The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction
James M. Citrin
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1400081688
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What is different about the careers of people like Lou Gerstner, the acclaimed, recently retired chairman and CEO of IBM? Or Senator Elizabeth Dole, Yahoo! COO Dan Rosensweig, and Tom Freston, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks?
Why did they ascend to the top and prosper—why did they have extraordinary careers—while others equally talented never reached their potential or aspirations?
Jim Citrin and Rick Smith of Spencer Stuart, the world’s most influential executive search firm, set out to explore this question. The result—based on in-depth, original research—is sure to be the most important and useful book for anyone seeking to crack the code of how to build a rewarding, personally satisfying career.
Like weather systems and financial markets, careers contain patterns. What Citrin and Smith found from their research and extensive experience is that people with extraordinary careers are guided by five straightforward patterns that can be harnessed and used by everyone. These individuals:
• Understand the value of you by translating their knowledge and experience into action, building their personal value over each phase of their career
• Practice benevolent leadership by not clawing their way to the top but by being carried there
• Solve the permission paradox, the dilemma of not being able to get a job without experience and not getting the experience without the job
• Differentiate using the 20/80 principle of performance by storming past their defined jobs to create breakthrough ideas and deliver unexpected impact
• Do not micromanage their careers, but macromanage them by gravitating toward the things they are best at and have a passion for, and working with people they like and respect
No one manages your career for you. But with Citrin and Smith as your guide, you’ll be able to understand—and act on—the root causes of success. And what better source for strategic career advice than Spencer Stuart, the firm that over the past ten years has conducted more than 60 percent of the searches for Fortune 1000 CEOs?
From the Hardcover edition.
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expectations. The latter was a fate Timothy Reynolds suddenly feared might have fallen upon him. For many years, Tim Reynolds had every reason to think he was on the path of an extraordinary career. After all, he seemed to have it all—three kids, a beautiful wife, a four-bedroom house in a leafy Chicago suburb, and a good job as vice president of marketing at a leading consumer-products company, all before the age of forty. But standing beside his classmates at his fifteenth college reunion on an
and other key steps for a wide range of entertainment and media companies. Now two years into the Scholastic role, he has put all of his prior experiences together to seamlessly lead the company’s business development function. Another excellent example of an executive whose demonstrated competence has propelled his career is Richard Nanula, one of the top five executives at biotechnology giant Amgen, with responsibility for finance, strategy, and communications at the company, which has a market
interactions that our firm has had with these individuals. The database is coded in such a way to permit sophisticated extracting and manipulation. From QuestNT, we constructed a representative sample of executives to survey. Our survey, which formed the heart of our research, asked each participant eighty separate questions about his beliefs, actions, and career. (The survey is available online, along with an instantaneous analysis of results, at www.5patterns.com.) Relying on the advice of the
that described her idea and her rationale about why it would work. The partner managing her at the firm reviewed Arnold’s work and was somewhat torn. On one hand, he was convinced that the work itself was truly exceptional—a breakthrough in strategic marketing thinking. But on the other hand, it had nothing to do with the work that Susan was tasked to complete—increasing efficiency and reducing costs in her client’s supply chain operations. After thinking about it, the partner disappointingly
auto design and product line. With twenty-five years of experience at Ford and Chrysler, and hit designs such as the PT Cruiser and Dodge Viper to his credit, the newly restyled Cadillac line and other hot products have been a direct result of this manifestation of Lutz’s experiential value brought to bear for GM. Experiential value is usually more highly compensated than potential value for the simple reason that it is much easier to measure what understand the value of you 21 you have done
