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The 5
Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and
Satisfaction by James M. Citrin Rating: •••• (Highly Recommended) |
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Provocative James M. Citrin intended his new book, The 5
Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, to be provocative, and it is. Beyond
that, it’s a useful and helpful guide to thinking about success at work, and
how to go about finding ways to achieve satisfaction. I especially liked that
the book’s insights are based on analysis and insight into executives in a large
database, that of executive recruiter Spencer Stuart. You’ve heard of the
80/20 rule; read The 5
Patterns to learn about the 20/80 rule. Here’s an excerpt from the
beginning of Pattern 5, “Find the Right Fit (Strengths, Passions, and People)
(pp. 148-52): Failure's hard, but success
is far more dangerous. If you're
successful at the wrong thing, the mix
of praise and money and opportunity can
lock you in forever. —Po BRONSON When
love and skill work together, expect
a masterpiece. —JOHN RUSKIN THE EXTRAORDINARY CAREER DEFINED What
does it mean to achieve an extraordinary career? We've been throwing that
term around quite a bit. Part of the mission of this book is to give you
tools for success. But another important task is to define and expand what it
means to have an extraordinary career. After thousands of interviews and countless hours of
analysis, we've developed our own idea of what constitutes career success.
Here's a hint: It's nothing like what many people imagine. For many folks,
getting top dollar for a top position is about as far as they think. We're
talking about something else. For us, an extraordinary career depends on
three critical elements: You
must: 1. Play to your strengths 2. Set your passions free 3. Fit in naturally and comfortably with your work
culture Attain
these three things in your working life and contentment will reign within
your borders. Our research revealed that extraordinary executives lead
careers that leverage both their strengths and their passions more than
six times as often as average employees. The
implication of these findings is profound: Not only is it possible to
leverage both your strengths and passions in the same job, but success
actually requires it. Of course, it's not all that easy to find the
perfect workplace where you fit in, love what you do, and were born for the
job. Many people spend a lifetime looking for it. That's all right. In fact,
just knowing that this is what makes a successful executive gives you a leg
up on the competition. Jim Head was blessed with exceptional intelligence
and interpersonal skills, but he felt as though he had almost been cursed by
his competencies. Head graduated from Vanderbilt University with a liberal
arts degree, near the top of his class. Soon after, he completed Vanderbilt
Law School, again finishing near the top of his class and making the
prestigious law review. He was a shoe-in for a job at a top-notch law firm. "Graduating from law school, I felt as if my
career was on a conveyor belt. It was all too easy to get seduced into the
cutthroat competition for positions with the best law firms. And given the
opportunity, it would have seemed like lunacy to not accept one of the most
coveted spots. The most successful among us felt as if we were destined for a
big firm in a major metropolitan area. It is ironic that in retrospect, the
better you performed and the more talented you were, the fewer options you
felt you had." So Head got on the track and joined a prestigious
law firm. After two years toiling away on "important" cases that
positioned him squarely on the partner path, he began to have second thoughts
about his work and his direction. It wasn't until a friend pointed out his
visible lack of enthusiasm for the law that he considered whether there were
indeed other, more exciting career alternatives. After some reflection, he
concluded that his seven years of academic training and two years of
sixteen-hour days made starting over from scratch not a viable option. All
the same, he longed for a job that drew on a long-suppressed
interest—creative businesses. So he left the large firm for a smaller
regional law firm that had a strong media practice. He actively sought to work
with media clients and eventually got his turn to work with several of the
firm's most prominent clients on the West Coast. It wasn't long before Head developed an expertise in
copyright law, business affairs, and contracts—the core of the media business.
After a few years, with skills and reputation established, he was offered a
permanent position as in-house counsel for Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting,
the giant cable programming company with networks from CNN to TNT. Once at
Turner, Head was able to reorient his work and complete his major career
refocus with a move into production. "Fortunately, through aggressive
cajoling I managed to convince an amazingly enlightened programming executive
that I was actually a budding programmer trapped in a lawyer's body," he
told us. Head became a programming executive for one of the Turner networks,
and he displayed a natural talent for the role. His knack for developing and
scheduling programs immediately showed results, increasing the network's
target audiences, which helped him evolve from a role in scheduling to one in
acquisitions to the head of nonfiction original programming, and finally to
developing and producing original movie series, and TV specials. "I met
with success, largely because I was finally following my heart in my
career," he says. "With my strengths and passions coinciding, my
career really took off." Jim
Head's story marks a common trajectory shared among the extraordinary
executives we know and have studied. In fact, finding the right fit is
perhaps the most common of all the patterns of extraordinary careers. If you
think back to the varied individuals profiled throughout this book, from the
panel of college alumni in the introduction to Lou Gerstner, Greg Brenneman,
Elizabeth Dole, Dan Rosensweig, Dennis Laoey, DickMetzIer, Dennis Gouyout,
Rich Bray, David Hood, Michael Reene, andArthur Levitt, each and everyone has
found a way to migrate toward situations that play to their strengths and
interests. But true success and satisfaction, in the end, are
goals that need to be defined by each of us in a way that is consistent, with
our own aspirations and values. We are confident that applying the first four
success patterns outlined in the book so far will help you Improve your value
significantly in the marketplace. But it is how you use this value, how you
invest the career capital that you will accumulate, that really counts.
SO
CLOSE, YET SO FAR Find
your strengths, passions and cultural fit and you will be happier and more
successful in your career. How simple indeed. Yes,
the logic behind this pattern for success is simple and straightforward. So
with its simplicity, it would be safe to assume that the majority of
competent and thoughtful professionals would be able to navigate their way to
desired strengths, passions, and people, as did Jim Head. Given the clear-cut
nature of this principle, what percentage of professionals do you think are
in jobs that maximize their strengths and where they are passionate about
their work and the people they work with? How many professionals have
replicated this critical pattern of extraordinary careers? Nine percent! Yes, only 9 percent of those we surveyed
believe they are in jobs that fully leverage their strengths, performing
activities that they are passionate about in an energizing environment and
with people that they like and respect. And remember once again that our
survey was strongly biased toward professionals who had succeeded greatly in
their careers. Therefore, they are in positions of influence, presumably with
a much greater ability to navigate their careers toward their strengths,
passions, and people than an average professional. Yet even in this group of
successful executives, fewer than one in ten had managed to replicate this
success pattern in their own career. This ratio, it should be pointed out, is
generally consistent with what we've observed in our professional recruiting
practice, which has allowed us to interview roughly three thousand executives
over the past ten years. For
most people, understanding the logic of finding the right fit for your
career—focusing on strengths, passions, and people—is intuitive, even
obvious. Virtually everyone desires such a career. And as the statistics have
played out, finding your ideal fit will result in improved performance and
higher levels of success. However, it is how you go about trying to put this pattern into action that
becomes much more challenging. No matter what degree of success or
satisfaction you’ve achieved in your career, you’ll find something to think
about when you read The 5
Patterns of Extraordinary Careers. Steve Hopkins, September 23, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the October 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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