Category Archives: Career

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Getting Your Shot

This month Kamala Harris got a step closer to one of the most coveted jobs in the world. It was anything but a predictable path. The preceding weeks were filled with anxiety and uncertainty. Through it all she remained fiercely loyal to her boss and the inside circle that provided her with the opportunity to someday be considered for the gig in the spotlight. Without much trumpeting, the door then opened and she proudly walked through it. She was ready.

That is not to jump the gun and offer any conclusions about whether she will be president. This isn’t even meant to be a piece about Kamala Harris. It’s about readiness. It’s about preparation. It’s about truly knowing what you want and putting yourself in a position where you might get there.

That kind of readiness is harder than most people think. Way harder. Exponentially harder.

If you’ve ever been in second position in any leadership capacity, you understand the difference between advising the person making a call and making the call yourself. They are both tough jobs requiring objectivity, empathy, careful analysis, diligent consideration, and consensus building. A bench coach in Major League Baseball is a vital and respected member of the coaching staff, but he’s not the team manager who will take the fall for a failed season. The provost of a university has a vast impact on the institution’s administrative and financial condition, but if the university fails to meet the goals of the governing board, it’s the president most likely to be under fire.

Often these second-in-commands long to succeed their bosses, and often they do. When the time comes, the key questions those in a selection capacity will ask encompass whether the candidate understands the gravitas that shifts in this role change, and whether that candidate is fully prepared for the unknown roadmap in their future.

I have written often that mentoring might be the best part of being a leader, but also one of the most difficult. We do our best to share perspectives, but each of us has a unique approach to things that may or may not be useful to someone else. Of all the gratification I have enjoyed in my career, none has been greater than watching younger careers flourish. Sometimes I have been able to offer guidance to a rising star looking to shore up his or her toolbox. Sometimes I have been able to explain the nuances of navigating a particularly counterintuitive negotiation.

I have seen ambition tempered by learning, and ambition undermined by hubris. I have listened to people lobby for a big promotion, asked them to consider fully if they understand the change in expectations once they get it, and watched the results go both ways. We do our best as leaders to ready the next generation for the ladder ahead, but ultimately that readiness is in their own hands.

Opportunity knocks when it wants, not necessarily when someone wants it. That can come in the form of a crisis, an unexpected competitive swing in the market, a change in surrounding personnel, an expansion effort willing to take a chance on new talent and untested ideas — all kinds of events and circumstances can unlock a mythical gate. Sometimes patience is on your side. Sometimes impatience serves you just as well. The question you must have already asked yourself is not whether you want what you think you want, but whether you are ready to tackle the unknown that you accept when you are asked.

In a memorable moment in the musical Hamilton, the young Alexander Hamilton sings the powerful refrain, “I am not throwing away my shot.” It’s a dramatic proclamation of self and an emotional manifesto easily relatable to a mirrored audience. “I’m a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal,” he continues. He knows the coming revolution will call upon the best of all those who choose the life risk of demanding national independence. It is that combination of desire, conviction, and opportunity that puts him on the path to becoming a historical figure.

Does nineteen-year-old Hamilton really know what is ahead of him, the sacrifices he will make, or the ultimate result of his ambition? How could he? What he knows is what matters: he believes he is ready. He commits. That puts him on a remarkable path with personal evolution and history. His choices are intentional. The opaque path ahead is purely beyond his control, and still, he makes his mark.

Alexander Hamilton didn’t throw away his shot.

Kamala Harris isn’t throwing away her shot.

There were no shortcuts for either of them. No guarantees. No promises. No sour grapes.

If you think you know what you want, recommit to readiness. Hone your skills. If you have a mentor, don’t squander the opportunity to be in the room anytime you can. You’ll see good decisions and bad decisions in real-time. You learn from both.

Test yourself repeatedly. Question your preparation even more often. Learn not just how important it is to be right under pressure, but how to improve your odds of being right by building trust with those around you to vet a broad spectrum of possibilities. Learn the balance of risk-taking, the integrity of owning failure, and the cycle of learning that comes from measured mistakes.

Embrace clear and frequent communication even when you want to be alone. Build a substantial contact list and advice circle that is diverse, renowned, honest, accessible, and global. Network ceaselessly for what you can do for others with such modest expectations of reciprocity that help is always abundant long before you ask for it.

Know that the next step is not a cosmetic change in title with better perks. If you want the gig, find the regimen to train for it. Don’t be timid, but don’t catapult yourself into contention before you’re convinced you can launch.

Don’t throw away your shot.

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Image: BroadwayMerchandiseShop.com

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Easing Up on Advice

When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.

I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.

What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.

With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.

With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.

Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?

Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.

Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.

Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?

Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.

In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.

The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.

Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.

Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.

If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.

All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.

To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.

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Image: Pixabay

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Critics Don’t Carry The Bag

Those distant from decisions often have many opinions to offer.

Sports journalists tell team managers what they should have done in yesterday’s game and what trades are worth making for the second half of the season.

Political pundits tell elected incumbents how to vote on legislation if they want to be reelected and opposing candidates what to include in their platforms.

Business columnists tell CEOs what companies to buy, what assets to unload, where to cut costs, and how to allocate dividends.

It’s all noise to those who are supposed to be listening.

If you sit in the seat, you listen to customers, team members, mentors, data, research, and the instincts that develop as a result of all these factors over a lifetime. You don’t look to those who sit on the sidelines and fire in potshots.

Until you own the outcome, until you have felt the weight of what could result as the effect of your decision, you are largely consuming air when you tell us what we should do. We may be unsure, but you don’t know.

“Carry the bag” is a term most senior leaders understand. It dates back to the days of door-to-door salespeople who carried their wares in satchels, literally bearing the weight of the product to be sold from one household pitch to another. Today we think of it as maintaining a sales quota, but despite the fancy titles top business people may hold, when you’re in charge, if you don’t deliver the sales required to achieve agreed goals, everything else in a company quickly becomes a lot less critical.

The scope of sales responsibility in a company transcends the actual exchange of dollars for goods and services. You could be selling a new strategy to an ownership group or board. You could be selling your vision for change to public or private investors. You could be selling a new initiative to employees whose buy-in and expertise are critical to transforming an idea into action.

In every instance of competent management, whoever owns the responsibility for transformation takes the matter seriously, understanding that ideas often are a dime a dozen and execution matters more than lofty commentary. Actions have consequences. Outcomes are unpredictable and even fleeting, but regardless of win or lose, whoever owns the decision to take action owns accountability for its effect.

A company can grow, shrink, be reinvented, or become obsolete based on sometimes unpredicted and cascading ripple effects of chess moves made real. If you’ve ever carried one of these bags, you know the difference between opinions argued in a bar and making a hard call you can never completely predict.

When I read a columnist’s assessment of a complex situation and see their confident, succinct remarks on what a CEO should do at any moment in time, I wonder what audience they are targeting. Are their words just filling space on deadline, at best a form of toss-away entertainment? Are they setting a beat to reference in a subsequent story when a company doesn’t heed their wisdom to say, “I told you so?” Do they think their opinions will rally shareholders to align with their insights and lobby a company under their influence?

They know top management isn’t their audience. Top management thinks differently about opinions. If a critic is wildly wrong about something strategic, no one cares. If top management is wrong about something strategic, a lot of people care.

I often see former bosses of mine and accomplished colleagues receive such advice in publications of global note and otherwise. They don’t need this kind of advice. They are way ahead of you. They are getting advice they trust — and still carrying the bag in ways their public critics could seldom imagine.

I read a number of newspapers and newsletters on a daily business. I am always looking for insights. When a great journalist reports researched news credibly and objectively, then puts it in some form of relative or historical context, I am grateful. It helps me form opinions about tangential matters I can test in all kinds of ways.

It’s also immensely helpful when a disciplined reporter exposes lies, scams, market manipulation, and other illegal activity — all tentpoles of investigative journalism. When John Carreyrou shined a bright light on Theranos in the Wall Street Journal, he provided a public service. Eyes on hidden crime are noble, particularly the bravest voices who endure their own criticism until proven accurate.

When instead a lazier writer suggests the headline, “The list of X things this troubled CEO must do now,” I turn the page. If I could, I would hand that individual a bag and tell them to come back when their sales quota was met. I’m sure they would reject that notion as unrealistic and irrelevant, not their job. That would make my point.

There are many ways to be humbled, nothing quite so much as an unanticipated outcome. When you don’t get what you thought you would, you’re still left holding the bag — until you’re not. That’s the difference between an offered opinion and a real decision. One fades away and is forgotten instantly. The other is reality.

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Photo: Pexels

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Big League Debuts

I get choked up when a baseball player makes his first official appearance in an MLB game. When I say choked up, I mean I viscerally feel what is taking place on the field. I was in Dodger Stadium when Dustin May first pitched. I recently watched Gavin Stone and Bobby Miller do the same on television with no less emotion running through me.

Those first starts are the culmination of endless sacrifice, physical preparation, and mental resets. There are so few positions available in professional sports it is almost ludicrous to bet one’s future on it. When I see young ballplayers walking onto an MLB field for the first time, usually with their families in the stands on very short notice, I feel a sense of awe and trepidation. A lifetime of dreams can continue for years after that debut, or possibly end right there on an underwhelming performance and a flight back to a playing field a tenth in size.

The power of hope and the threat of failure are all at once alive in a single and unrepeatable moment. I struggle to find the words to convey the meaning of that spotlight and the unknown future it presents as a test, but seeing that ballplayer suited up for the first time and given a spot on the roster by a manager is always in my eyes volcanic.

Then there are the veterans who perform even better late in their careers than they did when they first came up. Clayton Kershaw won his 200th game this season, becoming only the third Dodger to achieve that milestone, reaching an achievement shared with just 96 players in MLB history. I’d like to tell you Kershaw’s debut clearly foreshadowed the legendary career ahead of him, but five weeks after his first MLB game, he was sent back to the minors for fine-tuning. That’s when he recommitted to getting back in The Show and proving he belonged on a big league roster. Nothing could stop him from realizing his potential. He has worked hard every day of his career.

Why does talent reaching the launching point of potential bring me to stunned silence?

The why is as simple as I can say it: I revere talent.

You might have guessed, this isn’t just about baseball. All talent climbing to the apex of a focal point is forever for me an uncanny unveiling. A launch in the majors is not the real start of a career, that happened back in grade school, then again in high school, then again in the draft, and any number of games won or lost along the way in each leg of a player’s journey. Walking onto a big league stadium field for the first time in uniform and on the official roster is a moment of recognition, an entry in a time capsule that isolates a key reward point. It is real to the individual and a metaphor to all who are watching it in real time.

When talent sees the spotlight, when one person’s dream becomes reality, we all can look inside ourselves and see the shape of our dreams.

Talent is such an overused, even abused term. Talent is precious. It’s part nature and part nurture. When it reveals itself, the world breathes differently. At least I do.

There are all kinds of talent: sports talent, artistic talent, design talent, scientific talent, leadership talent, mentoring talent, teaching talent, parenting talent — you name something difficult to do, and if you see someone doing it better than a lot of others, it likely involves talent.

Some start with more natural ability than others but when we see talent at work it is seldom a lightning strike or an accident. Behind the realization of talent is a regimen of development that calls upon all the same forms of dedication and commitment evidenced in the training of athletes. I don’t believe it’s different for doctors, dancers, or poets, perhaps just less visible to the unsuspecting.

I often hear business people talk about the war for talent. That phrase troubles me. Filling jobs is not a war for talent. Creating an opportunity that attracts talent to unlock its potential is not a war at all. If your company is doing work of significance and someone with talent becomes aware of that opportunity, the fit will become natural. That is precisely the scenario where one plus one equals three, five, or ten.

Plug real talent into an ordinary opportunity and little exciting is likely to happen. Attempt the impossible with ordinary applicants and equally little is likely to happen. Marry real talent to real opportunity and the sky is the limit. That to me is the power of talent. That is why I revere talent.

I have been blessed over the past four decades to work beside a number of individuals who quietly changed the world through their talent. Some were gifted beyond imagination. Some just worked harder than all those who thought they wanted to compete with them. Most of their names you will never know, but they were game-changers in my life and the many seemingly impossible hurdles we crossed together. They weren’t just good. They were as good at what they do as Clayton Kershaw is at what he does.

When you are in the company of talent, almost nothing seems impossible.

Bobby Miller won his first three games and then encountered reality and lost a huge one. Gavin Stone at the moment is back in the minors. Their talent remains unquestionable, but how it will reveal itself fully won’t be known for a long time, Neither will debut again, but those debut dates will be memorialized on the scoreboard every time they appear in their active careers.

You had a debut and so did I, maybe not tied to a specific date, but close enough to remember the circumstances. We will watch others do the same. The inspiration of seeing talent emerge is unlimited in scope. When you see the next young ballplayer walk onto the field in that brilliant moment of emergence, remember the applause you offer is your own moment of celebration.

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Photo: The Author at Dodger Stadium, Miller’s Home Debut