By DENNIS NISHI

Tamara Guion-Yagy was disappointed when Tetra Tech, an environmental engineering firm in Pasadena, Calif., hired somebody else for the job that she wanted. The 40-year-old graphic designer thought she was being tried out when the firm hired her as a temporary worker.

So Ms. Guion-Yagy worked even harder at the same temp job, often staying late to finish work. Her manager responded by creating another full-time position for Ms. Guion-Yagy. “I knew I’d be good at the job and liked the work,” she says. “I just needed to show them how much.”

Dennis Nishi

When times are prosperous, companies are more likely to use temporary jobs as a low-risk way to vet full-time candidates. But the conversion rate from temporary to permanent worker has been low over the past few years as more companies lean on temps as a hedge against a double-dip recession, says Jonas Prising, president of Manpower North, a temporary-staffing company in Milwaukee, Wis.

“That’s why temps should do what they can to stand out in some way to improve their chances of getting hired full time or at least having their contracts renewed,” he says.

Become a source of ideas by really understanding the needs of your company and figure ways to apply your talents to this end. If you have logistics experience, for example, and know that consolidating shipping through a single supplier can save money, why not present your ideas in writing to the boss?

Be punctual and friendly, replace the office coffee with a gourmet blend or do anything else to increase your visibility in the office. Small gestures can make a lasting impression.

Work your way into the everyday office culture so co-workers will think of you as a colleague and somebody they can rely on. Laurie Ruettimann, a human-resources professional from Raleigh, N.C., recommends participating in workplace functions like office parties, picnics and lunch outings.

Volunteer for company-supported activities like charity work. It helped Sailor Brown get a full-time job at financial-services firm E*Trade Financial in New York. A weekend March of Dimes event gave the 40-year-old executive assistant the opportunity to interact with her boss and co-workers in a casual setting. And it allowed them to connect the hard-working temp from the office with a real human being who’s easy to get along with. Ms. Brown says she was hired full time soon after the event.

But don’t pester everyone about becoming a full-time employee. Put out your best work and let your actions sell you. Keep note of your accomplishments and bring them up when it’s time to renew your temporary contract.

Just being on the inside gives you an advantage over external candidates when applying for full-time jobs, says Mr. Prising. But don’t get complacent. Ready some options for when your contract is up.

—Email: sjdnishi@gmail.com

Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal

The tale of a KP MacLane polo shirt offers a rare look inside the planning and global transactions behind the clothes people wear.

Every piece of clothing has a story: There’s far more to a $155 polo shirt than a yard of fabric, four buttons and a length of thread.

The tale of a KP MacLane polo shirt offers a rare look inside the planning and global transactions behind the clothes people wear. To begin, though, there is an actual KP MacLane—Katherine, who founded the brand with her husband, Jared MacLane.

The MacLanes met while working as sales managers at Hermès in Beverly Hills. They shared a fondness for polo shirts, and their closets were full of versions by Ralph Lauren, Hermès, Lacoste, J.Crew, Vineyard Vines and others. When they decided to move to Atlanta and launch an entrepreneurial venture last year, their minds went to those polos. “From the beginning, we knew we love classic pieces,” says Ms. MacLane. Mr. MacLane adds, “We want to take it to the next level.”

A notable facet of the fashion industry is that the barriers to entry are low. Etsy is full of items sewn in someone’s spare bedroom. Many big-name designers started small. Thakoon Panichgul sold his first collection from an upturned trash can in a lower-Manhattan warehouse, and Zac Posen sold his concept from his parents’ living room.

While that gives new entrants hope, it also creates a big risk. Stores are full of clothes from brands that disappear too quickly to recall. Standing out is a challenge.

Yet the MacLanes believed there was one shirt that hadn’t yet been made: a polo that could cross from sport to the office. Their concept would forgo a logo so the shirt could be dressed up with a blazer. The women’s version would have a slightly longer, more flattering sleeve and a lengthier buttoned placket.

“I just wanted to be able to see my jewelry and have it open without being too revealing,” says Ms. MacLane.

They planned to sell it the way they had sold luxury products—with attentive service and attractive packaging. They would sell online initially and wholesale to stores later. Products would launch individually, with a men’s polo next.

