A young manager, with about five years of experience, once came to me for advice. A year ago, he had moved to a factory after four years at the corporate office. Within a year of moving to the factory, he heard that his earlier boss in the corporate office was leaving, and the company wanted him to come back and take up that role. He was not sure what to do. He had spent just one year at the factory, but the more senior corporate role that was being offered to him ahead of time was tempting. Should he stay in the factory and complete his foundation-building there or should he take the more senior corporate role, which provided a promotion and more senior management exposure?
This is the kind of question people often face in their careers in the first halves. The challenge they face is that there are no clear principles laid out on how to take such decisions. And in the absence of such principles, people most often choose higher promotions, higher pay and whatever makes them feel more successful in their careers then and there. In the previous chapter, we established the need for focusing on foundation-building in the first half, which becomes the catalyst for success in the second half. The question is, what are the principles of foundation-building, and how can one help people make career decisions keeping the catalyst of foundation-building in mind?
There are a set of three career management principles which, if you adopt in your first half, can easily catalyse foundation-building for the second half. These three principles that I strongly advocate are: focus on depth over width, complete major learning cycles and get out there when you can.
The first career management principle for foundation-building is ‘depth over width’. In my judgement, depth in a few things in the first half of your career is much better for building the foundation than width in many things. I say that because depth builds skills, while width primarily builds knowledge and information. I believe that in the era we are in, it is primarily skills and capabilities that determine long-term success. Knowledge has become universal and accessible and is no longer the driver of long-term success.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. A lot of people in the early stages of their careers get to do front-line jobs. Let’s assume there are two people, Amit and Vijay, who spend three years in front-line sales. Amit spends the three years in the same city managing the same product lines and accounts while Vijay spends the three years in three different cities, one year in each. Vijay gains a lot of knowledge and information. He finds out how the market is different in different cities, how the product lines that sell in each city are different and how the retailers of each city behave somewhat differently from those in other cities. He picks up a much higher width of information and knowledge. Amit, on the other hand, acquires the knowledge of only one city, and hence has less width of information and knowledge compared to Vijay. However, Amit, by virtue of having spent three years in depth in the same city, builds better skills and capabilities. E.g. Amit, in the second and third year, will be able to assess and learn from the impact of what he did in the first year. He will be able to see what worked well and what did not in subsequent years. That understanding allows him to build the experience algorithm, and if he can use TMRR in a disciplined way, then the algorithm-building is even stronger. Compare that to Vijay, who, because he is not in the same city the next year, cannot assess the impact of what he did in the previous year and hence cannot build the same quality of algorithm. What happens when these two people get to the second halves of their careers? Vijay, who spent time in three different cities, gets to the second half with a lot of information and knowledge, but not a strong experience algorithm, while Amit gets to the second half with less knowledge and information, but with a stronger algorithm. And what drives success in the second half is the quality of the algorithm you come with. Knowledge is easily available, information can easily be found in this Internet era, and it is not a prerequisite for success in the second half. In fact, too much knowledge can be a barrier at times, as knowledge and information is continuously changing, and if you are a prisoner of past knowledge, then you are not able to accept new knowledge and information easily. What you would rather have in your second half is the foundational skills and the experience algorithm that gives you the ability to analyse and deal with any knowledge pool that you have to face.
The other difference that develops between Amit and Vijay is the skill of capturing high-hanging fruit. I have always believed that the first year of any job you do is the easiest year for two reasons. One, there are typically low expectations in the first year, and hence it is easier to meet them. The other reason is that in the first year, one can have success by finding low-hanging fruit. In any situation in a new job, it is relatively easy to find something that is not working well or something that is an obvious thing to do, basically low-hanging fruit, and focusing on that makes you successful. However, if you do the same job for three years, it becomes difficult to find low-hanging fruit in the second and third years, which means perforce one has to become skilled and experienced at finding high-hanging fruit and in plucking it, solving problems for it and creating value. Now imagine a person who, in the first half of his or her career, has done many jobs, each for brief periods, and so has primarily learnt only to find and solve for low-hanging fruit. When such a person gets to the second half, where success does not come easy, where, to be successful, you have to be able to find high-hanging fruit and solve problems for it, they are not able to do it. They have never built the skill required for that, a classic case of not building the foundation in the first half for success in the second half.
