Are Your Career Plans Stuck In The Past?

By Barry Lenson

I recently attended a motivational talk given by an author who is very “hot” today.

The talk was a lot like others that I have attended over my three decades as a business journalist. The speaker wove in references to sports, to military life and war, and to advancing through the ranks of a corporate hierarchy.

His talk was very well received. But I noticed a few troubling realities . . .

• More than 90% of the people in the audience were men
• Very few people in the audience appeared to be age 50 or younger . . . and no one appeared to be 30 or younger

Maybe that is okay. After all, mature men deserve to hear career advice they like and can relate to. But I had to wonder whether the speaker was thinking in such outmoded ways that his ideas had no applicability to most people who are trying to achieve success in today’s world of business.

He might have been an anachronism. After all . . .

• A growing majority of today’s most successful professionals are young entrepreneurs. Are you too? For many of them, the career game plan is to launch a new app or other business, develop it quickly, sell the company, and move on. For them, concepts like dealing with a difficult boss or advancing upward through the ranks of a large, multi-layered organization are becoming irrelevant. So the message is, try to listen to career advice that fits with your plans, not with other people’s. 
• Sports analogies have less and less applicability to building a career today. Frankly, I have always wondered whether sports analogies and stories, stirring as they can be, actually offer lessons that can be applied to achieving career success. There are fundamental differences between making your vision a reality and scoring a winning goal or hitting a home run. So while the idea of winning the big game might get people excited, how much does it really have to do with achieving success today?
• New ideas and new strategies are needed to achieve success in today’s more entrepreneurial world of business. It is time to concentrate on today’s more needed skills like innovative business financing, project planning, deal-making, advanced marketing skills, marketing analytics, execution, and flexible concepts like “failing forward.” Lots of smart business thinkers today are writing and speaking about strategies like those. My question to you is, are you seeking out the right visionaries and thinking about what they have to say?
• Career insights that ignore or marginalize women are not going to cut it any longer. Powerful women entrepreneurs and executives are already achieving levels of success that exceed those of their male counterparts. And there is also the fact that for any company to succeed, it needs to cast aside covert and overt structures that relegate women to the role of second-status citizens. Companies that think only men can lead or be compensated at the highest levels are signing up to fail. Sadly, companies like those are still out there.

Think New, Achieve New Levels of Success

As Corinthians 13:11 states, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became an adult, I put away the things of a child.”

Those words seem a little harsh, and perhaps they are. But when you think about them, they could be a summons to cast aside old ways of thinking and embrace what works today.

About Barry Lenson

Barry has held senior editorial positions at the National Institute of Business Management, Boardroom Reports, and other companies. He has written and co-authored more than a dozen books.