia as larcenous citizens of the rogue state commandeer merchant ships and an occasional yacht, and hold them and their crews for ransom. Rather than an ambulance chasing lawyer, their weapons of choice are an AK-47 or RPG, and a fast boat.

Unfortunately, as with the aforementioned lawsuits, very few organizations fight back. Indeed, the ships are unarmed, and crews are generally taught/instructed not to resist once they have been boarded. Generally speaking, shipping companies pay a ransom, get their employees and their stuff back, and resume business as usual.

It has been estimated that the annual cost for this little game is north of $13 billion, nearly all of which is profit. It’s hard to know, however, since shippers and their insurance companies aren’t eager to publicize how much ransom they’ve paid out. Two things are for sure, however. 1) It is becoming more prevalent, and thus expensive, and 2) All of us who buy stuff that transits narrow bodies of water such as the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca wind up paying.

Until September, 2008, when the MV Faina, a Belize-flagged, Ukrainian operated cargo ship and its cargo of Russian made T-72 tanks and other weapons was captured, modern day piracy was largely under the radar. Eventually, the Faina, its crew and cargo were returned after a ransom reported to be $3.2 million was paid.

For those of us in the U.S., piracy has now made a big step closer to home. At present, subsequent to another act of piracy, four gunmen holding Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, an American-operated vessel, are in a standoff with a US Navy destroyer off the coast of Somalia.

Though neither a jurist nor a law enforcement expert, three decades of studying human behavior tell me that, until there is a “hot stove principle” at work, we will see neither a reduction in frivolous lawsuits nor a decline in piracy.

With respect to the latter, it would seem that Major General Tom Wilkerson, CEO of the US Naval Institute, interviewed this evening on CNN, has it about right… “Find them, and take the fight to where they live.” Until these thugs have to weigh some very long odds and serious risk of extinction, their behavior is not apt to change.

Indeed, that is exactly the approach taken of late by the French military. Today, for the third time in as many years, after days of unsuccessful negotiations, the French Navy intervened forcefully in a case of piracy against a French operated vessel. In addition to killing two  pirates in the operation today, since April 2008,  French forces have detained at least 60 persons involved in piracy against French interests. I can only hope that, wherever they are being held, the prisoners are being fed English food.

For readers who are not looking for jobs at the moment, be thankful, and please pardon the posting of job hunting tips two days in a row. It just seems a bit relevant at the moment. Today’s post is directed largely at the over 50 crowd (or over 40, or whatever age you have to be to start worrying about your age, ‘er being “overqualified” being an issue.)

Before proceeding, here’s a shout out to Michelle Goodman, who recently wrote a really good piece on this same topic for ABC News.

From an employer’s standpoint there is no such thing as “overqualified.” Under qualified yes… mis-qualified perhaps… once qualified, sure – but not overqualified. I’ve never heard anyone complain that their doctor, airline pilot, plumber, teacher, or lover had too much talent or experience.

As an HR executive during the high growth years of FedEx, and ADP, I was responsible for the hiring of perhaps 70,000 employees. We worried a lot about things like:

1. whether or not we’d be able to keep people whose skills might not be fully utilized right away
2. whether or not someone had done something for so long that they would be unable or unwilling to try different approaches
3. if an exceptionally well qualified candidate would become bored
4. whether or not those credentials would cost us more, and if not, why not?

I can assure you though, I never once worried, and the companies we work with today don’t spend one nanosecond worrying about people bringing too much talent to the game. The question is, is that talent fresh – is it relevant to the tasks at hand? And, perhaps more importantly, what kind of attitude do they bring to the game?

What hiring managers do mind is someone who has been around the block a few times and doesn’t want to listen or learn new stuff. To be sure, a lot of managers are intimidated just a bit by the prospect of hiring somebody who may be older, smarter, more experienced, or all of those things.

That said, a lot of people are in fact told by prospective employers that they are “overqualified.” Put bluntly, that’s code for “I’m not going to hire you, and I want a short, polite, non-confrontational, legally defensible explanation for it.”

And yes, there’s a bit of a dark side to this. The odds of folks over 45 years of age (like me) hearing the “O’ word are a lot greater than my 34 year old son hearing it. What is said is “overqualified” but what is sometimes meant is another word that starts with “O” – old. That may have something to do the significant increase in age discrimination complaints filed with the EEOC in the last decade. Can you as an individual change that? No. But here’s what you can do.

1. You can make darned sure that you don’t waste one precious minute of your life getting bitter about it. You didn’t get to this ripe ‘uh age still believing that life was always fair, so get over it. Besides, you’ve got better things to do, like conducting a job search, which, by the way is about as close to a full time job as any.

