Mentor, Shmentor!

Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.

  Career Development  

If you believe everything you read, you're either very naïve or a gullible dunce. Take your pick. Popular career topics spawn hundreds of books on the same subject, which all say pretty much the same thing. Take a gander at all the books about networking, resume writing and making a good impression, to name a few.

Mentoring belongs in a separate category because it's considered to be so important. But can it make or break a career? This story looks at the pros and cons of mentoring.

In the 1980s, especially, career experts pushed the importance of having a mentor. A subheading of supportive management is the possibility of establishing a mentor relationship with a corporate veteran at the supervisory or management level.

Mentoring was considered the "cool" career booster back then. Get yourself a great mentor and you could wind up on a fast track. Sure--like I'm training for the next Olympics.

I'm knocked out by how the lords of career management decree what's important for a career. Follow these rules to the letter, and you'll find the yellow brick career road. Mentors equal success. How simple? How dumb? How insulting. I call it reductionism. I like that word. I think I'll write a book around it replete with exercises, brilliant insights and maybe some insults as well.

How-to writers like to insult their …

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