Connecting Strategy to My Future

MAN 4720: Final Paper Guidance

Maximum 5 singe-spaced pages

Suggestions for the Final Paper Project – Connecting Strategy to Your Future

Goal Analysis

An important step in your career strategy must be carefully and thoroughly analyzing your own goals. You obviously must decide what you want from your career before you can take any action toward getting it.

Understanding your own goals is certainly not easy, but it can be done. The best way is to discuss them with someone else, preferably someone with professional training- -a psychologist, psychiatrist, psychologically trained minister. If you feel uncomfortable about discussing your goals with a professional, try to do so with a friend or relative who is a good listener.

Another possibility is to use a technique which has been helpful in my consulting. We use a form, but the basic technique requires only a pencil, paper, and patience. Ask yourself many fairly specific questions, write down both questions and answers, study them for patterns, and then answer the “key questions”.  Do not be embarrassed or surprised if your answers appear unreasonable or inconsistent. Very few people are completely sure of what they want to do with their careers.

A few of the questions you should ask yourself are:

• If you could have any job you wanted, what job would you take?
• How important is making a lot of money to you?
• How much income do you want?
• How much income does your partner want?
• Do you really want to do executive work (not lead an executive’s life)? That is, do you want to do things by motivating, directing, and controlling other people or would you prefer a job where you worked on your own or advised people?
• In what size firm would you prefer to work?
• Would you rather work in a company where most decisions are made by individuals or by committees?
• Would you rather have a secure job or one in which you could “sink or swim”?
• Would you rather work independently in an unstructured situation or have clear guidelines from above?
• Where do you want to work and live?
• Are you willing to drop old friends as you go upward?
• How many hours a week do you want to work?
• Are youwilling to spend a lot of time away from home on company travel?
• Are you willing to relocate whenever or wherever your company directs?

There are many factors to be considered for any career choice (duties, title, income, superiors, location, firm, company travel). List the factors that are important to you and rank them in order of importance.

• What do you really want to do with your career?
• What are you going to do?

Personal Analysis (know your strength and weakness)

Analyze your assets and liabilities. You would not forecast your firm’s future without first clearly analyzing its assets and liabilities. Your career strategy should be based on the same type of analysis: you must understand the assets you have to work with and the liabilities you must overcome or compensate for.

Unfortunately, analyzing your assets and liabilities is much more difficult than analyzing those of a business. Businesses have standardized accounting procedures and assets and liabilities can be compared by stating them in dollar terms. Your assets are hard to measure and usually cannot be compared to one another. We do not know the exact value of a business degree, high intelligence, a pleasing personality, and so forth.

Although you cannot exactly assess your assets and liabilities, you can make a more accurate approximation than you have now by using the same general technique you used to analyze your goals: with or without help from another person ask yourself a large number of fairly specific questions, write down the answers, and then sort your assets and liabilities into two columns. In answering these questions compare yourself to the people with whom you are competing for jobs, raises, and promotions, not with the public (you do not compete with them anymore).

Ask questions such as:

• How intelligent are you?
• How hard do you work?
• How good are you at company politics?
• How persistent are you?
• How good a supervisor are you?
• How broad is your experience?
• How much demand is there for your talent and experience?
• How does your past success compare with your competitors?
• How good are your relationships with your superiors?
• How well do you get along with your co-workers?
• Do you have any unusual skills or knowledge?

External Analysis (know opportunity and threat)

Analyze environment. Normally the word “opportunity” refers primarily or entirely to your chances for advancement, but here we shall use it to refer to the chances to reach your goals, regardless of what these goals may be. If you want to move into top management, “opportunity” refers to your chances of doing so. If you want to start your own company, so be it.  If you want a lower pressure job, or one with more satisfying work, more regular hours, less company travel, “opportunity” refers to your chances for reaching these goals.

