In 1998, I relinquished my position as Intel’s CEO after eleven years in the job. I did this as part of a normal succession process. I have always regarded preparing for succession to be part of a manager’s job and have often stated that belief. Now I could do no less than what I expected others to do.
For a number of years, there had been a growing consensus among members of Intel’s board of directors about my probable successor. We had often discussed this choice and consequently, over the years, moved the person whom we were considering into positions of increasing responsibility. My change of status was widely expected, both inside and outside the company. I continue to hold the job of chairman, go to work every day and participate in many of the same activities as before. Still, I knew that there would be a difference, and that the difference would grow in time.
As career changes go, this was a mild one, as mild as they come. But it still made me think about the millions of career changes that occur each year around us. Some of them are as natural as mine, but many more occur in adverse circumstances. Consider this: According to some statistics, 1998 will have seen a trillion dollars’ worth of merger and acquisition activities. That trillion-dollar figure signifies changes in corporate structure employing perhaps a million people.
There are other forces at work today that further alter the work environment. The Internet tidal wave that I described in Chapter 9 has grown and accelerated, increasingly affecting the way a large number of companies do business. It destroys existing business methods and creates new ones. Many jobs get shaken up in the process.
The year 1998 saw the momentum of the Asian economies go from fast-forward to reverse. Those countries fueled economic growth all over the world with their appetite for new products and services. The repercussion of the changes brought about by the Asian economies’ sudden stalling-out has affected an untold number of careers in Asia and the rest of the world.
Clearly, if environmental changes beget strategic inflection points for companies, they do so even more for the careers of the employees of those companies.
Nor are environmental changes the only ones that precipitate upheavals in individual careers. The desire for a different lifestyle, or the fatigue that sets in after many years of doing a stressful job, can cause people to re-evaluate their needs and wants, and can build to a force as powerful as any that comes from the external environment. Put another way, your internal thinking and feeling machinery is as much a part of your environment as an employee as your external situation. Major changes in either can affect your work life.
Are there any lessons from how corporations handle cataclysmic change that can be applied to individual careers?
I have long held that each person, whether he is an employee or self-employed, is like an individual business. Your career is literally your business, and you are its CEO. Just like the CEO of a large corporation, you must respond to market forces, head off competitors, take advantage of complementors and be alert to the possibility that what you are doing can be done in a different way. It is your responsibility to protect your career from harm and to position yourself to benefit from changes in the operating environment.
As environmental conditions change, as they inevitably will, the trajectory of this business of one undergoes a familiar curve, reaching a defining point where the action of the CEO, i.e., you, determines whether your career path bounces upward or accelerates into a decline. In other words, you face a career inflection point.
Just as a strategic inflection point marks a crisis point for a business, a career inflection point results from a subtle but profound shift in the operating environment, where the future of your career will be determined by the actions you take in response. While those actions will not necessarily introduce an immediate discontinuity into your career, their impact will unleash forces that, in time, will have a lasting and significant effect. As we have seen, a strategic inflection point reflects a wrenching moment in the life of a company, but the effort of navigating through it is spread around among members of a community. Career inflection points are even more intense for an individual because everything rests on his or her shoulders.
Career inflection points are commonplace. A story comes to mind. It so happens that it was related to me by a business journalist who had interviewed me when this book was first published. This man used to be a banker. He was happily and productively employed until one day he went to work and learned that his employer had been acquired by another, larger bank. In short order he was out of a job. He decided to change careers and become a stockbroker. He knew that he would have to pay his dues. While he was comfortable with financial matters, he knew that a banker’s skills are not the same as those required of a stockbroker. So he went to stockbroker school and eventually started working as a full-fledged broker.
For a while, things went well and the future looked promising. However, a short time before we met, on-line brokerage firms started to appear. Several of this man’s clients left him, preferring to do their business with low-cost on-line firms. The handwriting was on the wall.
This time, our man decided to make his move early. He had always had an interest in, and aptitude for, writing. Building on the financial knowledge that he had first acquired as a banker, and that was reinforced during his stint as a stockbroker, he found himself a job as a business journalist, a less lucrative position but one less likely to be replaced by technology. At the time we met, his career was in ascendancy. The transition this time was not as traumatic, mainly because he initiated it in his own time, unlike the previous time, when the change was initiated for him by outside circumstances.