Reality hit when they started looking for a fine cotton fabric and mother-of-pearl buttons. “We knew from our experience at Hermès that the best fabrics come from France and Italy,” says Mr. MacLane. Yet it took six months to find a source for a soft, well-draped fabric that was free of potentially harmful dyes and finishing chemicals.

Cotton fabrics turned out to be stiffer and harder to dye than some blends, and the planned piqué weave looked too casual. Cotton prices soared in a global shortage last year. They settled on a cotton-modal blend (modal is a form of rayon) that offered a soft feel, attractive drape and absorbed color well. From a factory near Paris, it cost $6.80 a yard—less than the $9 a yard for cotton fabric but more than some $5-a-yard blends they had investigated.

Their plans for fine buttons changed as well. Mother-of-pearl cost $1 a button. Samples broke and chipped during wear and laundering. The MacLanes were using four buttons rather than two (three on the longer placket, plus an extra), raising the cost per shirt. They found a durable plastic button with a shell-like sheen for three cents each. “We’re calling this the practical approach to luxury,” Mr. MacLane says.

Finding a factory to sew the shirts was challenging. The MacLanes wanted to manufacture in the U.S. “There’s been a big shift to things that are made locally, and we wanted to be a part of that,” he says.

The first New York factory they approached refused to submit a bid. The owner believed they would take his patterns and samples and send them to China for production.

They found a willing Brooklyn factory and set to making samples. Planned grosgrain ribbon inside the hem made the “tennis tail”—a longer back shirttail for easy tucking—curl up. They substituted simpler cotton tape to reinforce the edge. Fully enclosed French seams, often used in men’s shirts, looked bulky with the stretchy fabric, so they chose a simpler “overlock” stitch that looked finished yet trim.

When picking packaging, they worried that boxes would become landfill waste. One afternoon, Ms. MacLane pulled out a laundry bag in which she was storing some scarves. It was from the Sea Island, Ga., hotel where the couple had been married. “She said, ‘Oh my God, how about if we sent a shirt in a laundry bag?’ And I was like, ‘That’s brilliant,’ ” Mr. MacLane recalls.

It took several iterations to get their logo—a colorful bird—stitched on the linen bag in the exact Pantone hues they’d selected. From their work at Hermès, they knew Vietnam has a reputation for producing great hand-embroidery, so they decided to make the bags, which cost $3, at a factory there. But they had to send samples back and forth to get the thread colors right.

The hang tags come from a printer outside of Atlanta, using string from a Texas firm.

Ultimately, the cost of materials and labor for each shirt added up to $29.57. This brought into sharp focus the cynicism of the New York factory owner who had predicted they would take his work to China. Factories in China, they found, would produce similar shirts—without the MacLanes’ choice of materials—for as little as $1 or $2.

Using standard industry markups, the MacLanes set the wholesale price for the women’s polo at $65 and the retail price at $155. (Retailers in the U.S. mark up wholesale prices of ready-to-wear by roughly 2.2 to 2.5 times.)

From those profits, the MacLanes pay themselves, cover marketing and overhead, invest in new-product development—and pay for shipping to customers, for whom ground shipping is free.

Finished shirts are sent to their home in Atlanta. There, they juggle caring for their 10-month-old son with fulfilling daily orders. “We knew how to fold,” Ms. MacLane says. “We’d both been at Hermès.”

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com or follow her on Twitter: @BinkleyOnStyle

By TODDI GUTNER

Q:
I am looking for a full-time job that uses my writing, people and information-gathering talents from 25 years as a Los Angeles Times staff writer. My concern, validated by the coach at the retraining corporation, is that I am over 40. That coach actually told me to leave the dates of college attendance, etc., off my resume. My brother, president of a publicly-traded company, said this advice was nonsense, although he did say age is an issue (and he’s older than I am).Can you address this issue of inferiority complex for those of us competing with candidates 20 years our junior? How do we address it? How can we compensate for the potential perception that we are burn-outs or tired when we might — in my case — just be bored because we know the job so well?

A: No doubt, age discrimination does exist in the workplace. But don’t despair. There actually are advantages to being over 40.

“This is a good time to position yourself as a deeply competent and confident professional in your area of expertise and experience,” says Rabia de Lande Long, a consultant and executive coach at Chartwell Advisors. “In uncertain economic times, employers can be drawn more to experienced workers who join with ready-to-use skills and a shallow learning curve,” she says.

What’s more, younger workers are often perceived as job hoppers — quick to jump from one opportunity to the next. Employers aren’t likely to want to invest in training new talent — especially in this environment — unless employees are committed and stable.

As to whether or not you include the dates of your degrees, career experts have varying opinions. In most cases, it is a good idea to include them. If your resume attempts to indicate that you are younger by leaving out graduation dates or eliminating 10 years of early career history, “you could run the risk of surprising the interviewer and disqualifying yourself — not so much because of age, but because you have misled the employer,” says Sheryl Spanier, a career coach and consultant. When you include early work experience, it isn’t difficult to calculate the general age of a candidate. So why make the recruiter do the math? Leaving out the dates of your degrees may also make it appear that you have something to hide. What’s more, many employers verify degrees and will ask you to provide graduation dates, so you might as well provide them. Be sure to include any recent continuing education and dates you completed the work.

For professionals who are in their mid-50s and older, it will be harder to overcome potential employer biases. “If you are a youthful 55, perhaps you could post a professional photo of yourself on LinkedIn, which most recruiters check these days,” says Ms. de Lande Long. In addition, in your cover letter, you’ll want to differentiate yourself “by showing results, (understanding of) technology and demonstrate ease in interacting with colleagues of all ages,” she says.

During the interview process, avoid the “been there, done that” attitude. Instead, show interest, commitment, enthusiasm and energy. “If you’re bored with your profession, you can be sure that comes through in an interview,” says Susan Chadick, a principal at Chadick Ellig, an executive-search firm serving small and mid-size companies and startups.

Write to Career Q&A at cjeditor@dowjones.com.

By CHARLES WHEELAN

Getty Images

Look to your left and then to your right. Is that pretty girl Phi Beta Kappa? Marry her.

Class of 2012,

I became sick of commencement speeches at about your age. My first job out of college was writing speeches for the governor of Maine. Every spring, I would offer extraordinary tidbits of wisdom to 22-year-olds—which was quite a feat given that I was 23 at the time. In the decades since, I’ve spent most of my career teaching economics and public policy. In particular, I’ve studied happiness and well-being, about which we now know a great deal. And I’ve found that the saccharine and over-optimistic words of the typical commencement address hold few of the lessons young people really need to hear about what lies ahead. Here, then, is what I wish someone had told the Class of 1988:

1. Your time in fraternity basements was well spent.

The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years.

Charles Wheelan checks in on Mean Street with some advice for the Class of 2012: pay very close attention, because there are key things you need to know that you won’t learn by simply donning a cap and gown. Photo: AP.

2. Some of your worst days lie ahead. Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them. I’ll spare you my personal details, other than to say that one year after college graduation I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire.

3. Don’t make the world worse. I know that I’m supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I’m going to lower the bar here: Just don’t use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that “changing the world” also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

4. Marry someone smarter than you are. When I was getting a Ph.D., my wife Leah had a steady income. When she wanted to start a software company, I had a job with health benefits. (To clarify, having a “spouse with benefits” is different from having a “friend with benefits.”) You will do better in life if you have a second economic oar in the water. I also want to alert you to the fact that commencement is like shooting smart fish in a barrel. The Phi Beta Kappa members will have pink-and-blue ribbons on their gowns. The summa cum laude graduates have their names printed in the program. Seize the opportunity!

Successful people are often asked to deliver a university or college’s graduation speech, Here are some words of wisdom offered in commencement speeches over the last few years from President Obama, Conan O’Brien, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Carter.

5. Help stop the Little League arms race. Kids’ sports are becoming ridiculously structured and competitive. What happened to playing baseball because it’s fun? We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn’t about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message we are sending from birth is that if you don’t make the traveling soccer team or get into the “right” school, then you will somehow finish life with fewer points than everyone else. That’s not right. You’ll never read the following obituary: “Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place.”

