The Strategic Career: Let Business Principles Guide You - Hardcover

Barnett, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804793581 ISBN 13: 9780804793582

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

We often hear that finding the work we are meant for will multiply our accomplishments and enable us to attain new levels of personal satisfaction. Yet, many who are planning their careers find that the job market has shifted to the advantage of employers, whether as a result of the recession, globalization, IT-driven productivity, or other changes in the business landscape. Faced with these tough circumstances, it is more critical than ever for professionals to create a plan of attack and make sound decisions as they navigate their careers.

The Strategic Career provides readers with the ultimate guide to career choices-both short-term and long. While other authors approach career development from the perspective of psychology and counseling, Bill Barnett demonstrates how business strategy concepts can successfully guide us as we chart our careers. Drawing on two decades of experience leading McKinsey & Company's Strategy Practice, as well as his popular Career Strategy courses at Yale and Rice University, he approaches the construction of a long-term career plan by looking at the main challenges professionals will face: developing and reaching long-term targets, surfacing opportunities, assessing career decisions, and staying on track. Underpinning his advice with research and illustrating it with vivid stories from others' successes, Barnett lays out practical, step-by-step processes to help readers realize their goals. Complete with a program to help you develop your own plan and over 100 specific activities to guide you, The Strategic Career is the ideal companion on your professional pathway.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bill Barnett teaches career strategy at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. He was formerly Director of McKinsey & Company, Inc., where he led the firm's Strategy Practice.

Bill Barnett teaches career strategy at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. He was formerly Director of McKinsey & Company, Inc., where he led the firm's Strategy Practice.

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The Strategic Career

Let Business Principles Guide You

By Bill Barnett

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9358-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART I: CAREER DIRECTION, 
1. Fundamental Values Leading to a Calling, 
2. Strengths, 
3. From Values and Strengths to Fields and Roles, 
4. Investigation, 
5. Personal Value Proposition, 
PART II: LONG-TERM STRATEGY, 
6. Long-Term Strategy Initiatives, 
7. Integrated Long-Term Strategy, 
PART III: OPPORTUNITY SEARCH STRATEGY, 
8. Current Personal Value Proposition, 
9. Opportunity Identification, 
10. The Best Case, 
11. Opportunity Search Plan, 
PART IV: DECISIONS ON ALTERNATIVES, 
12. Alternatives and Objectives, 
13. Alternatives and Uncertainty, 
PART V: STAYING POWER, 
14. Personal Annual Report, 
15. Personal Resilience, 
Conclusions, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

FUNDAMENTAL VALUES LEADING TO A CALLING

A BUSINESS FOUNDER STARTS with his or her interests, ideas, and skills and determines how to meet the needs of the market. The founder designs products to fit the market and establishes the capabilities to manufacture and sell them. In established companies, fundamental aspirations guide decisions big and small. When contemplating a big strategy shift, corporate leaders test that shift against those aspirations. If the shift doesn't fit, that raises questions about whether it's a good idea.

Just as they do in business, uplifting aspirations can guide your work life. They motivate: the word aspiration suggests hope and opportunity. They lead to action: aspirations you believe in will target personal growth, stimulate initiatives to position yourself to be competitive, and guide your search for opportunities. Before your strategy can take you to your desired destination, you need to know where you wish to go.

Determining what you want from work, however, can be a tall order. Work is a financial necessity for almost everyone, and that work sometimes will require sacrifice. Work can be drudgery, but it also can be fun and exciting. The competition can be energizing. There's no perfect scorecard to consult for answers. Digging into aspirations is a big part of career strategizing.

My goal in this chapter is to show you how to structure thinking about your own values related to work. I'll begin by describing the job/career/calling framework. I'll take a deep dive into the factors that underpin this framework and then describe how to use it to guide your own thinking.

Jobs, Careers, and Callings

What matters most to you at work? Most people must wrestle with this question to get to bedrock values. This inside-out thinking is highly personal, but you don't have to do it without guidance. The experiences of others offer lessons into which aspirations provide the greatest prospect of happiness and satisfaction.

The best framework I've seen of attitudes toward work is the job/career/calling model, introduced to me by Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale:

• Job—People focus "on the material benefits of work to the relative exclusion of other kinds of meaning and fulfillment." They may contain time at work, spend some work time thinking about what they'll do after work, and resent occasions when work requirements expand.

• Career— "The increased pay, prestige, and status that come with promotion and advancement are the dominant focus of their work."

• Calling— People "work not for financial rewards or for advancement, but for the fulfillment that doing the work brings.... The work is an end in itself, and is usually associated with the belief that the work contributes to the greater good and makes the world a better place."

Investigating people from different walks of life, Wrzesniewski found that roughly a third fall into each category. (Throughout the book, I use the words job and career in a conventional way. In this part of Chapter 1, however, I use those words in the particular way defined in the preceding list.)

When I first saw this model, I smiled to myself and nodded. The job/career/calling model captured much of what I'd experienced in my own work life and what I'd observed in others. I knew that if I could use this idea to help people find callings or at least begin their journeys, I'd have something big.

When I began the research that led to this book, therefore, a principal goal was to classify people among these categories and learn what causes them to end up in one category or another. I did that by talking to executives, managers, and professionals, most in their thirties and forties. As I deployed this emerging thinking into the classroom, I added MBA students to the mix, most of whom were in their late twenties and early thirties. I asked about motivations and values, along with accomplishments and how they felt about their work lives. I'll describe what I've learned about these differences in a moment, but first let's get some misconceptions about callings out of the way.

Some people hear the word calling and assume that a calling requires a great deal of self-sacrifice and denial. They imagine people working with charities or religious institutions—an extreme version being Mother Theresa in Calcutta's slums. They imagine people in lower-paid positions than they otherwise could have. I'm sure some calling people are like that, but that level of sacrifice and denial isn't what I've found. Some highly paid corporate leaders have callings; others don't. Some Legal Aid attorneys have callings; others are there because it was the only position they found. Some people in public service roles bring career or job mentalities to their work. Some physicians are healers; others are in it for the money. None of the calling people I've known live in conditions anywhere close to those of Mother Teresa's life. Although they work hard, most of these people find their lives appealing—with average to above-average incomes and not much difference in hours at work.

Many assume that once you find a calling, it's with you for the rest of your life. In the stories in this book, you'll see some people who, so far at least, are pursuing the calling they first found. But you'll also see others who find callings, lose them, and then move on to something else.

People may suppose that only the young without family obligations can sacrifice in the way required to pursue a calling, especially a calling that comes with a modest paycheck. Callings, however, are far more prevalent among experienced people. Few young adults really know what they want from work. They're experimenting with possibilities, largely bringing a career mentality to decisions about which field of work to pursue and which positions to accept.

Some assume that callings arrive in a visionary way, perhaps coming down from on high, and feel like a command. I'm sure that's possible, and it certainly would clarify things. However, only one person I've worked with on careers had anything close to that experience. Callings, at least in the way I'll be using the term in this book, are far more likely to result from a multiyear journey that includes some trials and some errors than from a single astonishing flash of insight.

At first glance then, calling people don't look much different than...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804793581
• ISBN 13: 9780804793582
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande