Reinvention. What a quintessential American idea! It’s the frontier spirit. It’s Ben Franklin, it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, and by God, it’s Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey, too. They all understand the American impetus and genius for wholesale self-reinvention. We survive by staring change in the eye–and adapting. Look at us now. Our white-collar jobs are being offshored, and the possibility of lifetime employment is evaporating before our eyes. What’s next is ultimately about reinvention. A passive approach to professional growth will leave you by the wayside.
In the new frontier, the only way to protect yourself is to realize that you have to be the boss of your own show. Brand You. Me Inc. It matters. When I wrote about this in Fast Company in the summer of 1997, it was cool. But now it’s necessary. Ain’t no choice, bro. Even if this idea scares you to death, ordinary has become a design for disaster. It’s not easy to embrace. If you grew up thinking that you were going to work for Citibank for 40 years, you’re simply not going to survive with the same set of attitudes that you’ve had in the past. If you’re going to reinvent yourself for this new reality–and I say “if,” but it’s really not an option–here’s how to develop the attitude that will let you reimagine yourself as the CEO of Me Inc. and save yourself before it’s too late.
Think About Great Gigs
You undoubtedly read Dilbert. I read Dilbert. We laugh at Dilbert, and Dilbert talks of a world where, fundamentally, the opportunity to create your own shtick doesn’t come easy. Workers aren’t exactly inundated with projects that would create a signature. But now there is a requirement that you take assignments and bend them in a way that allows you to have something to talk about. Every employee who will survive has to turn projects into stuff that gets the person on the other side of the recruiter’s desk excited. The frustration of it is that it’s not typically the way things have worked in finance, HR, or logistics departments. They don’t produce new products or art portfolios that are tangible signs of what you’ve accomplished. But it’s precisely that mentality you have to pursue if you’re a 28-year-old relatively junior member on a PricewaterhouseCoopers tax consulting team. Where’s the value you added to that project? Where’s your signature?
Be a Spin Doctor
Reimagining Brand You is not a one-time thing. You need to revolutionize your portfolio of skills at least every half-dozen years. This is a minimum survival necessity.
Yes, you have your story of what you’ve done in your job, but you have to put the best twist on it. On each gig, you must be marketing your worth, marketing Me Inc. You can go too far (think Dennis Kozlowski or Martha Stewart), but you constantly have to spin-doctor. If you don’t, you have what I call the “engineer’s mentality”–and I am an engineer by training. People with an engineer’s mentality believe that truth and virtue will automatically be their own reward. That’s a crock, no matter what you do for a living. There are companies that don’t like people who stick their necks out, but at the same time, they like people who succeed wildly. So if you choose to stay where you are, you have to learn the rules. The Brand You world doesn’t let you hang out for 20 years with the same 17 people in the credit department.
