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Dad has a saying (many, actually) that goes:

Some people claim that they have 30 years of experience, when in actuality they’ve just experienced the first year thirty times, one after another.

That thought scares me. I can’t imagine anything worse than the sticky mire of unending stagnation, and non-improvement. I suppose some people find comfort in routine and regularity; while I can appreciate those things too, I place a higher premium on my own continual development and improvement.

I’m sure that simple experience can be very instructive. As the saying goes, “Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its students”.

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Very interesting map of the USA, with each state’s name replaced by a country with a similarly sized GDP.

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Like many people in their mid-twenties, I’m grappling with a career change. I know that I need to switch fields; that’s a no-brainer. But to which field should I be switching? And what guarantee do I have that the new career will be an improvement? Heavy stuff, definitely not the kind to approach by yourself, if you can avoid it.

I went to my learned sister Kara, who’s never at a loss to dispense advice. She loaned me a copy of Richard Nelson Bolles’ seminal book on the topic of job-hunting and career-changing, What Color is my Parachute? It’s a great book, very practical, useful, and witty. He has some fabulous advice on any job-searching topic you can imagine, and his website contains some interesting supplementary articles.

“To thine own self be true”

One of the things I like about Parachute is that he lays out a systematic, methodical approach to changing careers. Rather than diving into a premature dissertation on the best resume fonts available, he begins with a fundamental self-evaluation process. This is based on Bolles’ strong belief that everyone contains a unique and invaluable set of skills, traits, and interests. Where they intersect indicates an individual’s best career path (or paths!). This process of self-awareness and stocktaking is called the Flower Exercise (I might have chosen a different name). It begins with a sub-exercise used to identify your Favorite Transferable Skills.

Mad Skills

First you create a rough list of every skill you can legitimately claim. This is done by writing seven short stories, each describing something you have done in your life. Each story must start with a goal, something you wanted to accomplish. It must also have an obstacle you needed to overcome. You then write a step-by-step narrative of how you proceeded, followed by a description of the result (quantified, if possible).

Next you analyze each story for the Transferable Skills you used. To make this easier, Bolles had created a hierarchy of Transferable Skills. It contains nearly 70 skills, divided into three categories: Physical, Mental, and Interpersonal. They progress from being highly prescribed (”Serving, Taking Instructions, Helping”) to very discretionary (”Mentoring” and “Negotiating”).

You have now created what amounts to a random statistical sampling of you life experience, and the Transferable Skills they have called upon you to use. Some of them you may not have enjoyed using, and some may not be your greatest talents, but they encapsulate a rough description of your core competencies. They are part of what makes your contribution to the workplace truly unique.

Once you have a tally of your Transferable Skills, you strike off those that you don’t enjoy, or that only appeared infrequently.

Next you must prioritize your Transferable Skills. Bolles has created a grid that simplifies this process. You list each of your skills on a chart, and compare it to each other skill, one at a time. Each time, you pose the question, “If I could only use one of these two skills, A or B, for the rest of my life, which would I rather it be?” Each time you choose a skill, it receives one point.

After you’re finished making your comparisons, rank and each skill based on the number of points it received, and re-order the list. You just systematically prioritized your list of Favorite Transferable Skills. Would the Dead Poets Society approve of this method? Probably not, but consider the possibility for human error engendered by the use of naked intuition. Is the process mind-numbing, time consuming, and soulless? Yes. Does it ensure that you get a thorough, objective picture of your preferences? You betcha.

“Come Mr.Tally-man!” My Prioritizing-Process

I’m a big fan of Dead Poets Society. I’m not such a big of manually crunching numbers. Perhaps it’s necessary, but it’s also boring beyond comprehension. After a while, my eyes begin glazing over, and my brain starts begging for the opportunity to do something more interesting. Twenty minutes after trying to do the Prioritizing Grid by hand, I knew there had to be a better way. Heeding Peter Drucker’s First Element of Effective Decision Making (The Effective Executive), I accepted that the problem was generic and scalable, and would be best addressed by the creation of a system.

I created an Excel document with three worksheets, each of which would be able to handle lists of different sizes: 10; 24 (a tribute to Jack Bauer); and 40. I spent about two hours, and created what seemed like a great formula for tabulating the final score of item. It didn’t work. So, I labored for another 45 minutes, and crafted an even better second version. No dice. After another hour, I realized that my algorithm was “backwards” (not sure how that happened). I corrected it, and voila!