6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

7. Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices. Theodore Roosevelt—soldier, explorer, president—once remarked, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” Great quote, but I am willing to bet that Teddy’s mother wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.

8. Don’t model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better. You will be a friend, a parent, a coach, an employee—and so on. But only in your job will you be explicitly evaluated and rewarded for your performance. Don’t let your life decisions be distorted by the fact that your boss is the only one tossing you peanuts. If you leave a work task undone in order to meet a friend for dinner, then you are “shirking” your work. But it’s also true that if you cancel dinner to finish your work, then you are shirking your friendship. That’s just not how we usually think of it.

9. It’s all borrowed time. You shouldn’t take anything for granted, not even tomorrow. I offer you the “hit by a bus” rule. Would I regret spending my life this way if I were to get hit by a bus next week or next year? And the important corollary: Does this path lead to a life I will be happy with and proud of in 10 or 20 years if I don’t get hit by a bus.

10. Don’t try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn’t, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.

Good luck and congratulations.

— Adapted from “10½ Things No Commencement Speaker Has Ever Said,” by Charles Wheelan. To be published May 7 by W.W. Norton & Co.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You.

By KAREN WILKIN

Courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum

‘A Peasant Playing Skittles or Lawn Bowls,’ by Adriaen van Ostade.

New York

Eccentric private collections can be appealing. The erratic shifts in focus and the dizzying swings in quality that distinguish, say, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s or Albert Barnes’s amazing hoards are part of their fascination and charm. But there’s a lot to be said for obsessed art lovers who collect with a sense of larger purpose, concentrating on particular themes, mediums or periods, and gaining expertise as they do so, so that the resulting group of works has the coherence and, often, the excellence of a respected museum’s holdings. “Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings From the Clement C. Moore Collection,” on view now at the Morgan Library and Museum, is paradigmatic of the second type of approach: single-minded and informed by knowledge and connoisseurship. (The Moore Collection is a promised gift to the Morgan, which will at once provide an excellent context and be enriched by these additions.)

As Mr. Moore tells the story, in his preface to the exhibit’s handsome, scholarly catalog, he was first “completely hooked” by the 17th-century Dutch paintings in the Wallace Collection, during a visit to London more than 20 years ago—”so much so,” he writes, “that I began to explore Dutch art straightaway.” Golden Age Dutch works on paper, which spoke to him from the start, proved affordable. Mr. Moore’s first purchase, Rochus van Veen’s poignant watercolor “Study of a Dead Eurasian Otter” (1673), was soon joined by landscapes and other nature studies. As Mr. Moore’s ambitions for the collection grew more serious, so did the scope of what he acquired.

The more than 80 works at the Morgan include landscapes, marine images, cityscapes, portraits, genre scenes, religious subjects and (keeping the otter company) scrupulous representations of exotic birds, tulips and animals, both domestic and fierce. There’s even an undated drawing by Jan van der Heyden detailing “The Courtyard of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange With Suction Pump and Fire Extinguishing Equipment,” a remarkable image that announces its author’s multiple roles as a painter of cityscapes, engineer and inventor. The Moore Collection ranges from highly finished works, some with color, intended for collectors of drawings when they were made—a new phenomenon in the 17th century—to rapid working sketches and private notations, to preparations for engravings. The approaches range from earthy naturalism, to sparse elegance, to Italian-inflected Mannerism, although the emphasis is on Dutch artists who remained in the Netherlands and concentrated on recognizably “Dutch” images most appealing to the Dutch market.

That notable stay-at-home Rembrandt is represented by four economical but vivid figure studies spanning his career from the 1620s to the late 1640s or early 1650s. The most spectacular is the intimate, casual “Study of a Sick Woman for the ‘Hundred Guilder Print’ and an Alternative Sketch of Her Head” (c. 1647-49), a vigorous characterization of a weary supplicant conjured up with rapid, fluid pen strokes. The Morgan’s version of the monumental etching “Christ Healing the Sick” (c. 1647-49)—nicknamed the “Hundred Guilder Print” for the exorbitant price it fetched only a few years after its publication—is hung beside the drawing, to underscore the transformation of the scrawled figure in the sketch into the print’s impassioned worshiper.

