BILL BARNETT

>> Craig Gould: Bill Barnett, thank you so much for joining me this week on the podcast. Bill, you have had a long, distinguished career in the world of strategy, from, west point to McKinsey, where you eventually headed the strategy practice. And along the way, you have taught in the classroom at Yale, at Rice. And the majority of your teaching wound up applying those strategy principles from the business world to actively managing an executive’s career. Your book, that I just completed reading, the Strategic Career, I found, a book I wish I had read 20 years ago. And so, Bill, it’s. It’s a real pleasure to talk with you. And a lot of times, Bill, when I, speak with guests, I like to kind of start by going back to the beginning.

Back before McKinsey, where was your first job?

So back before McKinsey, back before our nation’s military, where was your first job? Was it in our armed forces, or did you have a job back before that?

>> Bill Barnett: Oh, well, I didn’t really have a job in high school. I mean, I mowed lawns and I did a few other things, but. But I didn’t really have a job in high school. My first job was when I was 18 and I showed up at West Point, because when you’re at West Point, you’re in the Army. So, I, actually I was paid to go to college. There was a little obligation I picked up along that path, but I was paid to go to college. And so really my first job was the army at the West Point. Time in it, I was in the army for 11 years.

>> Craig Gould: Did your interest in strategy, your strength in strategy, did you take notice of that in the military? Was that part of what you found out about yourself? Was that part of your responsibilities in the military?

>> Bill Barnett: I think I can describe two Origination points. One of them that, you know, it’s all about looking backwards and perceiving a trend that I might not have imagined at the time was in high school because there I really liked games. Now, games were not video games of today, they were board games. But what I mostly liked were military board games where you’re kind of recreating the bottle. The Battle of Waterloo or the Battle.

>> Craig Gould: Of Gettysburg, Something like Risk.

>> Bill Barnett: Yeah. Except. Except a level of, There were a couple companies that made board games that were truly representative of the way the battle was really fought.

>> Craig Gould: Wow.

>> Bill Barnett: And so, gosh, the name of the company was Avalon Hill. I think they’re now gone. But, But I found that doing that as well as playing chess in our school didn’t have a chess league or a chess tournaments, but playing chess, to me, those were two things that I sort of remember when I think about high school I was particularly interested in. Plus, I, at the time I was really interested in what little sort of economics that they taught in my high school and what kind, of political history they had. That all had something to do with conflict and how do you manage it. So that’s sort of the half a step. And then when I was in college, I gravitated to courses like military history, economics. The word strategy doesn’t quite appear in those, but it’s always there. And I kind of decided when I was, in my last year at West Point that I wanted to take advantage of those kinds of things because I enjoyed them. To me, having an exciting problem was fun. and so I said, I’m going to go straight to graduate school. And, the army permitted it. And so I applied and got into Harvard Business School. And suddenly I was in a world of strategy. Those two years were just very natural kind of evolution of my work ethic in this area. My interest, hopefully a little bit, my skills growth. And, So that’s kind of the core where it started.

>> Craig Gould: You know, when you get to McKinsey, I mean, you’re. You’re up to your eyeballs in strategy. Well, what are the core strategy principles that you guys would kind of lean there at McKinsey? Because at the essence, you know, those are sort of foundational to what we’re applying the micro level in our conversation about managing your career. Right?

>> Bill Barnett: Yes. McKinsey an enormously good place. And there was a, When I was at B school, there was a new consulting firm that was kind of attacking McKinsey, and they were pretty bright. They were writing these Little articles that were pretty intuitively interesting, and I found them quite, quite interesting while I was an MBA student. They were called the Boston Consulting Group.

