Business and Career Mastery - NeoStrategy - Page 2

“Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?” -Benjamin Franklin

On one occasion during my time as an account manager in the US, my client asked me for a DBA (database administrator). I didn’t have one, but I had a Java developer. So I tried to sell this person to my client, telling him how great he was, and how he could do DBA work as well. Finally, my client said jokingly: “Kishore, don’t try to fit Circles into Squares and Squares into Circles”.

I have never forgotten this phrase. The idea it conveys is very relevant to career selection and growth. If you try to fit even the most talented person into the wrong role, both the person and the work will suffer. If your career or your specific role within an organization does not match your core strengths, then it will just be a drag. But can you just imagine by how much? Think of how much of a visibly negative impact the wrong person has as the leader of a company or even a country. Then imagine the opposite- the right person in the right role. How many examples can you think of, of either type of situation? It is no different at a corporate. The right people will bring in exponentially greater returns for their work.

But how can you find your real talents and strengths? Most often you will know what they are based on gut instincts. In fact, life too has a way of showing you what you are good at. The main issue with this is that very often people confuse skills with talents. Skills come with practice. Talents are inherent. When you apply your talents to something, you get the highest returns with minimal efforts. A good sign that something is a talent is that you’ll find yourself wanting to use it more and more. Fortunately, now there are many scientifically-based assessments and tools available to find your core talents. You may have heard of tools like DISC, MBTI (Myers–Briggs Type Indicator) and Gallup’s StrengthsFinder. You could explore any tool you like. My personal favorite is the StrengthsFinder assessment as it has helped me identify my innate strengths with great detail and accuracy. Based on the insights generated by the use of these tools, even large organizations are transforming into “Strengths-Based Organizations”. Regardless of whether you are at the entry level or at a senior level in your organization, it will be of great benefit to you to know your core talents. This is really the key building block.

Strengths based individuals —> Strengths based organizations —> Strengths based nation

“Your love for your country is only in your work.” -Sudhir Mishra

What is the big deal, really, if you live with your accidental career and not pursue an addictive career? Life will still continue, right? The truth is that it will, but it will significantly impact the quality of your life and diminish how fulfilled you feel, how much you achieve and the impact you make on society. Apart from your personal wellbeing, it will also dramatically impact your nation’s progress and its economy.

I’m not personally very patriotic because I think it is just the combined feelings of pride, belonging and security on a large scale. It makes sense from the survival perspective which is OK. But suppose you are very passionate about your country and want to contribute to its progress, have you thought about how what you do will really contribute to your country’s development? What do you think is the best way to make a difference? Most often, we complain and crib, blaming politics, corruption, colonialism, etc. We think if we got rid of those problems, our country would be among the most developed. But in my view, we can transform any nation if the majority of its people get into addictive careers. Imagine if we had a 1000 Ambanis, Tendulkars, Modis, Rajamoulis, etc. Can you imagine how rapid and transformational our growth would be?

Why do you think that the US or any other advanced country has made significant progress? Do you think they are better because they have more natural resources or are blessed with some special powers? What do you think? I think it all boils down to freedom- the freedom of individuals to choose addictive careers. Period. Progress will naturally follow if you have even 10% (or far lesser!) of the population in addictive careers.

The bottom line is that pursuing an addictive career is good not just for you, but for your entire country. If you are patriotic, then instead of just talking about political issues, focus on getting into an addictive career.

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” -Confucius

How do people choose their careers? They might do so based on personal interests or skills, market demands, pay prospects, parents’ or others’ influence, family professional culture (as in business, doctor or lawyer families), etc. Unless you have a very good understanding of the career you want to pursue, picking one is very much a gamble and will later inevitably require adjustments or compromise. This is what happens when you fall into what I call an “accidental career”.

The closest analogy to this is an arranged marriage. In arranged marriages you or your parents find someone who looks suitable, you get married to them and then leave your fate to probability. You will end up with a suitable partner if you are very lucky person. If not, then you may get used to your not-so-suitable partner through various adjustments, and eventually get locked in the marriage due to obligations. If you get so frustrated that you feel like leaving your partner, but are afraid to take that step, you will continue half- or rather empty-heartedly. You will leave your partner only if the relationship is unbearable, no matter the obligations.

This is exactly how it is with accidental careers. The lucky few fall into the right career after a couple of tries, but the majority go through the cycle of adjustments and frustrations. If you get very frustrated, then you look for alternatives, but if you are afraid or have too many obligations, you are forced to continue. The result of this is an unfulfilling career and mediocre achievement.

Going back to the analogy of marriage, how do you think love marriages fare? At least here you would have made a conscious decision based on your preferences, values, etc. Hopefully you would have dated for a long enough period before marriage. You would know the other person to some extent. Hence the chances of good mutual understanding and a fulfilling life are higher. Similarly, if you select a career about which you feel passionately, you will probably continue to feel that passion, through ups and downs, for the rest of your career. This is the reason why almost every successful person, in every field, says that they feel great passion for what they do. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have be able to get the results they did. In fact, if you heard their life stories, you would say that most of these people are obsessed with what they do. This is the magic of pursuing what I call an “addictive career”. Addictive careers are highly rewarding and fuel outstanding achievement.

The point is not to get you to think about the relative advantages or disadvantages of arranged and love marriages. It is to get you to question yourself if you are living with an accidental career or leading with an addictive career. In the game of careers, the most important step is to understand the kind of career you currently have.

“A career path is rarely a path at all. A more interesting life is usual a more crooked, winding path of missteps, luck and vigorous work. It is almost always a clumsy balance between the things you try to make happen and the things that happen to you.” -Tom Freston

What is a career? I only knew about jobs. It was only after I’d spent a couple of years in my career that I began to understand what it was. Why is your career important? The obvious answers are that good ones give you money, recognition, the approval of society, etc. But for me, it is very important because your career is where you will end up spending the majority of your, happy or grumbling, active life.

This is why it is very important to understand the background and foreground elements of the career game. As the Indian economy grows, just like with other developing countries, more and more people will enter the corporate sector. Many factors come into the picture for a corporate aspirant such as career selection, planning, growth, exits and re-entries, power plays, etc. But did you know about these aspects before taking the plunge? I definitely didn’t. More importantly, did you select your career consciously or did your parents, relatives, or some “well wishers” select your career? If you are in the wrong career for you, you can forget about the rest of the elements. They won’t make any difference.

“A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again.”  -Roy H. Williams

When you join any company, at the induction you are told how the company works, what the standard procedures and codes are, what your benefits are, etc. But no one tells you what it would take for you to become successful there.

You are so happy to have got a corporate job with a good package, that you think your battles are won and you are blindsided when the real games begin. You thought that your company would train you, then give you some projects and you would manage. Your coworkers are as clueless as you, and your family just thinks you should be content with your well-paying job in a big company. Are your college professors then to blame? Probably not, because your MBA curriculum doesn’t cover this. So if your company, your coworkers, your family and your professors are not to blame for not teaching you the formula for success, then who is? It is you! Don’t you think it is your responsibility to proactively seek this information and learn how to apply it?

The truth is every day I meet people from across the corporate world who are simply unhappy with their “great” jobs and unable to live the life they dream of. In fact, even I used to be one of those people! Thankfully for me, I realized that what I had was a problem to be solved, not an immutable destiny that was out of my control. It was up to me- not my company, my bosses, or my employees- to create my present and future. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I became very curious about exactly what was making people happy or unhappy, and successful or unsuccessful. As I started talking to more and more people at different levels in various sectors, I could see clearly the real factors that made all the difference in corporate life.

My most fundamental and interesting realization was that a corporate career is a competitive game, with some clear rules, goals, boundaries and rewards. To play it well, you not only have to be very skilled at it, but you also have to have the passion for it and a desire to win. Just like with any other game, there will some opponents and tricky situations. Don’t dismiss these as “politics” or “bad luck”, or see this all in a negative light. After all, what is politics? At some basic level, it is about conflict between different values and beliefs. In any situation involving more than one person, some conflicts will arise and there will eventually there will be the dreaded “politics”. I hear many people complaining that they should leave their jobs and go into business. But if you can’t manage office politics, how do you expect to manage anything in the real world outside tame corporate domains? Earlier, every other day I would declare that I was ready to go back to my village and do my fish business. But I knew that in business I would have to manage far more complicated issues than in any job. As some poet once said, life itself is one big game. So work on improving your scores. You’ve already taken the first step by taking this course!

