Reinventing You. Dorie Clark
Advance Praise for Reinventing You
“As the corporate ladder morphs into a corporate lattice, where there is no single climb toward career success but rather a multiplicity of ways to grow, personal branding becomes your calling card. Reinventing You presents effective ways to help you develop your brand proposition.”
—Cathy Benko, Vice Chairman, Deloitte LLP; best-selling author, The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work
“The days of reliable, lifelong careers—complete with pension and gold watch—are over. With Dorie Clark’s clear, practical, step-by-step approach to reinvention, the reader comes to see this fact not as daunting, but rife with opportunity and possibility. Enriched with riveting examples from the worlds of business, politics, and nonprofits, this indispensable guide will help you take control of and shape your professional life.”
—Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, author, For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families
“Necessity may still be the mother of invention, but today’s relentlessly changing world necessitates reinvention, sometimes sequential reinvention. I can think of no better guide through that daunting process than Dorie Clark’s wonderfully readable and informative book.”
—Robert Cialdini, author, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Reinventing You is a must-read for anyone who wants to expand their career horizons and become more authentic—in work and in life.”
—Chip Conley, author, Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success; founder, Joie de Vivre Hospitality, Inc.
Copyright 2013 Dorie Clark
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
First eBook Edition: April 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4221-4413-8
For my mother, Gail Clark, with love
Contents
2. Recognize Where You’re Starting
5. Develop the Skills You Need
7. Leverage Your Points of Difference
Epilogue: Make Your Reinvention Work
Appendix A: Your Professional Reinvention Self-Assessment
Appendix B: Classroom or Book Group Discussion Questions
Are you where you want to be professionally? Whether you want to advance faster at your company or change jobs or even careers, one thing is clear: no one wants to spend a lifetime doing a job they hate. To succeed in today’s competitive job market and build a career that leverages your unique passions and talent, it’s almost certain that at some point you’ll need to reinvent yourself professionally—and ensure that others recognize the powerful contribution you can make.
After all, it’s clear that the era of gold watches and lifetime employment is over. How many people do you know who are lifers at a company? For better or worse, people today skip around professionally, forced by layoffs or seeking a better title or salary. Even for those who would have wanted to make a career at one company, the options are limited. Harvard Business School Professor Thomas DeLong attributes this, in part, to a precipitous decline in professional mentorship over the past several decades. As senior executives were forced to take on increased responsibilities, they stopped making time to cultivate rising talent. The result, says DeLong, is executives who “start to be suspicious about the organization and see themselves as free agents rather than saying, ‘I can stay at this firm for the next thirty years.’” Rapid job turnover has now become standard.
Even if they stay with the same company or industry, professionals still need to reinvent themselves to keep up with the rapid pace of corporate change. “How are you adapting and approaching your next reinvention curve?” asks Steven Rice, the executive vice president of human resources at Silicon Valley powerhouse Juniper Networks, of job applicants. “How are you staying relevant and competitive? People have to reinvent themselves to fit into the new context of work.”
Amid this new landscape of frequent job and career changing, people are increasingly working later in life. Sometimes that’s due to preference, and sometimes to necessity. (Between the recession years of 2007 and 2010, the number of working Americans fifty-five and over grew by nearly 8 percent—the only group whose workforce participation rates increased.)1 As AARP’s policy director told the National Journal, “the resources they were counting on to retire just aren’t there.”2 That means even more opportunities, or requirements, to reinvent yourself over the course of your career.
The lengthening careers of baby boomers also have an impact on their kids, millennials struggling to find their way in the workforce and hitting a wall of more experienced candidates eager for the same jobs. In 2011, the percentage of employed