My Takeaways:

‘Your career can’t be a passive effort to log more and more years in a cubicle doing good work and getting the occasional bonus or promotions; instead, you should look around the corner- whether by scanning cutting-edge competitors’ job listing or asking the most visionary people in your field for advice- and actively prepare for the future.’

‘The world needs specialist with the knowledge to do hard things.’

‘If you want to figure out which behaviors in a company predict and contribute to success, you first have to define ‘success.’

‘Working for the right manager can be the difference between loving a job and hating it, being a superstar in an organization or someone in line to be laid off.’

‘Productivity isn’t about how hard a person seems to be working.’

‘Making your people more valuable- more productive in a true economic sense– is the north star of being a manager.’

‘If you’re a manager, the pathway to success is to seek ways to elevate the capabilities of your staff, to offer tranparency about what it will take to rise in the organization, and to seek to turn complex work into something that can be replicated and executed by more junior subordinates.’

‘If you’re an employee looking for a job, you should eagerly seek an organization with that type of culture- one where you will get the instruction and leadership to become a more valuable contributor, and where you will be rewarded as you rise and create more economic value for that organization and future employers.’

‘Good management acts like a technology in and of itself. It is something that can be adopted and promogated across companies much as a new technique for smelting steel or testing machines parts might be.’

‘When best managment practices are in place, the productivity of the people up and down the organization is higher; each individual becomes more valuable more than would be in a more poorly managed firm. Higher productivity is an essential precondition to higher compensation.’

‘When you take a job at a company, you are essentially investing in it- not with money, but with your time.’

‘The people who most thrive in startup environments are comfortable with ambiguity, with a lack of clear hierarchy or clear departmental lines. The payoff is that this very ambiguity allows you to get deeper, wider experience with crucial strategic questions than how you would in a more established company.’

‘An employee’s relationship with his or her employer seems to have become less like a marriage and more like one in a series of hook-ups.’

‘People who want to ascend to CEO and other top jobs must seize every opportunity along the way to stretch their experience across different functional areas (marketing, finance, operations, and so forth) and different geographies in order to be a compelling candidate.’

‘When you weigh a job opportunity, don’t look only at your chances for promotion. Look at what it can offer you in skills and experience that will put you in a good position to have interesting options no matter how the economic winds shift.’

‘Think of each job as a ‘tour of duty’ of two to four years in which you aim to accomplish a specific task or gain a specific type of experience or skill, after which you will find something new to accomplish, whether at the same employer or a different one.’

‘Train yourself to have a ‘three-year itch’ in every job. The first year, in a new job, you’re learning your way around. In the second year, you’re coming into your own, and it’s time to seek out discomfort and push for new experiences.’

‘In any given job, what really matters for your long-term growth is what you gain in terms of experience.’

‘Good ballplayers focus on the imputs that are within their control and tend to generate success over time, rather than end results.’

‘If you’re a manager, having frequent one-on-one meetings with your direct reports, even if they’re short, tends to lead to both them and you being more successful over time.’

‘Work assiduously to build your network within your organization; the more people you know, the more likely you are to be happy and successful.’

‘Seek out employment at those best-run, most successful companies if possible, where you’ll likely be working with other high-performing people who will complement your own skills to make everyone more productive.’

‘The jobs at greatest risk of being displaced by artificial intelligence and other advancing technologies are those that involve any kind of repetitive process, as opposed to improvising and reacting to a fluid environment.’

‘In seeking a career that is not likely to be displaced by technology, the options are either to focus on that kind of improvisational work or to be one of the people driving the use of technology to supplant other jobs.’

‘Think of a job at a high-performing organization the way a professional athelete think about their contract with a team- a relationship of limited duration, which will end when the team’s needs and the employee’s abilities are no longer a match.’

‘When you are at a pivot point in your career where you must decide whether to stay with an employer or leave for another offer, apply principles of honesty and reciprocity.’

‘You need to be tolerant of risk and able to work proactively to keep abreast of the latest technologies and ways of operating in your field.’

‘You need to derive your self-worth and identity from something besides having a recognizable, name-employer.’

‘You need to be gregarious enough to be able to interact directly with customers, yet comfortable working in isolation most of the time rather than with the trappings of an office culture.’

‘You need to be comfortable not having any obvious path into managing a large team or becoming a senior executive.’

Source

Neil Irwin (2019). How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and Succeeding in High-Performance Careers