Robert J. McGovern - Bring Your a Game: The 10 Career Secrets of the High Achiever

Before I begin giving you advice about your career, its only fair that I tell you a bit about mine. In 1983, the summer after I graduated college, I embarked on a year-long training program to become a sales engineer with the Hewlett-Packard Company at their Palo Alto, California campus. To say that I was feeling inferior is a huge understatement. The name tags worn by the other students confirmed my worst fears: almost everyone in the class was from a prestigious school like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or Berkeley. Hewlett-Packard has long been affiliated with top-tier schools; their corporate headquarters are on Stanfords campus. I, on the other end of the spectrum, had just graduated from a public university with an undergraduate degree in business administration, and I was sure I was the token state school kid in the class. I only made it there for one reason: I was a co-op student at IBM during my senior year and had gained experience working with computers. HP was trying to transform itself into a computer company, and there were few of us around back then who had actual hands-on experience.

All of my fears were amplified as I sat in the auditorium. Waiting for the class to begin, I observed that many people seemed to know each other. It was my first lesson in the old boys network. The second lesson came during the first presenters talk. He made an off-hand joke about UC Berkeley engineers clearly he was one of the Stanford guysthat drew raves from his fellow alumni. In the back of my mind, I was saying a private prayer that they wouldnt be collecting SAT scores.

Throughout the first week of training it was clear that these were special people; they dressed better, studied more efficiently, asked better questions, and even paid attention better than any student Id shared a classroom with. If you were to make a wager on who would be successful in the class, I doubt you would have placed a bet on me. These were some of the most impressive people from the best schools in the country. It was their destiny to succeed.

Your bet would have paid off handsomely during the next few years as we launched our careers. In the early-going, these prestigious alumni connections and contacts helped them find plum positionswhich meant better exposure, which led to a faster start. And then a funny thing started to happen. An invisible force seemed to even things out. Their auspicious starts were no more promising than mine.

When I look back and think about my peers, friends, former employees, and contacts who were loosely in my age group, there didnt seem to be a correlation between how much ivy grew on their schools and their success. Sure, they got a great education, but something else was determining whether these people succeeded or failed in their career mission. For most of my career Ive been busy building successful teams, organizations, and businesses, and all the while this achievement gap has grown into a sort of obsession. If its not education, what makes people successful? What makes the superstar tick? Youll find those answers here, in this book.

But let me backtrack. The first eighteen years of my career went something like this. For ten years I rose through the ranks of Hewlett-Packard, both in the U.S. and Europe. From there, at the age of thirty-three, I went to work for a mid-sized software firm as general manager of a $200 million, 200-person division, where I learned how to run my own business unit without the safety net of a large corporation. I participated in the sale of that company, which went to our largest competitor, for $2 billion. At age thirty-five I started my own company, CareerBuilder, eventually employing 400 people and earning $145 million in revenues. CareerBuilder is now the Internets largest career site, with more than fifteen million visitors per month. After a seven year company-building effort, I sold CareerBuilder to two of the nations largest media companies in transactions valued at several hundred million dollars.