The most important thing we’ve learned from the financial debacle and this extended recession is that the old way of career success—keep it simple, avoid trouble, and do an adequate job—is a formula for career disaster. Instead, if we intend to remain solvent and have a career future, we’re going to have to know how to expect the unexpected and be ready to deal with it.
Fortunately, there are a few pre-existing templates for success where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming: aircraft carriers, firefighting crews and nuclear power plants. Karl Weick, the eminent Michigan scholar has developed a template for all organizations that intend to be more reliable in managing the unexpected.
So how should we think about our 21st century career?
What’s especially helpful about Weick’s studies is that his research on organizations transfers to careers. The best way to achieve career success in this century is to toss out our old ideas of work security and recognize that this century is going to be highly unpredictable. Creative destruction and restructuring of businesses will be the norm. The end of the recession of 2008-2009 will not mean the end of much other than over the next few years the job market will once again pick up—at least for some of us. As President Obama has put it, some of the lost jobs will never come back.
A preoccupation with failure
One way we can learn to be mindful of the unexpected is to develop a preoccupation with failures, mostly small, but some large. There are a number of places to look.
The most obvious place to look for failure in organizations is at the interface between groups and divisions: technology and sales, sales and marketing, marketing and marketing research, marketing and manufacturing, etc.
A second place to look is on the front lines: where products and services move out the front door and where raw materials come in the back door.
A third place is at the water cooler: listen to the griping and bitching. What customer has your company lost? What’s not working very well in operations, technology, sales, finance or even management? What breakdowns have you heard about in your company? Where are the cost overruns? What unexpected managerial changes are taking place? What questions are being ignored? What kind of technical or educational demands seem to be needed?
A fourth place to watch the industry: focus on changes, technology, bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions.
I grew up in a blue-collar manufacturing family in Detroit. By the 1950s, my dad, with an accounting background, was buying a new car every two years—obsolescence was built in, and laughed about. It took years for the auto industry to recognize that other organizations would identify auto defects as an opportunity for Japan.
My mother, though nearly a college grad, was a quality inspector at the Excello Corp, responsible for the Pure-Pack machinery that put together milk cartoons, and for the Pratt-Whitney jet plane engine parts. Defects slipped through in the Pure-Pack division, but practically nothing slipped through in the Pratt-Whitney division. Lives were at stake in the jet planes. GE and Pratt-Whitney still own much of the jet engine business, but the Pure-Pack division has been impacted severely by competitors.
These failures, initially small and eventually large, have profoundly decimated careers—even those of people with significant educational background
FYI: Research shows that people tend to gather information selectively to justify their decisions and their successes. In contrast, very few tend to look for disconfirming information unless they make that a priority in their work processes.