Welcome to my Web Site. Thank you for coming.
There isn’t much here, except for my C.V., which I maintain for my work as an educator. In it you will read about how I began my career in business after getting an accounting degree from California State University, Northridge.
That led to a series of jobs across some 27 years. I had one helluva run for those two and a half decades, and while I was rarely any good at it, I was certainly always the most eager (believe me, the mistakes and terrible decisions made vastly outweighed the good ones).
If you read far enough into the C.V., you will learn how, in 2006, I shifted gears and entered the helping professions as a mental health practitioner (becoming after a while a Life Coach) and, later, as an untenured lecturer at The University of Wyoming.
I have both an MA and a Doctorate (PhD) in the discipline of Educational Psychology.
You’ll also see that I have an essentially worthless MBA, gotten some 30 years after the BBA. I say “worthless” because all you really need to know you can learn on-the job as I did, especially from the kinds of leaders and mentors with whom I had the privilege of working (see below).
To that end, I try and tell budding business professionals to avoid the MBAs offered by American universities, and, instead, to focus on a specialty trade of some sort, like welding or plumbing – some sort of really, truly useful trade. Those are “AI-proof.”
But I suppose those 27 years in business taught something. I do have some good stories to tell, for sure.
And I had great mentors, people like:
- Ric Brutocao early in my career at Account-A-Call Corporation
- Louise Martire at Xerox Business Services
- Jerry Kleeman at Vistage International
- Gerry Klein at Brutocao and Klein, Attorneys at Law; and,
- Mike O’Hara and Dan Fowler at Microsoft.
They remain very much on my mind now that I’m closing in on my 70s and entering the last third of my life (my dad lived to almost 90).
With what, my mentors, especially Ric, tried to teach me what I can use to help those coming up behind.
For what it’s worth, my doctoral dissertation focused on counselor ethics in the social media spaces. You can access that dissertation here: The Effects of Social Media Marketing on Help-Seeking Behavior – ProQuest
I used to blog here in this space. However, with the rising tide of “cancel culture” in the 2010s and 20s, I stopped in August of 2025. My opinions had become catnip for the Woke Left. I didn’t that headache.
Once again, thank you for stopping by.
— Joseph V. Russo