Top executives attribute a higher percentage of their success to luck than do middle managers. I think they must be accurate in their assessments. Talent and drive and hard work are like seeds on the ground; no matter how good those seeds are they need a little rain from above. They need a break from forces they can’t control.
Luck is an odd force in the world. Luck is not random. Luck can be prepared for. It can be pushed a little. If the soil in one place is not right, move your seeds. If it doesn’t rain this year, eat from your stores and prepare for next year. Almost all agrarian societies have some kind of rain dance, or rain ceremony, because they believe luck can be lobbied. The best way to lobby luck is to be ready for its arrival.
For example, it tends to rain at the same time each year, more or less. If you anticipate luck, like a farmer anticipates rain, and have your seeds in the ground on time, you will be ready for it to rain. Luck rewards those who prepare. It is not random in its effect. As a careerist I once interviewed told me: “The more prepared I get, the luckier I am.” You need the right mix of prepared and lucky, methodical and nimble, and luck will be kind to you.
In my own assessment of career progression, luck, also known as chance, plays a huge part in actual careers. We are all, perhaps, too enamored of the whole concept of career planning: I’ll do this, then I’ll get that training, and I’ll qualify to do that, leading to an opportunity as.… We especially drill this into our college seniors and young MBAs. Plan your work, and work your plan. Know where you’re going. Don’t just jump off the diving board without thoroughly researching the water in the pool. Be careful! Fear risk! Assess your odds!
But you can plan only so much—sometimes things just happen. In fact, people who methodically follow their plans, no matter what, won’t get very far. You don’t become a corporate officer before age forty by being safe, conservative, methodical, and plodding. Whenever you see a thirty-four-year-old officer, you know she didn’t get there by sticking to her original plan!
As they say in the Marines, sometimes you have to improvise.
So how do you factor luck into career planning?
We have spent most of this book working up the case for career planning. You need to take care of your skillset. You need to constantly learn and evolve. You need to see, admit, and compensate for your weaknesses. Let us now focus on the rest of the equation: being lucky and nimble.
Chutzpah from a Banker: James G.
“When I was twenty-three years old, the director of the marketing department at a small regional bank had just departed, and his function was in disarray. I had been with the bank less than a year. I just walked in to the president’s office and said, “I want this. I can do this.” He said, “Be careful what you ask for!” So at the ripe old age of twenty-three, I was put in charge of a staff of twenty-five and a million-dollar budget. Maybe he thought I’d fail, but instead my career took off like a rocket. I had friends with fancier jobs, but within a couple years I was way ahead of them. You gotta ask to get, that’s what I say. That’s what my father taught me.
“Why do people get passed over? The opposite of chutzpah, I suppose, is timidity. And that’s not a personality characteristic that sells.
If every time you face three choices, you take the least risky and most defensible, well that gets noticed if it’s a pattern.
“Also—and this is a biggie—I call it the hygiene factor. There’s the obvious part of this, the spinach salad rule: never eat a spinach salad for an interview because you’ll have green teeth. But it is bigger than clothes and manners and going out to dinner and that type of thing. It also includes whether you are inarticulate, if your written work is an embarrassment, if your physical presentation is not crisp, if in your professional life there’s a lack of discipline and work. Nobody wants to associate with someone whose work and work habits do not reflect the image they want to have associated with their company.
“So, in short, being too conservative and risk averse, and being sloppy, are why people get passed over.
“H.R. people are the last people who know who should be promoted and why. You go where the hurt is and talk to the people closest to the problem, people responsible for actual work. Forget about H.R. You’ve got to ask for what you want. No one’s going to come looking for you.”
Don’t Be Afraid to Fail
Whether you like it or not there’s no such thing as a low-risk career. Loyal plodders are laid off along with star performers, so you may as well go for it! Five years after he graduated from college, Bobby J. oversaw a $4 billion budget and 23,000 employees as secretary of the department of health and hospitals for the State of Louisiana. He definitely didn’t get there by playing it safe. Here’s what he has to say: “Don’t be afraid to fail. Too often we aim for the middle because we don’t want to deal with spectacular success or failure. But we can only stretch ourselves by aiming for things that we don’t know if we can do. It’s too easy to settle into a comfortable, stable job. But if you don’t take risks when you’re young and have the ability to adapt, you’re not going to take them later, when you really need to.
Careerists—those who have intentional careers rather than a series of jobs—plan deeper than regular people. They position themselves for success in the future. They develop their skillsets, meet the right people, and accumulate the right mix of diverse experiences to advance up the org chart. But how far ahead, really, can you plan?
Anyone who is not looking two positions ahead is not looking far enough. For a fast-track careerist, that’s somewhere between two and five years. So that’s the near horizon for a thoughtful person. But what’s the far horizon?