Works by members of Rembrandt’s circle, such as Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, bear witness to his influence, while fine examples by other significant practitioners of the Golden Age, such as Hendrick Goltzius and Adriaen van Ostade, suggest the richness of the period; the Van Ostade, a tiny, lively watercolor of a peasant crouching to play lawn bowls, is a standout. Works by less familiar but no less accomplished artists complete our sense of what 17th-century Dutch draftsmen were capable of, from Roelant Roghman’s light-filled drawings of urban and rural buildings to Cornelis Saftleven’s near-life-size “Head of a Growling Bear,” russet fur, savage teeth and red tongue suggested with colored chalk overlaid with rhythmic strokes. That characteristic touch is the only thing connecting the large, angry bear with a more typical Saftleven, a monochrome of two placid, slightly shaggy cows with dopey expressions. In the animalier category, though, Simon de Vlieger’s chalk, brush and ink study of an exceptionally doggish dog, awake and asleep, is hard to beat.

“Rembrandt’s World” is installed in thematically related groups, rather than chronologically, which allows us to approach the exhibition from multiple starting points and, at the same time, encourages us to make comparisons among related works, perhaps in the same way that the original collectors of these drawings did, at a kunstbeschouwing—“art showing”—when carefully stored images were brought out and passed among a gathering of amateurs seated around a table, for admiration and discussion. Wherever we start, we find drawings that compel our attention. Don’t miss a delightful Hendrick Avercamp of fishermen on a riverbank, an unusual summer scene by a master known for his skaters on frozen canals. Then there’s Gerbrandt van den Eckhout’s drawing of a young man seated on a barrel, a celebration of black and white chalk’s potential for tonal complexity in the hands of a virtuoso. An informal pen-and-ink coastal scene by Willem van de Velde the Elder seems to test how few lines are needed to evoke a specific place. And a personal favorite: Abraham Bloemaert’s “Interior of a Barn” (1600-10), a tightly packed celebration of pattern and texture that transcends its century. Next stop, Piet Mondrian’s cathedral facades—modern, more abstract manifestations of Van de Velde’s impulse to distill the geometry of architecture into a complex expanse of shifting marks.

Ms. Wilkin writes about art for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared February 21, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Drawing Dutchmen: Their Golden Years.

By JULIE V. IOVINE

Jeff Goldberg/Esto for Ennead Architects

The Natural History Museum of Utah, perched on the foothills of the Rockies.

Salt Lake City

There’s nothing like a natural-history museum to give one a little perspective. Compared with the more than 160 million years that dinosaurs stomped the earth, mankind’s roughly 20,000-year history is barely a sliver of time. In the past, the grandiose subject of where we came from and what we are made of called for appropriately solemn and magisterial architecture: sweeping stairs, baronial halls, relentless symmetries and axial certainty. In other words, something in the Beaux Arts style.

The Natural History Museum of Utah, at its 200,000-square-foot home on the campus of the University of Utah here, has gone for a different feeling—that of a trailhead. Instead of ascending a grand staircase, you enter as through the faceted, sheer walls of a canyon, rendered in beige plaster and board-formed concrete. Instead of a procession of galleries with symmetrical predictability, the organizational logic is that of switchback paths traversing ramps, bridges and underpasses.

Designed by the New York-based Ennead Architects, with exhibition design by the ubiquitous Ralph Appelbaum Associates, and in collaboration with GSBS Architects, the museum makes an assertive break with formality. It plays up today’s educational mantra of experience, discovery and interconnectedness over yesteryear’s emphasis on order, direction and significance.

If the interior is conspicuously nontraditional, the exterior of the $102.5 million building, which opened in November, seems barely there at all. In a controversial move, it isn’t located near such other downtown cultural venues as the Church History Museum and the Leonardo, the new science, technology and art museum. Instead it straddles a popular hiking trail perched halfway up the slopes of the Wasatch Range, foothills to the Rockies at the edge of both the campus and the town. Had it not been for the spring panoply of bright green grasses visible on a recent visit, the museum, clad in a burnished copper mottled by streaks of zinc and tin, might have disappeared completely amid the reddish-brown rock against which it is set.