A lot of the elements involved in dealing with strategic inflection points are at play here, too. The most important—and the most difficult—is to be alert to changes in your environment. When you work inside an organization, you’re often sheltered from a lot of things going on in the world at large that are relevant to the health of the business you work for. When you got this job, even though deep down you knew it was unlikely to be what you would do for the rest of your work life, you may very well have tacitly relinquished responsibility for your welfare to your employer. But by taking your eyes off the environment in which your company operates, like the CEO of a large organization, you too may be the last to know of potential changes that could have an impact on your career.
How do you get around that?
Tune your alarm system to be more alert to potential strategic inflection points in businesses like yours. Go through a mental fire drill in anticipation of the time when you may have a real fire on your hands. Simply put, be a little paranoid about your career.
Put yourself in the shoes of the CEO of a large company. You must open up your mind to outside views and stimuli. Read the newspapers. Attend industry conferences. Network with your colleagues in other companies. You may hear anecdotal descriptions of changes that may be relevant to you before they add up to a cogent trend. Listen to chatter from colleagues and friends.
In a corporation, the helpful Cassandras would be the frontline employees who sense potential changes first and bring early tidings of strategic inflection points to the CEO. In the case of a career inflection point, the Cassandras are likely to be concerned friends or family members who work in a different industry or competitive environment and deduce winds of change that you don’t sense yet. Perhaps they have already been bounced around by a wave of change that’s coming your way. Or perhaps they’ve experienced a career inflection point in their own industry and have a lesson to impart, even if they’re not in your line of work.
When different sources—newspaper stories, industry scuttlebutt and company gossip—and your Cassandras all reinforce each other, it is really time to sit up and take notice.
Put yourself in the picture. Ask yourself a series of questions:
The existence of career inflection points is best analyzed by conducting a vigorous debate with sympathetic associates. You need to cultivate the habit of constantly questioning your work situation. By examining the tacit assumptions underlying your daily work, you will hone your ability to recognize and analyze change. In other words, get into the habit of conducting an internal debate about your work environment with yourself.
As with strategic inflection points of the business kind, success in navigating a career inflection point depends on a sense of timing. Are you picking up on the portents that something may be changing? Have you already anticipated a change and prepared for it? Or are you waiting until the signs are incontrovertibly clear before you make your move?
The stages of dealing with a career inflection point, if anything, are even more emotion-laden than with inflection points affecting a company. Little wonder; after all, you are likely to have invested a lot in getting your career to where it is. More important, you’ve invested your hopes in the further upward trajectory of your career. As signs appear that the curvature is shifting downward, your whole being will work at trying to deny that this is so.
Often you’ll be tempted to believe that because of your particular individual excellence, you’ll be exempt from the change. You’ll think, “It may happen to others but not to me.” This is a dangerous conceit. It’s the equivalent of the “inertia of success” that dogs companies which have done well. Career inflection points caused by a change in the environment do not distinguish between the qualities of the people that they dislodge by their force.
History offers plenty of examples. In early nineteenth-century England, the increasing use of mechanized looms made woven cloth so much more cheaply than by traditional manual means that an entire class of craftsmen, both expert and mediocre weavers, lost their independent livelihoods and were forced to work as unskilled laborers in the mills. The rise of the automobile threw harnessmakers, both good and bad, out of work. Today, small farmers are struggling to retain their economic viability against competition from agricultural conglomerates. No one is immune to these environmental changes, no matter how skilled and how invulnerable he or she may feel.
Denial can come from two wholly different sources. If you’ve been very successful in your career, the inertia of success may keep you from recognizing danger. If you’ve just been hanging on, fear of change and fear of giving up whatever you have achieved may contribute to your reluctance to recognize the situation. Either way, denial will cost you time and cause you to miss the optimal moment for action at or near the inflection point.
As in managing businesses, it is rare that people make career calls early. Most of the time, as you look back, you will wish you had made the change earlier. In reality, a change made under the benign bubble of an existing job, when things are still going well, will be far less wrenching than the same change made once your career has started its decline.
Furthermore, if you are among the first to take advantage of a career inflection point, you are likely to find the best pick of the opportunities in your new activity. Simply put, the early bird gets the worm; latecomers will get only the leftovers.
