Reinvent Yourself

Match Values, Not Skills

Acting on instincts the way Barajas did is gutsy. She didn't know much about Activision and knew even less about whether a female lawyer would fit in with a bunch of male programmers, or whether she had any aptitude for game production. Surprisingly, most career experts report that you shouldn't worry too much about your skills when considering when and whether to make a radical change. Smart, ambitious people generally find a way to adapt and grow in new environments.

No, it's the fitting-in part that ends up being most important. "When you're trying to reinvent your career, you're not reinventing your personality," notes career consultant Marti Smye. "So it's more important to match your belief systems with your new organization than to make sure your skills are compatible. One thing that stays the same when you make a change is that you still have to go to work with people every day, and the biggest frustrations at work often result from those people having very different ideas about how the work ought to get done."

Bob Presman, however, had no idea how true this really was in the brokerage business. But he soon found out once he began comparing Smith Barney with other investment companies. "When you're a radio personality, you don't have a lot of control over your future. Stations get sold, and ad revenues fluctuate with the economy," he says. "So if I was going to become a financial consultant, I wanted to go somewhere where I would have as much control as possible. Smith Barney seemed to have the most entrepreneurial culture. I felt like the company would be working for me, not the other way around." Plus, he wanted his clients to identify as much with him as an individual as they did with his firm. Today, his assistant answers the phone by saying, "The Bob Presman Group," not "Hello, Smith Barney," and none of the higher-ups seem to mind.

While Presman did thorough research before he determined that the corporate ethos at Smith Barney represented the way he wanted to do business, it may not always take so much work to convince yourself that you've found the right organization to host your radical career change. "Magic happens," says author Bill Schaffer. "There has to be a spark between you and the person you'll be working with. If there is no enthusiasm in the air when the two of you meet for the first time, it's hard for that element of magic to emerge."

It had taken two hours, but after that first blitzkrieg of a phone call from Chris Barrott at Aurora Casket, Nancy Koors had built up a fair bit of enthusiasm for the job. "It was an opportunity to be an evangelist," she says. "Most of my friends in the Internet world thought I should seize the opportunity."

But her friends weren't going to have to answer to Barrott every day. He was the scion of a family-owned business that didn't have to please stockholders, or hire gadflies like Koors, if it didn't want to. Plus, the business operated in a hidebound industry. "In many ways, Aurora could sit still for years and operate the same way it always has," Koors says. "No other company is about to force it to completely reinvent itself."

It all came down to this: If she was an outsider hired to shake up a slow-moving organization, could the company really tolerate her over the long haul? Koors spent a week searching for clues. "I went and found Aurora's Web site. It was horrible, but I was impressed that there was one," she says. "I talked to funeral-home directors about the company, and everyone seemed to really like it.

"Most important, from the moment I walked in for my interview I had a good feeling about Chris. He was passionate about this project. I told him how blunt I can be, and he didn't mind. What I didn't know was whether he would be a micromanager, since it was, after all, his family's business. I didn't know for sure, but he seemed genuinely sincere." Because this was much more a change of job context than content for Koors, she was confident that she could get the job done if left to her own devices. She just needed to be sure that Barrott would give her the free reign that she needed. She decided to give him, and Aurora, a chance.