>> Bill Barnett: And of course I always thought that BCG was probably the closest consulting firm to McKinsey. Although of course McKinsey was much, much better. But, that’s just my. But at McKinsey, the firm had mostly been, as I understand it, before my time, say in the 60s. It was mostly a firm of, let’s get three or four really good people together and have them figure out the answer to this client problem. Over the 70s, McKinsey evolved to where they begin to say, let’s make sure that we codify the approaches to not only strategy, but to operations, to purchasing, supply management, organizational effectiveness, etc. And so there were a lot of people working, as they were still doing mostly client work, to try to codify the approaches that they thought worked best. Those could be analytical tools, or it could be, in the case of strategy, strategic concepts or organizational concepts or other things. And so when I arrived at McKinsey in the 70s, that was just beginning. And then in the 80s, it really grew. And so, and I, and I was part of that because I was tied, into the strategy practice, you know, as a kind of junior guy. And then up over the years. And, what we tried to do is we tried to codify certain methodologies or approaches that we would recommend that whenever the teams had a strategy problem that they tried to deal, try to at least consider using.

Value proposition is when a company has understanding of a market related to its product

So, one example that I make a lot out of in my career thinking is what you call value proposition. A value proposition is when a company has, an understanding of a market related to its product. It understands what the market needs or wants or desires, and it understands how well their product fits. And if the product doesn’t fit, it gives them ideas about how to make the product better if they have that target in mind. Well, the value proposition is kind of like this. For a customer who wants X, I deliver these benefits. And for those benefits which are very valuable to you, Mr. Customer, I charge Y. Now, the charge is typically mostly price. But could it also be some contract terms or some other things that the customer must do in order to achieve those benefits? If you’re thinking about toothpaste, well, there’s the price is what the price is. But in some industrial things, there are other aspects to the arrangement. So that is a very important concept, value proposition. If you’re, if you’re in business, again, it’s. It’s thinking about, if you’re in a cruise line, it’s thinking about which segment of cruisers you want. Do you want retirees? Do you want families with children, do you want athletes, do you want gamblers? And you can design a ship to not, not to turn off everybody else necessarily, but to have distinctive appeal to one or two of those groups. And then you can market the ship that way. It’s no longer a secret. But, we discovered as well in my consulting assignment on that, as well as a lot of others have discovered, is that gambling is pretty profitable for cruise ships and draws a lot of people in.

>> Craig Gould: Right.

>> Bill Barnett: And so, everybody does a pretty. Just about everybody does a pretty good job in that industry on that side. Yeah.

>> Craig Gould: You know, you told that story in the book and I had never really stopped to think that the interior space of a cruise ship would be differentiated based on the target audience. Like the size of the cabins, how many cabins. But it, you know, it certainly makes sense that a Carnival cruise ship isn’t going to be laid out the same way as a Viking cruise ship or, or a Disney.

>> Bill Barnett: Right, right. And so these are actually companies that are following different niches. In the case of the Viking, of course, it’s a. It’s river travel. So that’s.

>> Craig Gould: Right.

>> Bill Barnett: A little different animal. But on the other hand, the experience on board, you know, it’s probably pretty. I’ve never done a. I’ve never done a river cruise, but from what I understand, it’s a different experience in a lot of ways. If you were to look at the ship, the ship would look a little different too because it’s not ocean going. So. So that’s actually a different, a different thing. But if you think about Disney cruises versus, Carnival, you know, there’s Carnival and then RCCL and some of the others are emphasizing entertainment and so on. But a lot of them are plugging in, performances, guest singers, guest comedians. A lot of them have a lot of video opportunities. And so there’s. There’s a lot of things you can do with a cruise ship, but how you allocate that space makes a difference. So in any case, that. That is illustrative of a kind of series of possible targeted strategies for an industry. But if you’re thinking about a career, well then maybe I’m kind of interested in an industry, but I’m not sure what role I want or m. Maybe I’m clues about the industries, but I know what role I want. And so, you’ve got a way of kind of Putting those things together in order to find the right target.

>> Craig Gould: For yourself, that turns into the personal value proposition. And that’s very foundational for everything else that you kind of build on top of it. And I think oftentimes we kind of want to rush straight to dessert. We want to get to a job application, we want to get to a job offer. But our successful job search, our successful networking, our successful career is really going to be predetermined by slowing down and figuring out exactly what that personal value proposition is. Right. And at the core of that, it really starts with our strengths.