It seems pretty clear to me that the career-planning horizon is no more than twenty years. After that, you’re dealing with mostly fiction and fantasy. Think about it. The Internet is less than twenty years old. Bill Gates started the software industry and became the richest man in the world in less than twenty years. All the information you would use for planning is probably going to change anyway over any twenty-year span. We are poised on revolutions in biotech, nanotech, geopolitics, the environment, and religion that will change everything we know and believe within this coming twenty years.
Your job may become obsolete. Laws may change, destroying your market. Your industry may move offshore. Public tastes may change, eliminating a need for your services altogether. I used to have a boss who was fond of telling all his employees, “You can be replaced by a button.” His point was that no one was indispensable, but in time maybe some of those old jobs will, literally, be replaced by a button.
Look as deep as you can, five to ten years at least, but know that around twenty years, all bets will be off.
Opportunity is all around us, all the time. You just have to learn to see it.
My father was a serial entrepreneur. He could make more money on a street corner than most people could with a whole store. During the Korean War, when he was on leave in Seoul, he noticed that every soldier who got off the plane had to have one of those little rectangular shoulder bags that used to be called airline bags. But instead of buying his bag from a vendor for $2, he bought his airline bag for a pack of cigarettes from a soldier headed back from leave. Airline bags were de rigueur for leave, but they had no value whatsoever on the front lines, where cigarettes were the currency.
My father spent most of his leave in the airport, buying airline bags for packs of cigarettes and selling them for $2 apiece. He threw in a few recommendations for free about where to go in Seoul.
After the war, he started several companies, none of which grew particularly big, but all of which were fun and sold for a profit. My father made money seemingly just by breathing. Even his hobbies and pastimes were profitable. He’s retired now, but he still cannot resist exploiting market inefficiencies.
Opportunity is all around you, but you have to be able to recognize it. One thing about opportunity, though, is that it is like an easily offended paramour. If you don’t see and appreciate her, it is like you slapped her in the face. She is gone.
You need to learn to develop contingency plans for your plans and to model multiple scenarios with more variables in play. You need to learn to pay attention to those with power and potential. If you unexpectedly gain access to people with great power or great potential, quickly develop a plan to capitalize on that contact. Learn to consider options that you had not anticipated. That’s the biggest key of all.
Things happen. I had a client who chatted up her seatmate on an airplane and ended up with a job in a new industry. She had never thought about that industry for a second before that conversation, yet it resulted in an officer-level hire. You just can’t plan for things like that.
Another client was looking for a new job because she was stuck in a dead-end division of a tech company. We had been practicing elevator speeches for her to use in networking. An elevator speech is a standard tool for jobseekers. It is what you would say to Bill Gates, or some other luminary, if he got on an elevator with you and you had about four to six floors to make your pitch. In as few words as possible, it’s who you are, what you can do, and what kind of opportunity you are looking for.
So she gets on an elevator at work and looks at the badge of the guy that got on with her, and he’s a top company officer. It was a cliché come true. She launches into her elevator speech, in an actual elevator, and he invites her to call him. She did and managed to extract one more promising assignment from this company.
ESPN analyst Doris Burke got her start in front of the cameras when an announcer didn’t show up for a men’s game. At the last minute, they grabbed her from a supporting role and placed her in front of the camera, and she was instantly a star. Did she plan that? Absolutely not.
Dick Cheney gave a graduation speech at LSU highlighting exactly this point: “On the day of my own graduation at the University of Wyoming, I had no ambition for public life.… Many of you will leave LSU today with definite plans of your own. Setting a plan for your life can be a good thing. It keeps you focused on the future and gives you a standard against which you can measure your progress. Yet I’ll wager that ten years from now, many of you will find yourselves following a very different course, all because of an opportunity that came to you out of the blue. Be on watch for those certain moments, and certain people, that come along and point you in a new direction.” That’s sage advice for all of us.
A person I interviewed for this book converted a wrong number into a promotion! Someone called him by mistake because he had a similar name to someone much more important in the company. He was friendly with the caller, and joked about this happening all the time. He managed to get a conversation going, and bang, he gets an introduction to a senior person that within a month resulted in a promotion to a new assignment. There is no way to plan for that.
Unlikely introductions are a mainstay of networking lore. A friend of mine got a job as second unit director on a movie in L.A. because he had the same dog walker as the producer. You don’t plan stuff like that—you see it and capitalize on it. So in spite of all the planning mentioned in this book, let chance play its part. See opportunity and capitalize on it, especially if it comes from an unexpected source!
Thank you very much for reading this little tome. I hope it is useful to you, and helps you get promoted again and again. Send your business stories to don@donaldasher.com. I may not be able to reply, but I promise you, I read them all. Career blessings to you,