According to Todd Schliemann, a partner of Ennead Architects, camouflage was much to the point in the interest of spreading the natural-history message. To that end—unusual for climate-control-conscious museums—multiple terraces open directly off exhibits. Thus, in one display you can observe a model of Lake Bonneville, which filled the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era some 15,000 years ago before it drained out through Red Rock Pass, leaving nothing but the puddle that is Salt Lake (energetic crankers can even spin a big spigot to fill the display with water and pull the plug on it themselves); then you can step out onto the adjacent terrace to view the actual lake in the distance and check the current level, which apparently varies slightly all the time.

Reminders of the natural world just beyond the walls abound, introducing a redeeming note of seriousness and wonder to the blatant infotainment of the exhibits inside, an Appelbaum trademark. The main lobby is called “The Canyon.” It’s the kind of sappy naming game that many institutions go for today. But it works, partly because the focal point of the space is an enormous panoramic window that, with breathtaking sweep, delivers natural history live: a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley and snow-capped Oquirrh Mountains. The lobby space is open and expansive, with café tables and cherry-wood benches meant to suggest fallen logs. There’s also a 40-foot-tall display wall that serves as a kind of amuse-bouche of collection highlights. It includes dinosaur fossils, conch shells, iridescent butterflies, ancient moccasins and woven baskets. The laudable intention was to provide a public place where people can range widely and even see a little something for free before buying a ticket. Two bridges cross overhead and a third seemingly carved from rock scales the back wall to underscore the adventure theme.

The NHMU may not go in for the old-fashioned coherence of symmetry, but it is organized in a left brain, right brain sort of way, with experiential galleries to the right of the Canyon and active research labs, special exhibits, vitrines for exotic rocks, and artifact storage (viewable through glass doors) to the left. But with wilding toddlers to wrangle (Utah has one of the nation’s youngest populations), odds are that it will be to the state-of-the-art interactive right side of the museum that people will head first for a full day of exploration.

You only have to see Allie, the Allosaurus, to realize just how far pedagogical entertainment in the natural sciences has come. This rubbery, stubby-armed flesh-eater was a favorite at the old natural-history museum. Slide a quarter down its craw and it would sing “Do-Re-Mi.” Now Allie has been relegated to an out-of-the-way spot by some elevators on the lowest entry level and supplanted by far more sophisticated educational tools. These include five learning labs for school groups and a showcase lab where working scientists pursue their research and bone dusting in full sight of visitors, a reality-show-era diorama.

Keyboards, screens, Post-it notes and good old chalk-and-blackboard beckon for interaction at every possible level. There are rubber bones to fit into the puzzle of a fossil imprint and fake pottery shards to arrange into an ancient painted vase just as archaeologists might. Cleverly, the museum shows off its exceedingly rare collection of competing types of horned triceratops, arranging them just the way local hunters might display their own bagged prey, as heads mounted on the wall.

The Beaux Arts museum of yore presented artifacts—whether rocks, fossils or human tools—in a fashion that made them seem to belong to a more primitive, less complicated time. Today’s approach generally makes past and present, nature and human all part of one ingeniously complex continuum. In its new digs, the NHMU captures that spirit at its most awe-inspiring.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Natural History, Modern Setting.

Like many workers, Ivelisse Rivera, a physician at Community Health Center, Middletown, Conn., feels stressed-out by mounting workloads. And she didn’t expect to get much help during her employer’s annual staff meeting last November—just the usual speeches on medical issues.

Instead, she got a big dose of something new: Happiness coaching. Keynote speaker Shawn Achor—a former Harvard University researcher and former co-teacher of one of the university’s most popular courses, Positive Psychology—extolled 90 listening employees to shake off dark moods at work by practicing such happiness-inducing techniques as meditation or expressing gratitude.

To her surprise, Dr. Rivera says, she drove home filled with thoughts about cheering up; “if I assume a negative attitude and complain all the time, whoever is working with me is going to feel the same way.”

Happiness coaching is seeping into the workplace. A growing number of employers, including UBS,

American Express,

KPMG and the law firm Goodwin Procter, have hired trainers who draw on psychological research, ancient religious traditions or both to inspire workers to take a more positive attitude—or at least a neutral one. Happiness-at-work coaching is the theme of a crop of new business books and a growing number of MBA-school courses.