>> Bill Barnett: Yes. And indeed, what you just said is interesting because I had a friend who coined a phrase that is exactly what you were just saying it, saying if you want to move fast, you have to slow down at the start, or the way another way you put it, you would say slow down now so you can run faster later. And, in the case of careers, the slowing down part, I’m not talking about waste a year, but it is taking the time to try to discern what your strengths are, to try to understand how well those strengths mix with different kinds of audiences or employers. It could be that you have good strengths for a certain industry, but you are, for the oil and gas industry and. But you would not fit well at Exxon because of the culture, but you might fail, fit well at bp. Very different. So, if you, if you look at things that way, well, it takes. It takes time usually to get to that conclusion. And sometimes people find that what they actually do is they figure, over a few years, I’m going to experiment. And that’s often when you’re, you know, just out of school or going to your second job or because you weren’t happy with your first one. But you’re probably running a series of experiments, and that’s common, that’s natural. But I’ll say that if you do that with, purpose, with a learning agenda in place, you will go faster ultimately and you will get more insight.

>> Craig Gould: You know, in the book.

Steve Reznowski defines jobs versus careers versus callings for our listeners

I found it, just really intriguing when you start to define, and delineate, jobs versus careers versus callings for our listeners. Can you kind of walk us through what that looks like?

>> Bill Barnett: You bet. And I have to say that that was not originally my idea. I got it from a colleague, one of the professors at Yale, named a.m. reznowski. And she had a long career trying to help think about organizational effectiveness. And she had the wonderful idea. I took the idea and I sort of said, well, let me see if I can really define it in group ways. And I think everybody should have in mind the hope that they will get to some kind of calling. In a calling, you’re not trying to pursue money as your primary goal, nor prestige, nor power. You’re more interested in the content of the job. You’re more interested in how you would spend your days, what kind of impact you might have. In some people’s cases, you’re more interested in the purpose of the organization that you’re affiliated with. And for extreme believers in that they’re called entrepreneurs, and calling people. There is a great deal of research by psychologists that show that people have these features of callings, tend to be better at it. They tend to advance and they tend to work a little longer than average, but they tend to enjoy the work. And so it’s kind of a happy place to end up. So I want to call it, But there are two other sort of career categories that there’s a logic to as well. Careers is very different than calling. And indeed, if I was a McKinsey & Co. Consultant who sort of had a kind of a calling, at least at the firm, there were other colleagues who were equal to me in tenure at the firm and advancement, et cetera, who probably were more careerist. They probably cared more about the quantity of their compensation, about their prestige, about the leadership opportunities that offered and so on than about the content of the work itself. I don’t think there were very many of them, but there were certainly some. And the problem with careerist is that, you know, organizations are sort of shaped in a kind of a pyramid. And the careerist, at some point, at first level, she’s competing with 35 other people for a promotion.

>> Bill Barnett: Rise the level she’s competing with 15. Rise another level she’s competing for. At some point she loses probably. And careers really tend to crash when they lose. So that’s one bad thing about careers. They also don’t generally take the feeling that a calling person has about how what they’re doing is really worthwhile. So, careers calling. The third area is a job person. Just like cruising. There are job people at every firm, in every profession. Some doctors are job people, some investment bankers are job people, professors, et cetera. And job people are people, who want to make sure they keep the job that they have. They want to make sure that they make as much money as is reasonable to get, but they are unwilling to really commit to what they’re doing. And they absolutely guard their Weekends and their evenings from work. now there could be a time in your life where you have to be a job person because you have a new baby. And, there could be a time in your life when you’re, you know, when you shift around among these categories. There could be a time with tourist when you’re near bankruptcy and you just gotta. You gotta get the thing. So there can be episodes with different motivations, but in general, job people can be happy, but only if they’re doing a whole lot of stuff outside of work because they won’t be particularly happy with their work. So those are three attitudes. There’s a good bit of research that looks into each of these, and it is, pretty clear that, these categories are generally applicable and that you do better if you kind of target a calling. Now, if you target the calling, you may not get there, you may never find it, but you at least have shot. And in all likelihood you’ll be happier and more fulfilled and more accomplished than if you’ve approached it with a careerist mentality.