The time period from an early sense of foreboding to a career inflection point is valuable. Just as athletes get in shape for competition, this is your time to get in shape for change. Picture yourself in different roles. Read about these roles. Talk to people who are in them. Ask yourself questions about them. Conduct a dialogue with yourself about how you suit those roles. Train your brain in preparation for the big change.
Experimentation is a key way to prepare for change. The banker/stockbroker started on his transition to business journalism while he was still employed as a stockbroker. This served several purposes. He dusted off his writing skills, tested the feasibility and practicality of his future change and established contact with potential sources of business before giving up on his main source of income. In doing so, he verified that he could plausibly make a living by writing if he devoted himself to it full-time.
Experimentation can take different forms. It can be moonlighting on a second job, as in this case. It can be going back to school part-time. Or it can be by asking your current employer for a new and entirely different assignment. All are ways to explore new directions for your career and get you ready for a career inflection point.
As you experiment, avoid random motion. Don’t just take blind steps in directions whose only common characteristic is that they are different from what you are presently doing. Guide yourself by your knowledge and understanding of the nature of the changes that are upon you; in this way, the experimentation propels you forward in a direction that gets you out of the way of those changes. Look for something that allows you to use your knowledge or skills in a position that’s more immune to the wave of changes you have spotted. (Better yet, look for a job that takes advantage of the changes in the first place. Go with the flow rather than fight it.)
It is very important to visualize what you want to achieve before you start to traverse the career equivalent of the valley of death. Ask yourself another set of questions:
Remember the incident I described in Chapter 8, when our then-chairman, Gordon Moore, made a comment to the effect that if we were to change from a semiconductor company to a microprocessor company, half of our management would have to become software types. That observation captured the essence of a strategic change in the workings of the company that, in turn, precipitated career inflection points for quite a few people, including myself. But it also gave us an idea of, if not a role model for, what we would have to learn and how we would have to change.
Much as conducting a dialogue with yourself will help clarify the existence of a career inflection point, an ongoing dialogue about the nature of the future you are headed into will help focus your efforts and allow you to move forward in a number of small, consistent steps rather than in a cataclysmic leap forced on you by the external world.
There are two things that will help you get through the career valley: clarity and conviction. Clarity refers to a tangible and precise view of where you’re heading with your career: knowing what you’d like your career to be as well as knowing what you’d like your career not to be. Conviction refers to your determination to get across this career valley and emerge on the other side in a position that meets the criteria you have determined.
When a corporation crosses the valley of death involved in navigating a strategic inflection point, the CEO is called upon to describe a clear vision of the new industry map and provide the leadership to get the organization across this valley. As CEO of your own career, you will have to supply both the vision and commitment yourself. Both are daunting. Arriving at the clarity of direction through a dialogue with yourself and maintaining your conviction when you wake up in the middle of the night filled with doubts are both tough. Yet you have no choice. Inaction will leave you in a position where the action will be forced upon you.
As a single individual, you have just one career. Your best chance to succeed in a career inflection point is to take control of it with full focus and energy, and with no wavering.
You have to steel yourself to recognize that it will take a while before you rebuild your career support system, experience and confidence to the same level that you had before. Part of the support system you will miss is the identity—a brand—your employer gave you. Whether you join another company or go out on your own, you have to let go of one identity and build a new one. This takes effort and time, and most certainly will test your courage. But it will also give you a sense of independence and self-confidence, which will help you in dealing with the inevitable next career inflection point.
Going through a career inflection point is not an easy process. It is not without many dangers. It calls upon all your best resources. It calls upon your understanding of the new world that you wish to become part of, your determination to take control of your career, your ability to adapt your skills to that new world and your resolve as you deal with the fear and anxiety of change.
It’s a bit like emigrating to a new country. You pack up and leave an environment you’re familiar with, where you know the language, the culture, the people, and where you’ve been able to predict how things, both good and bad, happen. You move to a new land with new habits, a new language and a new set of dangers and uncertainties.
At times like this, looking back may be tempting, but it’s terribly counterproductive. Don’t bemoan the way things were. They will never be that way again. Pour your energy, every bit of it, into adapting to your new world, into learning the skills you need to prosper in it and into shaping it around you. Whereas the old land presented limited opportunity or none at all, the new land enables you to have a future whose rewards are worth all the risks.