Excerpted from CDA Newsletter - September of 2002...At one time or another I have plowed doggedly through Toffler’s work in order to access his foresight. On re-reading his work, it’s amazing how on-target he has been concerning the changes in our world — not 100% of course, but without question much he forecast has happened. Now I plan to focus on gaining insight on trends for the next 30 years since I plan to work that long! I have trusted his assessments of the changes in the workplace, because when Toffler talks about the negatives of bluecollar factory work, he personally knows. He and his co-writer wife, Heidi, both worked in factories for years. This is difficult to believe when you read their highly scholarly and lengthy works!

I remember well my introduction to Toffler and future thinking in early 1970. I was rather ineptly trying to keep freshman awake in their MWF 1:00PM English class. Giving up on Shakespeare,and trying to be relevant (the cry of the ‘70s), I dashed out and bought a stack of paperback copies of Toffler’s Future Shock (after only reading a review). I don’t know how it affected my students, but it hit an extremely important life-changing "AHA" for me. His definition of "future shock" as total disorientation, shattering stress, and overwhelming unexpected change parachuting us alone into a chaotic world where current reality and our former expect ations and rules were totally clashing put a vocabulary to my life at that time! My quest became the search for understanding my life by studying the future.

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Excerpted from CDA Newsletter January of 2002...I feel compelled to communicate on the state of careers in our current era of chaos and workplace uncertainty. Keeping our careers alive and moving forward is increasingly a major challenge for which we are responsible! As I have said (dating back 15 years!)in CDA newsletters, articles, speeches, and books, "If your career isn’t in chaos now, sweeping away your former expectations and status quo rules for success, just wait, it will be." And after almost three decades focusing on career-related research and action strategies, I have watched chaos hit almost every industry.

Earlier I had chosen "capitalizing on chaos and the end of certainty" as the subject for a chapter in my new manuscript. At that time, I was referring to the rapid and unexpected decline of career opportunities in many industries. My focus was the necessity to use an unexpected crisis as an opportunity to search creatively for both meaning and for money by knowing your “Five P’s.”

The Five P’s pivotal to our career pursuit are:

1. Place you want to live
2. People you want around you
3. Purpose you will pursue
4. Passion you feel for the pursuit
5. Plan of action for moving forward

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ExcLaw Partner, Internet Pioneer, Social Entrepreneur – Tracking Todd Wagner's Career Change

Excerpted from June 2000 CDA Newsletter...How do you achieve phenomenal record-breaking success in an industry that doesn't have a name? What special set of chance circumstances, competencies, and creativity add up to an IPO that immediately breaks all previous stock records? What was the combination of timing, talent, tenacity, and teamwork that set this record?

Todd Wagner, co-founder of Broadcast.com, will talk of these challenges with CDA clients at a Pathfinders meeting on Thursday,June 29 at 7:00 PM. As a partner in a major Dallas law firm in the mid-1990s, Todd faced the fear of a career change head-on. Affirming in our sessions that he wanted to "make deals, not advise others on them," he resigned. After rejecting the idea that he needed an MBA or formal training in technology, he leaped into the newly emerging Internet world and created what is described as the Web's most valuable and lasting franchise – a sustainable entity now owned by Yahoo.

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Do you know your worth to your potential employer? Learning your market value and negotiating successfully for it is a major need in our rapidly changing workplace. However, expecting an employer to automatically know and pay us what we our worth is passive thinking at its worst. Many are unduly timid and get taken advantage of as a result while others are so aggressive they don’t get hired. Click here to read some suggestions in presenting yourself.

Article written by Helen Harkness, Ph.D. for distribution at Southwest High Tech Career Fair and printed in Volume 1, Number 3, The High Tech Connection Career Guide.