>> Craig Gould: If I’m an employer, am I looking for people who have found their calling? You, know, I think of, like, Steve Jobs, because, like Steve Jobs, you know, I’ve always heard these stories about how he would like to hire artists and poets as part of the team at Apple. And, I always had the sense that it was around the aesthetic choices that the fact that his liberal arts education, he saw the value in it. But after reading your book, I started thinking, you know, maybe he was looking for people that had a calling and that those people would be more productive within his organization. Like, does that make any sense?

>> Bill Barnett: I obviously don’t know Steve Jobs or didn’t know him, and I don’t know about his thought process here, but it can make sense. In order to find calling people, you have to be a good place to work. You have to be a place that has fair evaluation processes, that has good feedback. That’s an open atmosphere. it’s the opposite from a regimented, inflexible, highly vertical organization structure that is just not much fun, especially not for young people. And so, if you want to attract calling people, that’s a smart thing to do because you will be attracting probably better performers who work harder and who care more about what they’re doing. they may also be good team members. Of course, teamwork’s a lot of this because they care about the outcome, as much or more than they care about how they personally look. so that’s a Good. That’s a good, criteria. and if I were doing a big recruiting program, I would be looking for people out of college. Now that’s easy for Bill to say. How would they find people? How would you judge that? You have a calling and I don’t. That’s a hard, that’s a harder thing to say. So what you have to do is in your recruiting, you need to think about emphasizing things that calling people would find attractive. emphasize sort of the, cost of working here, which might have something to do with business travel or hours or intensity. And, to make sure that you’ve got someone who’s kind of trading, making those trade offs in a way that is consistent with your really getting a high performer. And then also, I mean, you talk with them a lot and you, you try to figure out how well would she fit on this team. but I like making a trip to a small town in the middle of Indiana to a factory with him. You know, and you kind of, you kind of are trying to judge all that, which is subjective, but you, of course, you also have a lot of record on their accomplishments, et cetera. Use. But if you can, if you can hire people with a calling, and you can do that repeatedly, you will, over time have a better organization and you will accomplish more and you will create more shareholder value.

Master Move Premium helps you actively manage your climb to the C Suite

>> Craig Gould: Hey there. If you’re enjoying today’s conversation, I’ve got something you don’t want to miss. Imagine having a daily dose of insights that can help you actively manage your climb to the C Suite. With Master Move Premium, you can get just that. Our premium content dives deeper into the strategic decisions, cultural leadership, and innovation that top executives like you face every day. But the most valuable resources are those that help you find the next great opportunity. In the C Suite. As a Master Move Premium subscriber, you’ll get access to premium content, which includes my ongoing conversations with corporate leaders in talent acquisition as well as C level executive recruiters. These premium episodes provide unmatched insights on executive search trends, candidate best practices, and specific job opportunities as they emerge. So why wait? Head over to MasterMove IE and become a member today.

Are people good at understanding what their strengths are or do we conflate

Now back to our conversation.

>> Craig Gould: As I mentioned earlier, kind of at the crux of the personal value proposition are, one’s strengths. And I think in the book you define strengths as innate talents and aptitudes as well as develop skills and knowledge. I feel like for us to get the most out of this exercise, there has to be an incredible amount of honesty. And I’m just wondering, are people good at understanding what their strengths are or do we sometimes conflate who we are versus who we want to be?

>> Bill Barnett: Well, yes. First of all, that, that is a frequent challenge is to be straightforward and honest. There are two or three things you can do to help with that. number one, you can step, back and you know, say, well, I’m going to try and think about myself like I think others would that were detached from me. that’s one thing that’s not easy. But you would think back over your past. Where was I most happy? Where was I most successful? Are there times when I’ve had what, one psychologist called flow? Would I have the feeling that I almost sort of, I start working, you know, three or four hours later. Golly, how did you get to be this late? and you just sort of get caught up in the work and it just seems to kind of pull along and so you think about yourself in that way. So that’s one tool, that’s the one that you were directly challenging when your question, is that really possible? I think it is, but I. It’s not. Everybody doesn’t do it right. Second, think of people who know you professionally and they’ve kind of got to be at least professional friends and ask them for feedback in the context of, Well, as I’m planning my job search, I’m not quite sure how to think about what I’m best at, and what I’m weakest at. Can you give me your assessment of two or three characteristics you think I’m best at? Ah, and also that you think I need to work on it most. And especially the second half of that, if they can be, if they feel comfortable being honest with you, can be very helpful. Third thing you can do is you can look at your past performance reviews. Now obviously, if you’re a 22 year old and you’re just getting started coming out of college next year, you can’t really, you probably don’t have a long track record of performance appraisals that really are very meaningful. You may have worked as an intern, but, you know, who knows how much thought they gave into that little performance, appraisal that they gave you. But if you, if you’re 27 or 8 or 30, you certainly have enough experience to where, if you were to think about your three employers you’ve had before you were 30 and go back to each of the three or four people who knew you best there and ask for their critique of your work at that Time again, asking for strengths and weaknesses, that sometimes produces some really valuable surprises. And then the last thing I would mention is that there are a host of, career assessment software examinations, you can do on yourself. and, I mentioned a couple in the book.

