Adrienne Eisen known as Penelope Trunk.

Retrieved from:http://www.penelopetrunk.com/aboutme.html

Her Biography:

My Bio

Penelope Trunk is CEO of Brazen Careerist, a career management tool for next-generation professionals. This is her third startup. Each company Penelope built was focused on a community. Her own career path has had twists and turns and in a world where straight, safe career paths are nowhere to be had, Penelope appreciates the power of managing oneself through community.

Penelope’s career began in Los Angeles, where she played professional beach volleyball. She then went to graduate school for English. During that time she learned HTML which allowed her to get a job in the marketing department at Ingram Micro.

After a stint in the Fortune 500, she went to a few smaller software companies and then started her own company, Math.com, a math-tools resource for the teaching community funded by Encore Software. She sold that company for a small sum, and founded eCitydeals, an online auction service for city governments, which was funded by Shelter Ventures, and was shut down in the dot-com bust.

During this time, Penelope wrote a column for Business 2.0 magazine about her experiences as a startup founder. She relocated to New York City and after only a few months at her next startup, she found herself a block from the World Trade Center when it fell.

She decided to be a full-time writer so she did not have to leave her apartment. And she focused on giving career advice instead of writing about herself. At that point, generation Y was entering the workforce and they were looking for advice to tell them how to steer a career that accommodates their lives: old career advice was irrelevant to them.

Penelope started writing career advice for a new generation of workers. Today Penelope is the author of a bestselling career advice book for generation y and the number one career blog.

She explains why old advice – like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don’t have gaps in your resume – is outdated and irrelevant in today’s workplace. She has a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion.

She is dedicated to helping people find success at the intersection of work and life, because that’s what she wants for herself. She thinks of career advice as a group effort. And she launched her company, Brazen Careerist, to create a large-scale community for young people manage their careers for the new millennium.

Interviews:

Retrieved from: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/penelope-trunk-interview-sotb-2009/page-2/

Penelope Trunk Interview: SOTB 2009 – Page 2

Author: Eric Berlin
Published: October 19, 2009 at 6:00 am

Penelope Trunk, founder of Brazen Careerist and prolific blogger at blog.penelopetrunk.com, is never one to pull a punch. Check out her take on blogging it like it is (or isn’t), entrepreneurship, and how Gen X and Gen Y view the web and social networking quite differently from one another.
Your blog, Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist, is well known for being a bracing mixture of career advice, workplace trends, and your own personal and professional adventures in running a start up. How’d you come up with this recipe?

Things would get boring fast if I stuck to strictly career advice – like, how to dress for work. So I try to think of another angle. Like, for most of my life I have worked very long hours, so I only had time to meet men at work. So I realized that you should dress for work like you are going to pick someone up at work. Because if you don’t do it at work, you’ll never get a date. (Sidenote: Men like working with women who dress more feminine. They judge more feminine women as more competent. Really.)

Also, I try to base the advice in my own life – stuff that’s happening to me right now. Then, sometimes, some workplace thing will come up and I think people are misguided, so I have to say something. Like, people should not report sexual harassment at work, and I realized they needed to hear that from someone.

Yours is anything but a typical “corporate blog.” What’s your take on running a business and a blog at the same time?

My blog is definitely a full-time job. And so is running my company, BrazenCareerist.com. So, when I was CEO and we were raising money and I was traveling all the time, it was very hard to blog regularly. It was actually hard to do anything – the amount of work was incredible to me. Now that someone else is CEO and I can focus more on my blog, I have a better balance between the blog and the company (and sleeping!).

What’s the most interesting workplace trend you’re tracking this year?

People are realizing that a job hunt is all about building a network. This is due to years of effective messaging from LinkedIn. But this year I see people starting to recognize that you can’t actually *build* a network on LinkedIn. You can only *display* your network. You need to be having actual conversations (online or offline) in order to build a network

Is blogging a viable career path?

No. Well, yes, but only for a very very small group of people. And the odds are that anyone reading this is not part of that small group.

Blogging is a way to build a personal brand and a network. If you know what you want, blogging can get it for you. But you need to want something beyond blogging.

Your company, Brazen Careerist, launched a “social networking career site for Generation Y” over the summer. Does Gen Y think about the web in a different way than older generations, and if so how does that play out through social networking and online publishing?

Gen Y thinks of networking differently than other generations. Gen Y is actually good at it and they like it.

Baby Boomers have always been very competitive because there are so many of them. They don’t like sharing, helping, or following. And these are all attributes of good community members online. Baby boomers like to lead.

Gen X are not collaborative. They like to work on their own. They are the worst-parented generation in history (two words: latchkey kid) and they are used to doing things on their own. That’s why LinkedIn is the killer networking app for Gen X: There is no networking. You put your contacts into a database and you’re done. Back to work. Gen X is fast and efficient and so is LinkedIn.

But Gen Y wants to make genuine connections. They are the first generation that grew up being taught social skills in school. They are the first generation that grew up with social networking tools at hand all the time. They love their parents and their parents told them to network to get a job, and they are doing that. Gen Y is great at having conversations online. They just need a place to do it in a professional way. That’s where my company, BrazenCareerist.com, comes in. We provide the conversation from Facebook and the professionalism from LinkedIn.

You’ve written about how your work sees a lot of business plans crossing your desk. Can you describe a particularly crazy or outlandish one you’ve seen of late?

The crazy thing is the people who get feedback from investors that says, “This business is not big enough to fund.” It’s a very common problem — that it’s a good idea but it will never have a big enough exit to warrant investors coming in. And people just ignore that. They think it’s the idea that matters. But really, it’s very hard to come up with an idea big enough to take in capital. So the crazy things I hear are people who get feedback and then pretend they didn’t get that feedback.

What’s your take on corporate policies that govern the online publishing activities of employees?

If you let your employees go to cocktail parties and talk about their jobs then they already know how to police themselves. Conversations are the same online and offline. People are not morons. They know how to manage themselves, and if they don’t, then fire them for being morons. You’d do that anyway, without corporate blogging policies.

Who are some of your favorite bloggers today, and why?

I like Heather Armstrong because she’s so amazingly creative and innovative. I love her new blog that is all hate mail. I like Michael Arrington for his snark. He can take a boring company and write in such interesting ways. I like Jezebel because they are women with an edge. (Sometimes they end up ripping on me, but at least they always do it in interesting ways.)

What’s your advice to young “careerists” who happen to blog and/or microblog?

Use your blog to figure out who you are and what you are good at and who the best people are for you to connect with.

What’s your advice for aspiring professional bloggers?

Professional blogger? Really? Think about your blog as an audience builder for selling something that has a higher margin than advertising. Unless you’re Heather Armstrong, you should use your blog as a marketing tool, not a business.

Her blog: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

Articles:

Why I tweeted about my miscarriage

Read them in: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com

-4 things you might not know about generation Y

What Clicks

http://www.eliterature.org/

As she is: