Seeing Around Corners

by Rita McGrath

  Many people invest in other kinds of assessments to get a sense of how they might better prepare themselves for the future. Among the more popular are 360-degree assessments, so called because they gather input from people whom you directly report to, those who are your peers, and those whom you might supervise (hence a 360-degree view). I do recommend going through whatever feedback you receive with a coach, if possible. Some people even create a personal “board of directors” to whom they look for advice and inspiration as they contemplate their next moves.

  Get out of the Building and Talk to the Future That Is Happening Now

  Just as Steve Blank says that “there are no answers in the building” for the entrepreneurs he advises, there aren’t going to be many insights about your future in the same tried-and-true places where you typically spend time. In the same way that Gisbert Rühl tried—and failed—to get inspiration for digital transformation at corporate headquarters, it’s very hard to see around the next corner for yourself without introducing some sort of new and challenging thinking. It’s also unlikely that your normal surroundings are going to expose you to where the future that’s just not evenly distributed yet is already happening.

  You need to develop a fresh perspective. Fortunately, there are any number of ways to do that. You might attend a conference of an industry that isn’t directly related to what you do all day. Events such as the Digital Dozen competition at Frank Rose’s Digital Storytelling Lab can be incredibly eye-opening (see Chapter 1). Local universities often host seminars and lectures that are open to the public. Even joining a club based on an interest of yours can expose you to people you wouldn’t normally run across. And, of course, courses on topics you find personally interesting can provide the seeds of new ideas.

  Scenarios and Leading Indicators for Yourself

  The process I described in Chapter 2 for creating future scenarios and time zero events can be very useful on a personal level as well. It’s worth asking what a future scenario might hold as you make pivotal decisions about what steps you want to take next. Even asking about the key uncertainties in your own life can be a valuable exercise to explore. What you might learn is that even if there is nothing particularly wrong with how your future looks, you might consider a change that could bring even greater opportunities.

  This was a big part of Julie Sweet’s journey from working at a top-tier law firm to becoming Accenture’s CEO for North America. She was working at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, was one of the top attorneys there, and had enjoyed considerable success. And yet, she was beginning to feel as if she wasn’t going to fulfill her potential by staying in the same role she currently had. So she left. As she has said, “If you can see your future, then you probably are not challenging yourself enough. I have this little plaque that my husband hung on our wall at home. It says, ‘If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.’” She now cites “curiosity” as one of the most significant traits she looks for in the people she hires.

  Preparing to Navigate

  Just as an organization succeeds best when it builds its capability to address inflection points before it is absolutely necessary, you can succeed when you learn to look around corners in your own life. As Tom Kolditz will tell you, the time to get resources in the bank is before you desperately need them.

  The Winding Path of Successful Careers

  In the world of traditional careers (think Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate, who was told that his future lay in plastics), the dominant assumption was that we would climb a very linear ladder to the top and advance up a hierarchy. Today, of course, the assumptions in that type of career planning are often simply not relevant. Instead, we are much more likely to be facing career paths that have us moving in and out of what Reid Hoffman has called “tours of duty.”

  In other words, rather than thinking of a lifetime of advancement in a single organization, we are likely to be working in situations in which a team of people with the right skills and abilities are pulled together to accomplish a specific outcome, and then they are disbanded when that outcome has been achieved. This, in fact, is the way that some industries (think motion pictures) and some companies (think large consulting firms) already work.

  How we construct careers in such an environment, with frequent inflection points changing what we need to be doing, is not always clear. One interesting conclusion from research done using LinkedIn data is that those who rise to the top often accumulate diverse skills and show an ability to learn about areas they are not comfortable with. Indeed, Marc Andreessen, the well-known inventor, investor, and venture capitalist, has gone so far as to call this capability the “secret formula to becoming a C.E.O.” The most successful corporate leaders, he wrote, “are almost never the best product visionaries, or the best salespeople, or the best marketing people, or the best finance people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25 percent in some set of those skills, and then all of a sudden they’re qualified to actually run something important.”

  The implications of this insight, based on a study of 459,000 people, are several. First, most of those who made it to senior-level positions started in jobs that required solving complex problems and having multiple skill sets, rather than more straightforward jobs that leaned on one set of skills. Second, the people who were willing to take on these different career roles also tended to be those who were willing to take on the modest risk of being somewhat incompetent and to get help from those around them. Finally, opportunities for what the researchers call “hybrid jobs” are on the rise. Organizations are looking for team members with more than one specialization or skill.

  So, if you’ve been in your comfort zone doing the same thing for a while, it might be worth considering how to take on some kind of new role that could teach you a lot. Julie Sweet, for instance, after joining Accenture, had to learn how to be a general manager, a very different set of skills than she needed to be a partner in a major law firm.

  Bricolage

  In art or literature, “bricolage” means to assemble a diverse range of things to create something new. Increasingly, having a successful career involves different combinations of skills that come together in sometimes unexpected ways.

  A great example of this is the career of my colleague and collaborator Ryan McManus, whose thinking on digital transformation I mentioned in Chapter 5. When McManus went to the University of Iowa for his undergraduate degree, he had, as many of us did, “a very limited idea of what I wanted to do.” After some time there, though, he realized that he wanted to somehow gain international experience and have an international career. As he says now, the idea came to him while he was standing on a street corner in Iowa City, and that decision became a driver for many subsequent choices. While at Iowa, he also had the chance to study in the world-class Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he found to be rewarding. He imagined a future as some kind of creative worker.

  With a desire to do something about gaining international exposure, he ended up spending a year abroad, in Paris. To make that happen, he had to major in French (in which he had limited experience at that point). Arriving in Paris, he was plunged into an overwhelmingly challenging situation at the Sorbonne. Without fluency in French, he faced entirely French-based classes and was assigned rather sophisticated French novels to read. Eventually, he mastered enough of the language to get by, and then eventually he became fluent.

  McManus graduated as valedictorian of his class at Iowa and was hired by a large global accounting firm to help coordinate global marketing functions, a role for which his experience in Paris and his French communications skills had inadvertently prepared him. The next big inflection point he participated in was the advent of the Internet and digitization. He started working on projects that included building digital properties for the firm and went on to create entirely new digital businesses with new business models. This added competency in digitization to his portfolio. (As we saw earlier, digital first showed up in a s
ignificant way in the marketing side of organizational life.) Clearly, McManus was sensing that the digital revolution was something that was coming in the near future, something that he could see around the corner.

  Next, he decided that it was perhaps time to hone his business capabilities, so he earned an executive MBA at the University of Chicago. He then joined Accenture and added a new skill—strategic direction—to his portfolio. At that point, he had a major “Aha!” moment during a conversation with one of the high-level consultants there. As he told me, the consultant observed that “in many of our business strategy conversations with our clients, they are asking us about technology, and in many of our technical conversations, clients are asking us how this connects to business strategy. The light went on immediately, and I realized, We have to build a practice at the intersection of these things.” That led to his leading the development of Accenture’s digital transformation strategy business.

  As the digital revolution went through several evolutionary stages, beginning with what was easy (digital books, for example) and progressing to more complex activities (such as automating business models), McManus realized that there was going to be a sea change in how companies operated and he wanted to have a hands-on role in that development. He left Accenture to join a fifty-person startup in the Internet of Things space, where, as he described it, “you had the opportunity to work directly with all of the company’s teams, across multiple areas of development.” Today, he has a broad portfolio of activities, including advisory roles, Internet startups, and board service, all of which have built on the unlikely capabilities he put together previously. He told me that he is still extraordinarily motivated by learning: “My career has always included an element of what I could learn and help to build next.”

  Generate Options

  One reason that people can get stuck in their personal situations is that they feel it is too risky to make a big bet on a speculative next step for themselves. That may well be true, but remember that building skills and capabilities does not have to mean abandoning everything you know and starting from scratch. Just as I would advise corporations, I tell people to build up options for the future without taking big, risky bets.

  An option is a small investment that buys you the right, but not the obligation, to make a choice in the future. Often, when we are thinking about what we want to do personally, we don’t spend enough time generating new and fresh options, experimenting with them, and learning what they have to teach us. Just as McManus’s experiences generated choices that proved to be hugely valuable as his career evolved, you can invest in choices that expand the opportunities you may find later on.

  A useful way to think about this is to apply the principles of design thinking to your choices, as Paula Davis-Laack found when she felt she had arrived at a dead end in her job as a high-powered lawyer. Today, she is a professional life coach and helps people address issues around burnout.

  The first step in any design challenge is to specify the problem you are trying to solve and the constraints that you will be operating under. In the case of your own career, you might couch the challenge in terms of a question such as “How might I find something I would love to do next at work?” or “How will I best take advantage of this trend that I’m seeing?”

  Notice, we’re just framing the problem here, not yet jumping to solutions. Add any constraints that you need to bear in mind—financial, locational, family, or others. Don’t let those get too overwhelming, but do include them, as they can be creativity triggers later. Good designers will tell you that constraints are incredibly valuable, as they shape the context for design decisions and also challenge you to find ways around them.

  The next step in design is observation. Since you are doing this for yourself, it’s very much worth considering what activities you find rewarding, fun, or exciting.

  The third step is to generate some ideas about what kinds of options you might want to take out and what your assumptions about those are. Davis-Laack realized she had failed to articulate and test her assumptions when she quit her job and took an internship as a pastry chef. She hated every minute of it. That sent her back to step two to figure out what kinds of things she really enjoyed doing. She developed what she calls “the list”—qualities that she felt were positive about previous experiences, whether work related or not.

  Designers at this point will often create prototypes—sometimes many prototypes—in order to test their assumptions. Obviously, you’re not going to build something to represent your future self, but you can start having conversations about it. Just as Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg did with Flatiron, don’t be afraid to talk to people who have roles that you think might reflect the ones on your own list. In my case, for instance, before committing to get a PhD, I spoke with dozens of people who had academic jobs to see if that would be a suitable career for me to make a long-term commitment to. Yes, you may well find that a number of potential options aren’t of interest to you. But you also may start to uncover other ideas that could be viable.

  This is the personal equivalent of running experiments. You can also do things such as see if you can shadow someone at work and observe what the environment is like. You can test several ideas until one or more start to gel for you. Getting buy-in from your stakeholders is valuable here as well. I’ve sometimes paired executives with different capabilities who take time to observe each other. Recall how Satya Nadella of Microsoft learned from observing Reed Hastings of Netflix about faster decision-making and difficult choices by becoming a Netflix Insider for a time.

  After sufficient testing and experimentation, it’s time to move into the implementation phase. That’s where you revisit the constraints, evaluate your options, and commit to any changes that you decide make sense. By following a process such as this, you won’t have to make a huge, risky bet before you feel you’ve learned enough to proceed.

  Where Are You Heading?

  A good way to start thinking about how you might orchestrate your journey through a personal inflection point is to articulate a perspective on the shape you would like your life to take at some point in the future—perhaps ten or even twenty years hence. The greater the clarity of that calling, the more helpful it can be.

  Don’t Mix Up the Destination with the Vehicle You Use to Get There

  One of the most common mistakes I see in this regard is that people sometimes become mixed up between the future state they think would be attractive to them and the vehicles they think will get them there.

  For example, one of my clients is an exceptionally hierarchy-dependent organization that is going through a massive transformation. I’ve been working on helping its leaders see how they can make necessary and timely changes to shift them toward that future. “What,” I asked one of them, “would you like to see for yourself if this all goes well?” “Oh,” he replied with confidence, “I’d like to get to be an E-band 4-level officer.” I continued to probe, asking him why he thought that would be such a great outcome and got pretty much nowhere. Regardless, he had convinced himself that this outcome would be nirvana.

  And that’s very risky. Let’s say this company merges with another, its arena collapses, a flatter management structure comes along, or some other major inflection point takes place and the whole E-band idea disappears. If that’s how you are thinking about your future state, it creates a potential vulnerability due to a lack of imagination. Instead, focus on the kinds of outcomes you’d like to surround yourself with in a future state.

  I had a similar conversation with a woman who thought her nirvana was going to be becoming a senior director of marketing. As we probed more deeply into why she envisioned that, it became clear that the reason she thought that would be a wonderful position was because it would give her creative latitude, allow her to connect with and develop other people, and give her the chance to interact with high-level decision-makers. The exercise after that was for her to envision multiple ways in which she could a
chieve those outcomes.

  This is a much less risky path. The woman could conceive of different positions in different sectors in which this would be possible. She could start her own business. She could join a creative consultancy or a not-for-profit. The point is that by framing her goals in terms of outcomes rather than positions, she opened up many more options for herself—very useful in the context of potential inflection points.

  Pursue Your Own Leadership Journey

  At Columbia Business School, we use an exercise called the Leadership Lifeline to make students’ personal and professional journeys explicit and to bring forth the unique lessons that each of us has drawn from them. We first ask individuals to reflect on the experiences that have shaped who they have become as people and to make these lessons as concrete as possible. In the many years we’ve done this, no one’s journey has ever been a straight path. What this exercise can do for you is illustrate and pinpoint where and how you’ve leveraged inflection point building blocks to create opportunities in your life.

  Traversing inflection points leads to unique experiences. Connecting to others in an authentic and genuine way can provide an enormous impetus for making it through the challenges of navigating an inflection point. One useful exercise is to consider and document your journey. The goal is to reflect on the patterns you’ve seen in your life, so that you can better recognize and build on similar patterns in the future. This is a general process that I have found helpful—feel free to elaborate or adjust as you see fit.