>> Craig Gould: I really like the Clifton strengths Finders, for example.

>> Bill Barnett: Yeah, that’s a good example. and so ideally, if people are writing software for this, what they do is they ask you enough questions where they can actually take that together with a database on what strengths typically are involved in advertising effectiveness. And if you’re interested in advertising as a career, and they can help you understand how well you fit these sort of general characteristics. And so that’s the kind of thing that is also a very good tool. But, I think of others, I think the databases are good. I think that the individual inquiry himself and then also asking former colleagues, you got to have those strengths. Because the reason why I start the thing with strengths, and you’ve mentioned it a couple of times, is that if I don’t have the strengths, if I can get a job, I really don’t have the strengths for that. I really don’t want to be in a situation where I might fail. That’d be really bad. Maybe not quite as bad would be, I go forward and try to get that job and I don’t get it. But if you get the job that you’re not prepared for, you may have a really bad year. So you want to get into a situation where you’ll be challenged, but you got a good shot at doing a really good job and, where you, have a good chance of making your best case. So you start with strengths. The other place you start is you start by trying to think about what do I care most about. In my case, it was a nice combination because I liked, really, I cared a whole lot about having hard problems to solve and, that were kind of hard to figure out. And I really took a lot of joy from the times as a consultant, which I wish I could say it was every time. It wasn’t every time when I came to an answer that surprised everybody and it was well documented and it was a big shift in the industry they were at or a big reassessment of where they stood within their industry. And, I got a lot of fun out of that. So that was both intellectually interesting and something I liked. Plus, it aligned pretty well with my skills. And, that’s a good result. But you’ve got to have a good understanding of yourself. And then A good understanding of what a potential employer would need.

>> Craig Gould: If we go through that exercise, we should be able to get to a place where we have some general role in mind. Right. And even if we’re not qualified for that role today, it allows us to create a roadmap on how to get there.

>> Bill Barnett: Yes. So like a five, ten year plan, I mean it’s not a plan you’re not, you’re going to just execute rigidly. It’s a plan you’re going to start on. An example would be a business school student, an MBA student. And she wants to run a business. well that could be starting your own company or it could be running a division of a corporation. But let’s say she wants to run a business and she’s most comfortable, at least right now, thinking about a corporate role. She has a little bit, let’s say she has a background in accounting and so she’s done financial analysis before and that was her undergraduate degree was in accounting. She has four years of work experience with that and then she has CMBA role. So she comes out of that mba, she doesn’t want to go into corporate finance because she’s already done some of that. She don’t want to be an accountant anymore. But she can think about is there an industry that I’m most interested, maybe she doesn’t have much of one or maybe she has some interest in three or four industries. So what she would do is she would think about, I’m going to target these three industries. I’m going to emphasize my background in analytics rather than exactly the same thing as accounting. And I’m going to talk about how I have grown so much and how much business school has broadened me. And I have an opportunity here to be very helpful in your manufacturing function or in your marketing function or in something else. And that’s, that is a way to broaden herself. And maybe she has one position for three years on a path and then maybe she has a different kind of position with another three years. Well, suddenly she has some accounting, she has some marketing, let’s say she has some purchasing or some manufacturing work and suddenly she’s a pretty broadly experienced person to, when she’s sort of ready to be that kind of leader, to take on that role. A little bit easier said than done. But that’s, that is a nice concept to figure. And so I typically argue that people want a five year plan or a ten year concept, but it isn’t a rigid plan. What you really need is you need A path that might work towards your aspiration, but what really matters most is your plan for this next year. Right. And then that gets back to your job search for the next year. And to try to get started with a good step towards this, perhaps still a little bit vague view of where you would like to be in. 10 years.