Victor Juhasz

Critics say that pushing positive thinking is just a way for companies to improve morale while they continue to burden employees with the threat of layoffs and an ever-increasing workload. Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book, “Bright-sided,” blames “positive thinking” for enabling people to avoid confronting a wide range of serious problems in the economy and workplace.

Still, there’s no doubt that workers could use a little cheering up. Employee satisfaction has hit the lowest level in the 22-year history of the Conference Board’s annual survey on the topic. Only 45% of U.S. workers are satisfied with their jobs, down from 52% in 2005 and 61% in 1987, says this 5,000-household study. Mr. Achor describes one employee audience he encountered at a big banking concern as “ashen-faced and anxious.”

Research shows that employees’ positive attitudes can be good for business, too. A 2004 study of 60 business teams in the journal American Behavioral Scientist found teams with buoyant moods who encouraged each earned higher profit and better customer-satisfaction ratings. A 2001 study at the University of Michigan says people who are experiencing joy or contentment are able to think more broadly and creatively, accepting a wider variety of possible actions, than people with negative emotions. And a 2005 research survey in the Psychological Bulletin shows happier people miss work less often and receive more positive evaluations from bosses.

Of courses, coaches have long tried to instill proactive skills to help clients extract career or personal success from tough situations. What’s different now is the emphasis on inner happiness, and controlling your own mood in the face of turbulence or misfortune.

Indeed, the happiness coaches go beyond traditional positive-thinking approaches, taking new tacks that tend to ring true with workers. Some examples: Write e-mails to your co-workers every day thanking them for something they have done. Meditate daily to clear your mind. Do something for somebody without expecting anything in return. Write in a journal about things you are thankful for; look for traits you admire in people and compliment them. Focus on the process of your work, which you can control, rather than outcomes, which you can’t. And don’t immediately label events good or bad, but remain open to potentially positive outcomes of even the most seemingly negative events.

Mr. Achor bases his training on a burgeoning body of research on the positive psychology movement, which emphasizes instilling resiliency and positive attitudes over analyzing mental illness and dysfunction. Srikumar Rao, a Long Island University emeritus professor whose training courses in workplaces and business schools have earned him the nickname “the happiness guru”, draws on tenets common to such religious traditions as Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism.

People who use the principles say they work. Greg Johnson, a Charlotte, N.C., corporate real-estate executive, says Dr. Rao’s training helps him avoid rushing to negative conclusions about daily events. Amid staff changes or reorganizations, he has taught himself to think, “Good thing, bad thing? The reality is, I don’t know” how the change will turn out in the long term. That mindset helps him remain open to the possibility that seemingly negative events can produce positive outcomes in the long term, he says.

Andrew Potter, chief executive of National Car Parks, London, says a tenet he learned from Dr. Rao to focus on work processes, rather than outcomes you can’t control, helped him manage his company’s recent bid for a big contract. His employees felt intense pressure to wrest the contract away from a competitor. But instead of “talking to the team about how great it would be if we win it,” Mr. Potter says, he asked them, “What more should we be doing” to prepare?”

His company didn’t win the contract, but “We had 20 minutes of grumbling,” then everyone bounced back, he says. When the next bidding opportunity rolled around, “we walked in with confidence and we won it.” Dr. Rao’s training is “very, very practical in the fiercest corporate battle,” he says; he plans to enroll several of his executives.

In Marshall Goldsmith’s new book, “Mojo”, the respected executive coach emphasizes finding “a positive spirit toward what we are doing now, that starts from the inside,” he says. Many companies are trying “to increase employee satisfaction by asking themselves, ‘What can we do to make the employee’s job more meaningful? How can we make employees happier?”‘ Dr. Goldsmith says. “My approach is quite different, in having employees ask themselves, ‘What can I do to make my work more meaningful? What can I do to make myself happier?”‘

To help employees keep tabs on their inner attitudes, Dr. Goldsmith will start offering free software for iPhones and BlackBerries on his Web site next month.

—E-mail sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com.