Over the coming lessons, I have laid out a simple theory for success in the corporate world based on 11 ingredients that I think are key. I like to think of these 11 ingredients as the 11 players in a cricket team. All the players are valuable to the team, but the relative importance of each varies based on both the stage of the game, and on the pitch on which the game is being played. As with any game, there is a scoring system to keep track of how well you are playing, and for the game of careers I have devised an index called the Corporate Success Quotient (CSQ) where the maximum score is 100 points. You may wonder why I am introducing a scoring model. What is the use of such calculations? The point is that simply having an intellectual knowledge of something doesn’t make anyone any good at applying it. Your understanding will be deeper and your application more effective if you spend some time making observations and seeing for yourself how the scores add up.

The next time you see a person who is very successful, try to calculate their CSQ based on the guidelines in this book and you’ll realize why they are in their position. You might be surprised to find two people working equally hard, but one doing much better than the other because hard work contributes to their overall score differently. Remember that the relative importance of each factor, or each player in your team depends upon the corporate you work for, and its mission and work culture.

Even if you leave the corporate world tomorrow, you will get the most out of it today if you learn to play the game well. In fact the lessons you’ll learn will also help you play other life games much better. This is because all games, fundamentally, have the same timeless and universal human interactions at their core.

“It’s not what you achieve, it’s what you overcome. That’s what defines your career.”

-Carlton Fisk

One day several years ago, I was waiting in my office for a highly qualified employee to discuss the prospect of his joining my team. I was quite excited because he had degrees from both IIT and IIM, and his work experience suggested that he was the best-suited candidate for the position. After he came in, we started discussing his skill set, our requirements, etc. But I repeatedly got the feeling that he was answering my questions in such a way as to break the rapport I was trying to build with him. I even changed my communication style in an attempt to build an understanding with him, but nothing worked. Finally, I told him that I would get back to him, but I didn’t mean it.

After the interview, I asked a few people in private about this person. I wasn’t surprised to get negative feedback about him. This small incident played itself over in my mind and I puzzled over why such an academically brilliant person was not able to understand what was required of him to succeed in the corporate world. I began to consciously observe the people who were very successful at their corporate careers. Now, I know that you may think that everyone has their own definitions of success, and someone I may think of as “successful” may not be so from your perspective. So for the sake of having a common understanding, I will define here a successful person as someone who is able to deliver the results that their organization expects by embodying the leadership qualities that its mission deserves.

Initially, I thought I would pen my insights as blog posts or articles. However, there are many of these freely available on the Internet and none can give you a comprehensive and complete view on the subject. The same goes for the various leadership training courses and seminars commonly found on the corporate training circuit. As our economy grows, more and more corporate citizens are emerging, most of whom aren’t getting the expert guidance they are worthy of. Yet I couldn’t find any relevant books in the market that were appropriate to the Indian corporate context. I finally made this course because I felt a responsibility to share my deep expertise on strategies for success in the corporate world, and also because I wished someone had gifted me this when I started out.

“Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.” -Katherine Whitehorn

This class is not just any other boring course, but a gift of my most earnest and heartfelt advice. Thank you for accepting it. I am not a seasoned writer, but what I’ve written is the time-tested wisdom I’ve gained from 20 years of survival in the corporate world. Why do I speak of “survival”? I could say “experience”, “exposure”, or “challenges and successes” instead. But the truth is that the corporate career is a game where you may only thrive, survive, or lose depending on how well you play. No one told me this when I started and I had to learn the rules the hard way, over time.

Since you’ve chosen to read this, I’m assuming that you either want to be a better corporate citizen or are aspiring to be a great corporate leader. I hope I can teach you to play at your greatest potential, and at the very least, avoid making the mistakes that most other people make. As you read the rest of the lessons, you might find things that you already knew or sub-consciously agreed with. Maybe you’ll even disagree with other things. Regardless of this or your level of experience, you will improve your corporate awareness quotient significantly. I can even guarantee that if you consider my advice with an open mind, and practice what you learn with patience and courage, you will come out on top.