Earlier, you had mentioned something about having a conscious strategy going forward and executing

Earlier, you had mentioned something about, the difference between having a conscious strategy going forward and executing or things just kind of happen. Well, that happens. And, I remember one woman who did a whole lot of career work. she was at an American business school. On the other hand, her family was in India, her mother and father and siblings, and her mother got cancer and she decided she had to go back to India. So it sort of was a little bit of an event that sort of changed her approach. I lost track of her. but I know she was on a good path within the U.S. i suspect you. You know, with India’s booming economy, I suspect that she found a great path there. But it was. Things happen. my husband gets a job in another company in another country, in another city, and we have to move. Well, that uproots me professionally. I get a boss I can’t stand, he treats me poorly. I quit having. So there are. There are a lot of things that can happen, or I get laid off. And so you’ve got all this turbulence. But if you sort of have a sense of where you want to get to over time, then you replant. I have a concept in the book that is called your personal annual report. And I encourage everyone to take a little bit of time each year, be on your birthday. You get the kind of break between late, December and January 1st. But, it’s good to step back and kind of devote a day or most of the day sort of thing around. How are things going? Am I satisfied with where I am? Am I on my way towards that plan that I’m kind of conceptually thinking about? And, if I am, well, I’ll find full street ahead. If not, what should I do differently? That’s a good discipline.

The exercise helps executives identify what sets them apart outside of a particular industry

>> Craig Gould: I found it really interesting you had stories in the book where the process, the exercise, help people identify who they were as executives kind of outside of being tied to a particular industry or a particular product that they were capable of kind of, in a broader sense, understanding their capabilities and interests in a way that they could see where they could be transferable to a, different industry, a different role. It’s really interesting because it. It really opens up, I feel like a lot of times in a job search, people can feel like they’re, you know, in a dead end because, well, this is this narrow vertical that I’ve attached my cart to and I feel like I’m kind of stuck. But this kind of helps break apart what sets you apart that’s not tied to a particular industry or a, product.

>> Bill Barnett: Yes. And, that is a hard mentality to get into because it’s always easier to stay with what I’ve already done. It’s easier because you don’t have to change as much, you don’t have to grow as much. But it’s also easier if I’m going to be changing jobs anyway. It’s easier to work in the same industry or the same function I’ve been in because it’s easier to get that job. So on the one hand, your path forward is easier if you are doing something closely tied to what you’re already doing. but I think the best opportunities are often not quite the same as that. The best opportunities are distillation about what I have learned and what I know how to do, and then a little more broad thinking about what would I like to do and try not to be pinned to, the company or the industry or the function I’ve been in.

The MBA experience of two years stimulates people to think about other industries

Now, one way to get yourself in that mindset is to imagine you’re an, you’re a new MBA student, you’re 28 years old, this is your first semester, and it’s a two year program. And whether you know it when you walk in the door or not, the MBA experience of two years is one that kind of stimulates people to just naturally think about other industries and other functions. Some people go to MBA school because they’re really good at software, development, but they don’t want to do that anymore. Or they’re a very fine accountant, or I’m a nurse and I’m very successful at that. I don’t want to do that and I don’t want to go to med school. So I got to find something else to do. so the business school and other graduate programs as well. The business school is kind of special in the sense that you’re being exposed to different industries when you reach cases. And so it’s a stimulating point. And what you’re hoping is that a potential employer looks at your background, where you worked four years or six years before you started B school, you have some industry experience there and some functional experience there. But the interviewer, she looks at you personally and what you’ve been doing. In school and suddenly you seem broader and, you know, you’ve learned a lot of stuff, hopefully, and probably, you’ve learned how to carry yourself too. And so you may have a more conversational style as a result of the school experience you had. And so it’s a nice time to kind of reconstruct what you want to do and what you want to be. And in her case, the person I’m just talking about, you know, this, this recruiter, she will look at candidates with a much more open eye than she would if you were talking to candidates who were coming to straight from another job the one way. So just to stay at a little differently, if I can trigger in my mind whether I’m in B school or not, imagine I was, what would I want to do? And, that might be a tool for, for helping you think broadly.