So it is very important, in your first half, to focus on depth in career management. Manage your career so that you get relatively long periods in roles and you acquire significant depth in some functional areas—which enables skill and algorithm-building—for these are the foundations you need to build to catalyse success in the second half of your career. Equally, do not fall into the trap of chasing width in the first half of your career. The need to be in the rat race, the need to feel continuously successful, can often push you to making career decisions where you experience a lot of width, many jobs, many companies, many cities and many functions. This will build a lot of knowledge, but unfortunately, this is unlikely to be effective in the foundational skill and algorithm-building that you require. Such people feel hyper-successful in the first half, they feel they are ahead in the rat race, and then get to the second half and get a shock. They have simply not built the algorithm and skills to succeed there, and the rat race comes to a stop.
The second principle of career management in the first half deals with how you manage learning cycles. There are two key things to manage to ensure that your career benefits from learning cycles.
Starting with the first, in my judgement, the experience algorithmic benefit of full learning cycles is many times higher than that of many half cycles. Going through two half learning cycles is not equal to one full learning cycle. E.g. let’s say in a new product learning cycle, you learn how to spot the opportunity and develop the brief, do product development and testing, and then you change roles or jobs. Then with another new product, you learn how to build a launch strategy, launch in the market, ask for feedback and take corrective action. On paper, you have experienced the full product learning cycle, but in two halves. Experiencing a learning cycle in two halves is significantly less effective than experiencing a full learning cycle end-to-end in one go. The reason for this is in how it aids algorithm-building. If you participate in two half learning cycles, you might learn all the activities concerning that process and initiative, but you do not get to understand how the decisions you made in the first half of the learning cycle worked out. You do not get the opportunity to apply TMRR in a holistic way, and hence you significantly reduce the algorithm-building. If you find that your career decisions are repeatedly making you experience several incomplete learning cycles, then you are risking failure in the second half of your career.
Having established that, it would be impossible in your career to complete every single learning cycle you have the opportunity to be a part of. You would have to leave midway as you change roles or move along in your career. So while the preferred situation is to achieve the completion of all learning cycles, the question is, if you do have to exit midway, then what is the key guideline? My advice is to never walk out of a major learning cycle in your career. Overall, you will experience many cycles in a long career. However, among all those cycles, there would be only a few major learning cycles. Major learning cycles are those which are career-defining, those that have the greatest impact on building your algorithm. I feel most people get the opportunity for about 4–5 major learning cycles in their entire career of about forty years. These few major learning cycles are often what determine a person’s future success. One of the great skills of career management is to recognize when you are in a major learning cycle, and then to be sure that you do not make a career choice that hampers the completion of the said learning cycle. Sometimes, in the first half of your career, you might be tempted by a promotion or a new job when you are slap bang in the middle of a major learning cycle. These are the toughest career decisions to make. My advice remains—when in the first half of your career, always favour what drives real individual growth, always favour completing the major learning cycle.
Sometimes people say to me, ‘I am in a major learning cycle and I want to complete it, but my organization wants me to do a new job that will result in me leaving it incomplete.’ This might happen to you too. Even when you find yourself in such a situation, I am of the view that you must try to complete the major learning cycle if you are in one. Here is how I think about this situation: if you are in a major learning cycle, it also, in all probability, means that you are doing something very important and critical for the business. It is highly unlikely that you are in a major learning cycle doing something that is unimportant to the business. Hence, it should be possible to have conversations with your managers and leaders in which you tell them that you want to complete the learning cycle and in the process also want to make sure that you complete the critical initiative for the company. Most companies are reasonable, they will actually appreciate somebody having such a viewpoint, and I am sure they will more than make up in the future for the opportunity that you let go now. So when you are in a major learning cycle, try your best to complete it. There are very few major learning cycle opportunities and they are too precious to be missed.
In a career spanning twenty-five years, while I have experienced many learning cycles, there have only been four major learning cycles. I want to describe some of them for the benefit of the readers. It was in my first company, Asian Paints, that I experienced two major learning cycles in about a decade. The first was early on, when I was a brand/product manager. It was a cycle in which I spent over three years at a go, learning the fundamentals of marketing, something that has stood me in good stead all my life. Most people at an early career stage like that do not spend three years in one role. I did, and it was a major learning cycle for me. I resisted the temptation to keep seeking change, and I had a mentor who helped me make the right choices at that stage. The second major learning cycle for me was when I was fortunate to be made part of an end-to-end organization transformation project, working along with a consulting company. The project lasted six months, possibly the most enlightening six months of my career, but the learning cycle lasted over three years. During these three years, many of the recommendations from the project stage were implemented, and I could continuously add to my algorithm by understanding what we did in the project stage was working and what was not. In hindsight, I think I made a poor career choice after those three years as I was still in a super zone of learning, but was tempted by a bigger salary and title from another company. I feel that if I had done one more year in that learning cycle, I would have built an even better experience algorithm for myself. I probably got only 75 per cent of the value from that cycle. The next learning cycle was when I joined a new company in a turnaround situation. The business was not performing well when I joined, and there were many days when I felt it was a hopeless situation and that it was taking too much effort for no return. Yet, with some persistence, I stayed there for four years, effected a successful turnaround and, in the process, experienced one of my major learning cycles. It taught me how to turn around an underperforming business, how to deal with adversity and how to motivate people in difficult situations. My next major learning cycle was when I made a cross-functional move from being a business leader all my life to being the HR head for Cadbury India. This cycle involved learning an entirely new space and then creating value. I did it for three years and saw the value being created, understood which of my business skills mattered in HR and, most importantly, gave myself enough time so that the theoretical aspects of HR actually penetrated the practical aspects of my leadership style and changed me as a leader. The greatest impact of a major learning cycle is when it changes you as a human being, and I gave myself enough time and opportunity in that learning cycle to see myself change.
