In the HBR Blog entry To Find Happiness, Forget About Passion author Oliver Segovia suggests that following your passion is not the path to career happiness and success. He argues, "Forget about finding your passion. Instead, focus on finding big problems". He goes on to suggest the place to look for "big problems" is in something that excites or interests you or, as he says it, "Look into problems that affect you in a very personal way".

Several people have criticized Segovia for what they consider just renaming passion. That overlooks what I consider the most important section of his blog post where he says, "Putting problems at the center of our decision-making changes everything. It's not about the self anymore. It's about what you can do and how you can be a valuable contributor. People working on the biggest problems are compensated in the biggest ways."

As managers, we're always looking for people who can tackle the biggest headaches. We assign our best people to the biggest problems. And we reward their successes. Wouldn't it be great if our employees came to us with the attitude of wanting to tackle the biggest problems they could handle? Shouldn't that be our approach to our boss and our work too?

For more on this topic, read Passion Pays. And for what happens when passion dies, read Larry Doesn't Work Here Anymore.

Several years ago, people started calling garbage men sanitation engineers. Then every worker became an "associate", like sales associate and customer service associate. More and more individual workers were given manager titles, even if all they managed was themselves. Not surprisingly, this trend spread to the top corporate jobs and every Vice President who could became a Chief ___ Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, etc.

This article from MSNBC highlights the silly extremes to which this trend has been pushed. Do you know what a Chief Sustainability Officer does? What about a Chief Digital Officer? It's time to stop using titles to make people feel important and go back to using them to describe what a functional, contributing employee actually does.

More on Job Titles:

• Entry and Mid-level Management Job Titles And Roles
• Senior Management Level Jobs
• What Is A Manager?
• What Is A Leader?

Most workers get two weeks vacation a year. Some get more. Some get less. Red Frog is a company that gives its employees unlimited vacation. As long as your work is done and someone covers for you while you're away you can take as much vacation as you feel you need. You can read more about this in the Inc.com article Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days. The author, Joe Reynolds, believes his company is more productive by giving unlimited vacation days and lists four reasons. I believe the most important is the first one.

Some companies try to skirt the vacation issue by combining vacation with sick leave. That's a bad idea. Read Sick Leave vs. Paid Time Off (PTO) to find out why.

Companies that value their employees know that they can use Employee Benefits as a Management Tool.

Entrepreneurs see vacation differently than managers. I see vacation as a time workers need to get away and recharge. I spell out why in Vacation or non-cation?, but be sure to note the comment at the bottom from a friend of mine who is a serial entrepreneur.

National Clean Off Your Desk Day for 2012 is Monday, January 9. Is your desk top clean as a whistle or do you have piles on every flat space? Do you file everything as soon as it comes in or toss it with similar things? It doesn't matter. What matters only is what works for you.

In my article What's Wrong With A Messy Desk? I explain the pros and cons of both work styles - clean desks and messy desks. On the second page of the article I'll give you six simple steps to Tame The Monster and get your desktop under control. Finally the article Tame the Desktop Monster teaches you the two fundamental rules to keeping the desktop monster under control.

And for those of you who like numbers, John Campanelli, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, provides these interesting statistics on clean and messy desks.