The Proof of the Pudding

With my template document in place, I handily prioritized my Transferable Skills. I also plowed through my Favorite Subjects, which came from another of Bolles’ career-changing exercises. In fact, many other exercises from What Color is my Parachute requiring prioritization; each one was readily dispatched by my fantastic tool. Generating the formula was a bit of a task, but it’s saved me hours of heartburn and carpal tunnel.

In case you were wondering, my prioritized Favorite Transferable Skills:

1. I am a proactive, thorough, planner.
2. I am a methodical organizer.
3. My managerial style is marked by a deliberate attempt to be both decisive and supportive.
4. I’m an adept instructor, with a teaching style that is flexible and fun. I love teaching individuals, but also enjoy running larger educational events.
5. I try to remain patient when getting things done; persistence is the key to consistent results. Act in haste, repent in leisure.
6. Written communication is one of my favorite conduits for creativity. I employ a writing style that is slightly jocular, without losing its tact, professional tone.
7. I make thoughtful appraisals, and diplomatic recommendations.
8. When assessing individuals, I always strive to make evaluations incisive and objective.
9. My mind works in unusual ways, which often allows me to find unique ways to synthesize information.
10. I’m a sensitive, responsive coach.
11. When communicating to groups, I try to be commanding, succinct and personable.

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I’ve been reading Peter Drucker a lot lately. Who, you ask, is Peter Drucker? For over forty years, he has been the so-called dean of business literature in the United States. He has authored scores of books about executive effectiveness, the philosophy of management, and coined the term information economy (ring any bells?). He was one of the first so-called management consultants, a profession he began in the mid 1940s for such clients as Alfred P. Sloan. His body of work is the forerunner of more contemporary effectiveness literature such as Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and has earned him a place in the pantheon of management/professional/interpersonal thinkers such as Lao Tzu, Epictetus, Sun Tzu, et al.

According to Drucker, all problems are essentially generic in nature. But what does that actually mean, you ask? I’ll attempt to elucidate the Dean’s words with a rather mundane example: let’s say that you own a particularly difficult toaster. Each and every morning, you put two pieces of cinnamon raison bread into its slots. You then offer up a prayer to the toast gods, that they may choose to spare your breakfast this morning. However, after several minute of tense waiting, the toaster spits out your offering like an angry volcano. And why does this happen? The reason, dear reader, is painfully obvious: with some crucial piece of the toaster’s mechanism malfunctioning, any bread you put into it will be similarly reduced to nuclear ash. This issue is generic, because we can generalize that any other toaster which contains the same set of malfunctioning components will become a toast destroyer.

Where are we going with this, you ask? Drucker, in his attempt to spell out the critical characteristics of an effective executive, declares that anyone worthy of the name must be capable of making good decisions. Furthermore, any capable of methodically making good decisions must first understand that all problems are have a broad, generic base. Good decision makers don’t make many decisions; rather, they focus their intellectual energies on the core of the issue at hand, and make monumental decisions that address the problems core. They may go back to their previous decisions and make numerous small adjustments as their understanding of the issue evolves, but these are analogous to the course corrections of a cargo ship on the Pacific Ocean bound for Hong Kong that must plot a new course around a storm. The destination hasn’t changed, although the tactics to get their alter with the introduction of new information.

Drucker appears to be in good company: Aristotle states in the first book of his Metaphysics that knowledge of everything belongs to the man who can understand the universals. Universals, he continues, are the broad generalities that encompass all individual events and occurrences in our universe. What makes them the true gauge of wisdom? They lie below the surface, many layers of abstraction removed from the visible world of our senses, and hence require the greatest level of intellectual power to comprehend.

I’ve read several of Drucker’s books, and Covey’s as well. Like anyone reading effectiveness literature, I do this because I see holes in the armor of my own “effectiveness”, and want desperately find some sort of caulk that will plug them. Being human, however, I understand that this is ultimately too much to ask. That’s what I like about Drucker (and Covey to a certain extent): they embrace the realities of life that most decisions are fated to be wrong, that many projects are doomed to go awry. The best we can do is develop a methodical approach to addressing problems that is based on the understanding that issues are best addressed with universal principals. Like Voltaire’s Candide, all we can do is cultivate our gardens and do the best we know.

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