>> Craig Gould: You know, we’ve talked about realizing our strengths and values. We’ve talked about defining the roles where we can put those to work. The next step is actually finding those opportunities. And sometimes that can be tricky. Especially nowadays, it seems like there’s, there’s a lot of gatekeeping. If we’re applying to something online, we’re not sure if our application’s even going to get past whatever filter has been set up to kind of weed out, people. And at the core of it, you know, it really comes back to the importance of the network, which is another reason in my mind, of advocating for the B school. And, you know, even when I’m advising teenagers about where to go to college, you know, I will talk to them about, well, you know, it’s not just about the quality of the education, it’s about the quality of the network. And there are some schools that you are going to benefit because they are very loyal to one another. And they, they generate 10,000 graduates every year. And so you’re, you’re going to have a bigger network to tap into.

Networking is the best tool for finding jobs, author says

Can you kind of talk about the practicalities of that? And I don’t know if we’re all natural networkers.

>> Bill Barnett: Networking is the best tool for finding jobs. especially if you’re, you know, kind of late twenties or in, throughout your thirties or for sure if you’re in your fifties. Because networking is where you get a chance to get ahead of the system that may be sort of reading resumes and in a kind of a mechanical way. If I’m interested in working for a particular company, if I know some know someone who already works there, that’s enormously helpful. If I know people who don’t work there, but who know the company because they work for competitors that can be helpful, still learn. and so that’s quite, it’s a big thing. I, I found that of all the people that I had worked with, roughly two out of three, all the people I worked with who found positions that they were happy to get, I think it was even more than two out of three. The source was a networking contact. now I know that job sites, job websites have a lot of things showing and large company job postings that they either put on those websites or that they have on their own website, those have a lot of things. And I wouldn’t ignore that stuff. But I think for most people the thing to do is to start by talking to people. I wouldn’t talk to people and say, do you have a job that I might fit for. I would talk to people and I would say I’m kind of interested in this field and this function. I know you have some experience there. Do you think that makes sense for me? Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And maybe you get some insights there. How is life in one of those, in that function, in that, in that industry? What do you know about that? I’d like to learn more about it. Never really ask them is there a job? Because that’ll kind of, well, that made me feel a little uncomfortable or almost never. And you know, they’ll know what you’re doing, but if you don’t put them on the spot, well, you’ll probably get a much better conversation. most people that I know that have been successful at networking have been able to do that. One that I cite in the book is a woman who, was just enormously good at conducting meetings with a whole lot of questions, a lot of good listening, and never really trying to ask for anything for herself. But you know, she’s triggering ideas in the head of the people that she’s talking to. And she had two or three really good opportunities as a result of kind of a several month job search. So the networking’s the most important thing about getting a job. Now if I were 22, that’s a little harder, but go ahead and try. maybe your friends, know people, maybe the father of one of your friends, they’d say, why don’t you, I’m talking my dad. so this is, these are things that you can be surprised how that goes. But the networking is by far the best way. how do you build network? If you think about it in a way that is not crass you don’t want to do anything phony. A, it probably won’t feel good, but second, it probably won’t work. Authentic networking is networking where you’re really trying hard to be helpful to somebody. That’s helpful in the context of, we’ll have a nice coffee together, or it’s helpful in the context of, let me help you with this particular issue that you’re facing. It could be another person on a nonprofit organization that you’re volunteering, a little bit for. It could be someone who’s kind of a colleague, who’s facing a tough time at work or something else. And you can go and you can have lunch with them and you can find, ways to, if nothing more, to just be a sounding board for their thinking. Maybe you can actually do something a little bit more than that. Those are nice things. But if you do it for any purpose that sort of feels uncomfortable to you, that’ll go through, that’ll come through. And so make sure that if you’re doing stuff like that, where you’re doing it in a way where you’re asking them for a favor, you’re asking for ideas, but on the other hand, you are, very much trying to, listen to what they have to say, learn from the experience, and as appropriate, try to be helpful to anything they have in mind. And if you can build network that way consciously, that can, that can happen in college, that can happen in first job, it can happen second job, it can happen something that you’re volunteering for in the community. It happened in a religious institution. in anything you’re doing. You can make friends that way. That’s a nice thing about it. You can make real friends. And I just encourage everybody to do that. And as you do that, we’ll keep track of everybody because it may be somebody going to be most helpful is somebody who you knew five years ago and then they moved to Kansas or something. And so you haven’t seen them, but you still view them as important. Some of the best networkers I know have a list of, you know, 100 people, maybe 50, 100 people that they just basically try to get in touch with every few years. Even if they’ve all moved out of where they went to undergraduate school, or if they’ve all left IBM where they used to work, or whatever it is, and they, and they just try to get back. some people do that with sort of Christmas greetings. It’s maybe just a birthday greeting, or others just say every two or three years, I’M going to call or I’m going to call this group, of people. So networking is important. it is the easiest way to do a job search. Even though most people say it’s going to feel uncomfortable because I’ll feel like I’m kind of using people. You’re not using people as long as you don’t do it in a way that is not sort of interesting and helpful to them.