2. The 1st place to invest your time and energy is in doing a targeted job search. We are in corporate classrooms just about every week, training managers to hire those people (and only those people) whose temperament, preferences, and values will allow them to be happy, productive and successful working for a given organization. You need to do the same by identifying those companies (and even individual managers) with whom you will be successful. One of the major tenets of our work is that just as people have reputations, companies have a reputation as a place to work. The more successful businesses and even individual managers have figured out that their reputation as an employer matters, a lot. If I’m on a job search, those are the businesses I should be targeting. Sites like GreatPlaceJobs.com can be a good place to begin your search.

3. Do not, repeat, do NOT apply for jobs that you feel ‘overqualified’ for. Translation:  You believe going in that the job is beneath you. Doing that is committing fraud against your psyche, your resume, and a potential employer, not to mention the folks you’d be working with.

4. Your resume is your ticket to the dance. It needs to look like a ticket to a dance that is occurring in the year 2009. On the one hand, there have been enough football coaches caught putting their resume on steroids to suggest that falsifying documents is not a very smart thing to do. On the other, you need to worry – a lot about how that resume presents you. How does it look electronically, for example? Email it to yourself and find out.

Though you should never fabricate the data (dates, positions, degrees, etc.), there is nothing wrong with choosing how you want to allocate the white space on your personal billboard… which particular talents or experiences you should emphasize for a given job or employer. You should definitely consider adapting your resume for specific jobs and situations. Skills and experiences that are no longer relevant in the job market, or for a particular job don’t bear mentioning on your resume. You wouldn’t wear a thirty year old suit to the interview would you… would you?

Yet, selective creativity is perfectly legit. I once hired a sales rep for ADP  whose resume listed outstanding qualifications – as a baseball player. His resume listed his last position as “Catcher, Kansas City Royals” and his reason for leaving as, get this… “couldn’t hit a curve ball.” Upon seeing this, I just had to talk with the guy, and he had his foot in the door. Think of it as one-to-one marketing.

5. Once you do get an interview, show up prepared – something most people don’t do. Companies that are particularly successful at making acquisitions do very good due diligence on the business they are about to acquire. An applicant’s failure to conduct that same basic research on a place they might spend 8 hours a day working at is fundamentally stupid.

Similarly, show up prepared to participate in an interview. Practice being interviewed, and in particular, answering the obvious questions about why you are willing to consider a job you were qualified to do ten years ago. Get with an interview coach who is skilled at behaviorally-based interviews, have them videotape the practice interview and give you some bone-honest feedback. Watch the tape, throw up, make some changes, and do it again. This is serious business, and your first practice session shouldn’t be on the day you need to have your best stuff. Even Mariano Rivera warms up before he pitches.

6. On the big day, go into that interview brimming with confidence, secure in the knowledge that you’ve done your homework, are well prepared, and happen to be exceptionally well qualified.

This post has been excerpted from articles available in The Fridge at ContentedCows.com.

A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

Well, now that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been signed into law, the heavy lifting begins, amidst the hoopla and controversy over who has the most “shovel ready” projects worthy of public financing.

In that vein there was an excellent piece (Smart Roads, Smart Bridges. Smart Grids.) by Michael Totty in today’s WSJ. In well-written, compelling fashion, Mr. Totty advocates  using currently available technology and good engineering methods to leave us with “highways that alert motorists of a traffic jam before it forms; bridges that report when they’re at risk of collapse; or an electric grid that fixes itself when blackouts hit.”  In other words, as long as we’re at it, let’s use some smart data gathering and design methods to yield much better outcomes.

In similar fashion, we have long called attention to the fact that smart, well-run organizations make it a point to regularly (no, constantly) sample the ebb and flow of worker morale using well constructed surveys. They do it not out of some socialistic bent, but because they know that to a great degree, today’s morale drives tomorrow’s customer experience, and next month’s earnings. In other words, it pays to do it. This is not something where they turn the spigot on when times are good and shut it off when things get tough. Rather, they take pains to listen and respond to their workers whether the wind is in their face or at their backs.

A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

Monday I attended a lunch meeting at which a spokesperson for the American Medical Association was the speaker. It was good of him to come from Colorado to Florida to address our group, but it was, as we say in the speaking business, “a tough room”.

The speaker was there to rally support for the AMA’s positions on the growing health care crisis in the United States. Most of what he advocated didn’t go down any better with this group of business professionals (many business owners) than did the dry chicken on the buffet.

