Brian Fetherstonhaugh - The Long View: Career Strategies to Start Strong, Reach High, and Go Far

Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com

Copyright 2016 by Brian Fetherstonhaugh
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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First Diversion Books edition September 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68230-292-7

The Long View is dedicated to my wife, Chris, and my daughters, Claire and Alison. You inspire me every single day.

Jennifer, Mark, and Emily are all going to work today. Despite their many differences, they do have one thing in common: theyre all worried about their careers.

For twenty-two-year-old Jennifer, worry is mixed with anticipation. This is day one of her career. I am so excited but so freaked, she says. Ive spent fifteen years getting educated, and today its real. I cant ask my parents for advice. They have no clue what the job market is like today. Will I fit in? Will I ever find the perfect job? Will I have to jump around to get ahead?

At forty-two, Mark feels like hes reaching the peak of his career. Ive paid my dues and built some skills. Whats next? Can I do a bigger job without working longer hours and wrecking my family life?

Emily is also asking some tough questions. With her fifty-fifth birthday right around the corner, she is contemplating retiring from her big corporate job. Ive sweated for over thirty years. So many of the people I grew up with are no longer here. I dont have enough money to totally retire from work, but theres no way I am going back into the big corporate world. If thats not it, then whats next? I get bored too easily. Bridge and golf just arent going to cut it.

Jennifer, Mark and Emily are not alone. According to The Futures Companys 2015 Global Monitor survey of over 15,000 respondents in 23 countries, people in the workforce everywhere are feeling the heat. Globally, 58 percent feel strongly pressured to have a good job and career, rising to 64 percent among those 2135 years old. Across all age groups, 53 percent feel pressure to acquire new skills and improve themselves. And among the Millennial generation (approximately ages 2135), becoming a successful entrepreneur is behind only having a long and successful marriage on their list of top-ranked life goals.

The idea of what a successful career looks like is changing fast, and many people are struggling to adapt to a host of new challenges. Millennials are seeing the decline of job security. They are taught to think about The Brand of Me, but often lack the foundational skills and building blocks to succeed in the long haul. Mid-career professionals are feeling vulnerable as their jobs, industries, and entire careers face serious disruption. Those approaching traditional retirement day are finding themselves both healthier and poorer than ever before. What comes next? For much of our lives, we spend more time working than sleeping. Many of us spend more time wedded to our careers than to our spouses. Some of us could easily spend 100,000 hours of our lives at work. And when we are not doing the work, we are often worrying about it. Worrying is not going to help. Instead, lets focus our energies on understanding how these big changes are creating a new set of tools, skills, and decisions that can help people at every stage of their careers. This book is about empowering you to take action to thrive in this new landscape.

The career revolution is upon us. Employer-employee loyalty is eroding. Retirement is starting later but lasting longer. A whole new wave of career choices is emergingincluding job titles weve never seen before in industries weve never heard of. The corporate nine-to-five job has been replaced with a dizzying array of part-time, contract, job-sharing, remote, and entrepreneurial options. Career-minded people everywhere are seeking more flexibility and compatibility between their jobs and their personal lives. Job competition is coming from new quarters: from abroad, from younger people, from older people. And, increasingly, from machines.

Are you ready for the career revolution? Most people are not. We seem to have a few contradictory ideas about the nature of work. According to The Futures Company research, over 70 percent of people in the US agree with the statement my future career will be decided based on what makes me happy rather than how much money I make. But in that same research, working people revealed that the number one factor in choosing where to work is money (86 percent agree), followed by benefits (82 percent agree). Our aspirations of pursuing the work that will maximize our happiness are clashing with global economic instability. We want to dream but were afraid. The world that we know is changingfast.

We need new ways of finding jobs, and new ways to build careers that last. We need a new mind-set and a new tool kit. Not just tacticsbut robust, road-tested strategies that will equip us to survive and thrive in the new career reality. The answer isnt to throw away everything weve known, but to choose the relevant bits, give them fresh context, and combine old-school wisdom with new-school context.

I have been mentoring and teaching on the subject of career development for over two decades. It began with an internal training speech twenty years ago to my employees at Ogilvy & Mather Canada, where I was president. I did it as a bit of a larkjust to give people a change of pace from their usual company training sessionsbut I was surprised by the enthusiastic response. About ten years ago, I began lecturing at top business schools such as Yale, Columbia, NYU, McGill, and MIT Sloan. I always gave about half the lecture on my area of expertiseglobal marketingand devoted the other half to sharing my thoughts on career management. In every single case, it was the career management advice that got the biggest reaction.

For the past decade, my day job has been as CEO of a 5,000-person global marketing company called OgilvyOne Worldwide. It is the digital marketing arm of Ogilvy & Mather, one of the worlds leading advertising firms. It is a fantastic gig that comes with a very full schedule, including about 120 days of international travel every year. I started noticing that in addition to my day job, my calendar was being populated with a growing number of informal career consultations. Pretty much every week I shared breakfast, lunch, coffee, or dinner with some extremely bright and talented person seeking advice on careers. The more people I spoke with, the more I realized that I was giving out the same advicethe circumstances were all different, but the core of the challenges remained the same.

In early 2014, a colleague of mine suggested that I finally write down my long-simmering thoughts on career management. I had tons of material, gleaned from over twenty years of observing the career trajectories of thousands of professionalsfrom Fortune 500 CEOs to millennials just starting out. During a few long flights to Asia and Europe, I finally wrote up an article for FastCompany.com called Career Rocket Fuel that was later posted on LinkedIn, SlideShare, and Twitter. To my shock, it garnered over 50,000 views.

So, after twenty years, it finally dawned on me that there is a deep and growing hunger for practical modern advice on how to think about careers. Our colleges, graduate schools, and companies may teach the worlds greatest technical and business skills. But talented, smart people everywhere are still confused and frustrated because they dont know how to put all the advice, insights, and best practices together into a cohesive career plan. This doesnt surprise me at all. The world of jobs and careers is almost unrecognizable compared to just a decade ago. Many of the job-search techniques and career strategies that worked in previous generations simply dont work today. There are some great long-term principles that still hold true, but people in todays career marketplace face some unique challenges.