The third principle for me is getting out there when you can. One of the key foundational elements of career management is building business understanding from the trenches, not from the ivory towers. It is vital in the first half to spend enough time in the trenches. This could be in front-line sales facing customers, in factories or in highly transaction-intensive operational roles. This could mean spending time in challenging locations that are not idyllic to live in. Much like how you can’t become an effective general leading an army if you don’t have an understanding of what happens in the trenches, you can’t become an effective senior leader if you don’t understand the nuts and bolts of how business happens. The critical thing is to try and do as much of this as you can in the first half of your career, preferably the first quarter of your career. That’s because there are more operational nuts-and-bolts roles available at that stage. It is difficult to get to twenty years’ experience, realize that you have not done your time in the trenches and then find a role suitable for doing that at that level of seniority. Equally, life stage and personal preferences also play a role; early in their careers, people have greater flexibility to choose locations that might be more challenging to live in, roles that are more operational and time-intensive, than at a later life stage, where other priorities might come in. Success in the second half is often a function of being able to understand and relate to what is happening in the bowels of the business, the challenges in the trenches and how the strategy that you are developing will actually work where it matters—out there. If you have not been out there in the foundational stage of your career, then you are not going to be able to leverage this understanding when you need it in the second half. When you look back at your first half, you must be able to see that some of the time you spent there was like annealing steel in a furnace—challenging and intense. If it has been a comfortable ride all the time, it is possibly an indicator that you have not got out there yet.
A personal annealing, ‘out there’ experience for me was right after my MBA, during my first year at Asian Paints. I was out there in Jaipur as a trainee. Right in the first month, the godown keeper had an exigency and the godown was unmanned. Since the crucial festival season was ahead, I was asked to manage the godown for the next few months. Here I was, an MBA from a premier business school counting boxes in a godown, making sure it matched what was in the invoices and everything that had to be dispatched for the day was sent out before I went home. One might ask, was there any foundation-building experience in counting boxes? I can assure you there was. I figured out in those four months that a lot of people who design boxes have probably not spent enough time counting boxes in godowns. The markings on the boxes often made it challenging to pick the right ones, and the batch numbers and dates did not make FIFO easy. Some products never sold in full boxes, which meant that every box had to be opened, which meant the count of items in each box was not planned well. I could go on and on, but to put it simply, in the many years that followed and the many boxes I designed in my career, I always kept that godown in mind. I knew what it took to work in the godown—the trenches, so to say.
So these, then, are my three principles for foundation-building in the first half—favour depth over width, complete major learning cycles and get out there when you can. The basis of these principles comes down to being clear that the objective of career management in the first half is foundation-building for the second half, as opposed to success in the first half.
One way of checking if you are making foundation-building decisions is to ask this question: how would your career decisions in the first half be different if the objective was success in the first half, instead of foundation-building for the second half? In many cases, the career decisions required for success in the first half and foundation-building for the second half might coincide. These are the easy decisions to make. The challenge is when you come across a situation—the kind I described at the beginning of this chapter where a young manager had to choose between continuing in the factory and taking the promotion at the corporate office—where the career decision you have to make to maximize success in the first half is at odds with what will be good for foundation-building for the second half. My exhortation to you, dear readers, is please prioritize foundation-building for the second half. Don’t get tempted by low-hanging fruit, by the allure of looking successful early in your career. It will not really be important by the time you hang up your boots. Make decisions based on what will lead to real individual growth, what will improve your experience algorithm and what will drive foundation-building. When in doubt, adhere to the principles—favour depth over width, complete major learning cycles when you are in them and get out there when you can.