Administrative partner Teresa Ryder Bult has a guest post this week: "Inverting Views on Networking: How Can You Influence Someone's Life Today?"

Hint: Don't make it all about you.

(Teresa is the original founding chair of Constangy's Women's Network.)

One more thing: The FOCUS blog was having technical difficulties with email notifications to subscribers. The problem ...

Should an employee performance review be one big love letter?

Maybe so, according to Rachel Feintzeig, who wrote in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, "Everything Is Awesome! Why You Can't Tell Employees They're Doing a Bad Job." The idea is that many employers are getting away from providing constructive criticism in performance reviews and are "accentuating the positive."

My ...

An article by Lauren Weber and Rachel Feintzeig in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal caught a lot of attention -- it was about companies that have made the decision to do without a Human Resources function.

The idea drew some positive response on Twitter:

HR stifles innovation and bogs down businesses with inefficient policies and processes. http://t.co/5cGRIwHaxR

— Mike Brice ...