Joel A. Garfinkle - Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level

Praise for Getting Ahead

So many executives I know are always looking for ways to take their careers to the next level. Joel Garfinkle shows them how in Getting Ahead . By focusing on three key aspectsperception, visibility, and influencethis book presents a compelling case for what an executive needs to do to become a more credible leader. Each chapter ends with handy summary steps that readers can put into gear for themselves. Getting Ahead is a welcome read for anyone seeking to advance his or her career.

John Baldoni
Author of Lead Your Boss:
The Subtle Art of Managing Up

Getting Ahead delivers. Definitely providing a step-up and step-ahead perspective on how to make a difference and get recognized for doing so, it is full of practical ideas and applications for managing a career without the customary politics and b.s.! This book is an enjoyable and fresh read with a lot of interesting examples.

Barry Z. Posner, PhD
Professor of leadership at Santa Clara University
Coauthor of The Leadership Challenge, Credibility,
and The Truth about Leadership

The book is chock-full of quotes, cases, ideas, and tools. Anyone who wants to get ahead will find this book thorough, well written, easy to read, and quickly applicable.

Dave Ulrich
Coauthor of The Why of Work
Professor, Ross School of Business,
University of Michigan

Joel Garfinkle offers smart strategies to stand out from the crowdwhich is extremely important if you want to build an influential network and move forward quickly in your career. He wraps the strategy in riveting stories and offers practical advice. I like this book.

Keith Ferrazzi
Author of Who's Got Your Back and Never Eat Alone

This book provides tremendous insight into who you are and how you can have a bigger impact on those around you. If you're really serious about boosting your career, reading Getting Ahead will be one of the best moves you can make.

Sydney Finkelstein
Professor, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College
Author of the best seller Why Smart Executives Fail

Getting Ahead is a book that will help you manage your career. Joel Garfinkle provides practical, actionable ideas you can use to get ahead. The book delivers on its promise.

Mark Sanborn
Author of The Fred Factor and
You Don't Need a Title to Be a Leader

Good ambition is a great asset. This book helps you put that ambition to work.

Jim Champy
Coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation

Getting Ahead breaks down success into three profoundly simple principles to systematically and pragmatically elevate your career. Joel Garfinkle gives you the tools to be an exceptional difference maker and value creator in our complex, dynamic world.

Kevin Cashman
Best-selling author of Leadership from the Inside Out
and Awakening the Leader Within

In this insightful book, Joel Garfinkle provides his brilliant PVI model to help you gain the competitive advantage needed in today's marketplace.

Jon Gordon
Best-selling author of The Energy Bus and Soup

Getting Ahead is a must-have resource to accelerate and advance as a global leader. The powerful three-step process clearly outlines what a leader must do to maximize his or her potential. It provides practical advice for leadership development and is a must read.

Phil Harkins
CEO, Linkage, Inc.

Getting Ahead lays out, in very straightforward terms, a simple and practical model that leaders can use to seize the reins of their own careers while identifying and supporting the essential development of their employees.

Beverly Kaye
Coauthor of Love 'Em or Lose 'Em

Copyright 2011 by Joel Garfinkle. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN: 978-0-470-91587-5 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-118-11675-3 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-118-11676-0 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-118-11677-7 (ebk)

To my beloved wife Jueli,

From every human being there rises a light that reaches straight to heaven. And when two souls that are destined to be together find each other, their streams of light flow together and a single, brighter light goes forth from their united being.

The Baal Shem Tov

Foreword

In Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level, Joel Garfinkle hits upon three significant and important aspects of leadershipperception, visibility, and influence. Like Joel, I stress developing perception or taking control of how others see you (your reputation) and exerting your influence no matter what level you are at in the organization (effectively influencing up) as an integral part of my own leadership philosophy.

With this book, Joel takes us on an incredible learning journey in his exploration of taking control of how others see usor our reputation. Our reputation, what other people think we've done lately, is basically a scorecard kept about us by others. It's when our coworkers, customers, friends, and sometimes strangers grade our performanceand report their opinions to the rest of the world. Although you can't take total control of your reputation, there's a lot you can do to maintain and improve it. Joel explores this concept to its fullest here in Getting Ahead.

Another fascinating aspect of leadership explored in Getting Ahead is exerting influence in the organizationno matter what level you are at! Peter Drucker once said, The great majority of people tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors owe them and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they should have. As a result they render themselves ineffectual. The fact of the matter is, though, that every decision is made by the person who has the power to make that decisionthis is not necessarily the right person or the smartest person or the best personand this is something with which we all must make peace. Making peace with this fact will inevitably help you do a much better job of influencing decision makers, which will, along with all of the teachings you'll learn in this book, help you to convert your good ideas into meaningful action.