You need to understand the growth, profitability, and opportunities in your firm and industry, and the possibilities of your present job and other jobs to which you can transfer. Many of you, if not most, already have positions when you graduate and those are a great starting point for this exercise – or the analysis you need to do to accomplish it.  Ask yourself and others, even those in your future employer, questions such as:

• How rapidly is your industry growing?
• How profitable is your industry compared to other industries?
• How well does your industry pay compared to other industries?
• How does your firm’s growth rate compare to the industry’s?
• How do your company’s profits compare to the industry average?
• How well does your company pay?
• How much agreement is there between your goals and values and official and unofficial company policies and practices?
• How highly is your unit valued by the top management of your company?
• How many people have moved upward from your unit or your present job to higher’ management?
• Is your boss promotable?
• Do your superiors regard you as promotable?
• How many important people do you normally contact at your job?
• How much has your income increased since you are in the firm?
• How many real promotions have you had?
• How high do you think you have a reasonable chance of going in your firm?

Long-Range Career Planning

Plan your career. Although these analyses are very time-consuming and even annoying, they make it possible to do something that very few people ever really do. They make it possible for you to plan your career, to decide where you are going and how you are going to get there. Most people do not plan their careers; they take a job because it looks good and then inertia takes over. They may stay at the job long after they should have quit, or change jobs prematurely or for irrational reasons, and they rarely have an overall concept of-where they are going and how they are going to get there. They therefore are not really successful (if we define success in terms of satisfying all of their goals, not just their monetary and advancement goals). You can avoid this experience by using these analyses to plan your career.

The first step in planning a career is obviously a long-term goal. Where do you want to end up, ultimately? Do you really want to be a CEO or president or the United States, now that you know what it costs to be either one? There are two basic parts of an effective vision: First is a “Guiding Philosophy” — a set of core values and principles like the Declaration of Independence. Second is a bold mission, or what Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) like to call a BHAG — a big, hairy, audacious goal — like our national goal in the ’60s to go to the moon by the end of the decade.

Five guiding criteria for good BHAGs is that they:

1. Are set with understanding, not bravado.
2. Fit squarely in the three circles of (a) what you are deeply passionate about (including your core values and purpose), (b) what drives your economic logic, and (c) what differentiates you (what you can be the best in the world at).
3. Have a long-time frame—10 to 30 years.
4. Are clear, compelling, and easy to grasp.
5. Directly reflect your core values and core purpose.

Once the long-term goal (or goals) is set, you have to establish intermediate-term goals. If you want to be president, what jobs will you have to take first to get there and when do you have to get these jobs? What training do you need? What political connections do you need? Then you have to set up an orderly plan for obtaining the connections and training that you need, and getting into these steppingstone jobs?

Finally, you need to establish short-term goals to clearly fit into a coherent plan for your entire career (seems like staging and pacing are relevant here). Your next job (if you are now a fairly young person) should be picked not only for its salary or for its opportunities for advancement, but for its chances to provide you with the training and connections you need to reach your long-term goals. The job which is superficially attractive to you because it has a high salary, or offers the opportunity for immediate advancement, or is located in a desirable place, may be a mistake from the standpoint of your long-term career.

Note that the planning strategy I advocate here is exactly the opposite of the strategy that most people follow (if it can be called a strategy). Most people do not plan further ahead than their next job (if they plan their career at all). They take a job because it looks attractive, and then they see what they can do with it. I advocate looking as far into the future as you can and deciding where you want to end up and what steps lead to it. In that way, your life and your career fit into some intelligent plan, and you are in control of your own life.

You will find it useful to keep a weekly record related to your learning and experiences as the course evolves.  Your entries may include, for example, key new concepts or ideas from a case discussion that led to a new perspective; a particular reading that had significant impact; or a new sensitivity to other people’s ideas that came about as a result of hearing something from another person or insights into your own beliefs and behavior.  It is also appropriate to document how your learning in MAN 4720 has influenced your understanding of functional courses like finance, accounting, or marketing.