It’s a complex problem with no easy solutions. But here’s what I took from the speaker’s remarks, if I understood him correctly:

• Costs are out of control, and will only get worse.
• Physicians and hospitals are being reimbursed only a small fraction of what they’re billing. The rest is allocated between what’s negotiated with payers, and written off as bad debt. Oh, and they do a lot of pro-bono and charity work.
• Far too much of patients’ treatment is being determined by insurance companies, and not by patients and their doctors.
• A well-integrated nationwide system of electronic medical records is a long way off. The technology’s not the problem. It’s getting suppliers to cooperate, and governments to quit passing such restrictive legislation that’s getting in the way.
• Fear of litigation and extremely high court-awarded damages has led to unaffordable malpractice insurance, and the ordering of unnecessary “CYA” tests and treatment.
• The greatest share of pharmaceutical research and development is borne by American drug companies, and that’s why prescriptions are so expensive in the U.S., compared to other nations.
• Health insurance shouldn’t be tied to one’s employment.
• The best idea would be to eliminate the tax deduction that employers currently have for employees’ health insurance premiums, and use all the extra tax revenue collected to give back to individuals, who could then go out on the open market and buy a private health insurance policy. Our decisions about what kind of coverage to buy would be driven by our needs and what we could afford.

As you might imagine, that last idea wasn’t exactly embraced by the employers and business owners in the room.

I found myself agreeing with a few of the good doctor’s points. Not with others. But at no point did he suggest that there was anything physicians or hospitals could do to reduce costs or improve the quality of care.

He talked a lot about people taking responsibility for their lifestyles and their healthcare. But not much about any responsibility those in the medical profession might share. It all sounded a little one-sided to me.

One thing my father repeatedly told me was “Put your mind in gear before you put your mouth in motion.” Although he would have been among the first to acknowledge that he often failed to take his own advice, it’s good advice nonetheless. What we say – the words we use – or sometimes more importantly, the ones we don’t use, make a big difference.

Just ask any of the current presidential candidates. There are lots of thoughts they probably wish they, their supporters, and their spouses had kept to themselves.

A couple of weeks ago, I took my 74-year-old mother to the airport, so she could fly to Tennessee to visit my sister. Mom’s in remarkable shape. She’s employed full time, works out at a local gym 2 or 3 times a week, and goes to line dancing class every Thursday. Each Friday, she gets her hair done.

As has always been the case, people are still often surprised, when they meet her, to know that she’s my mother. Most remark that she doesn’t appear to be old enough to have a child my age (gee, thanks). 

She drives all over town, travels with some regularity (Europe in a couple of weeks), and has an active social life revolving around friends, neighbors, and her church.

While we were walking through the Jacksonville airport, with Mom pulling her roll-aboard suitcase, and walking at a brisk pace, a gentleman who appeared to be in his 60′s, and who worked in some capacity for the airport, was walking by, and greeted us with a cheerful “Good Morning!” We responded in kind, and then he said to my mother, “Ma’am, would you like me to get you a wheelchair?”

I nearly had to restrain her to keep her from beating the man about the head and shoulders in the manner of Ruth Buzzi on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In from the 60′s.

She declined the offer (I started to say “graciously declined”, but I’m not certain that would state it accurately), and marched, without any assistive devices or vehicles, to the security line, and got on her flight, smarting just a bit, perhaps, because this man of extremely good intentions and kind heart, failed to engage his mind before he did his lips.

A few days later, I stopped by our local supermarket to pick up a few items. Because I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in (I know – very unusual), it is not uncommon to see people I’ve known since childhood.

I ran into a retired couple (I know this for a fact – they are retired – I’m not making an assumption) whose kids are just a few years younger than I, and whom I guess I have known most of my life.

After the usual pleasantries and inquiries as to the health and wellbeing of myself and my family, the woman in the couple said, “So are you retired now?”

Retired?! No, I’m not retired, and with one kid in college and another one who soon will be, I don’t see that prospect on the horizon any time soon.

I don’t know if she asked the question because she thought I looked to be of retirement age, or because I appeared not to be gainfully employed, milling around the grocery store in the middle of a Thursday.

Over the course of the last few months, I have, intentionally, dropped about 30 pounds. As a result, I feel much better, and my family tells me I look better. I ran into an old friend last week, someone I hadn’t seen in about a year. He said, “Richard, you’re looking really good!”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling even more satisfied about not eating the way I’d really like to all the time.

“What is it? Are you coloring your hair?”

 So much for the compliment. And no, I’m not coloring my hair. As far as I know, Just For Men doesn’t sell a color called “Salt and Pepper.”

Just because you think it doesn’t mean you have to say it. I learned long ago that just because a woman appears to be carrying a little extra up front, and may be presumed to be pregnant, is no reason to give voice to that presumption.

At any rate, the solicitous airport worker, the retired couple, and the old friend taught me a lesson. Remember what Dad always said: “Put your mind in gear before you put your mouth in motion.”