>> Craig Gould: My wife in, the last couple years transitioned from a job in education to a career in instructional design. I was really surprised at the receptiveness of people to schedule, an informational interview with her folks that were in the role at a particular company in a particular industry to just reach out and say, I’m trying to work my way into this field. Can I have some time to get your perspectives? Just the generosity of people was, I don’t necessarily surprising, but it would make me a lot more likely to reach out to unknown people and ask, you know, because I think a lot of times, oddly enough, I think a lot of people don’t get asked enough for an opportunity to share the lessons they’ve learned. And I think a lot of people are open to responding to those types of solicitations.

>> Bill Barnett: Absolutely. And I guess my guess would be that when your wife called and asked for some time, I’d like to learn something about your industry or learn about this idea that I have, or get your reactions to me. I think they would react to that. Not that well, this is going to be pain in the, in the butt. And you know, I just don’t want to have to have to do this. I don’t have time for this. I mean a few might, but for the most part they’re flattered. For the most part they’re saying, wow, this is really neat to kind of be on the, you know, to be, to be wanted, somebody who really is interested in what I have to say. And then of course you want to conduct your meeting in a way that’s like that. You really want to be more about questions than about your own answers. but that is, that’s a good, good thing. So, so if you do the, do this kind of networking we’re talking about, you’ll probably have some things to look at or at least you have some conversations that might lead that way.

>> Craig Gould: Way.

In job search, there are three steps. The first step is to find opportunities

>> Bill Barnett: So if I think about job search, there are three steps. The first step is to figure out what I want to target. That’s the personal value proposition. The second is to find opportunities, which is Mostly about networking. And the third thing is how you conduct those meetings. I think of it as telling my story. In the book, I talk a lot about techniques to help me tell my story. one of the techniques is to look at my resume. And the resume should be written in a way where it tells my story. But then everything that’s on that resume, I should be thinking about a story I can tell to illuminate that dot point on the resume. Because the resume is really an invitation for interview questions. If I put down there, thinking it’s cute to say, well, I’m a, I’m a. I’m very interested in, cooking, and I’m a chef, you know, I’m almost like a chef. Well, you better be ready to answer a question about that in a way that’s not, you know, that’s not, trivial. not that I’m a qualified, you know, degreed culinary expert, but on the other hand, I really get excited about baking bread. And let me tell you how I do it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m a painter. well, that’s pretty good. Tell, me about your painting. How do you approach it? Oh, well, I’ve gone to art school on the evenings, on the weekends, and I’ve done this and that, and, here’s my website. those are kind of things that are often at the bottom of the resume, but in the top of the resume are things like, as a management consultant, I helped a company out of a large cost reduction program. Well, that’s great. What did you do? How hard was it? What were the results? What was your role? you have to be prepared to answer all those questions. And it’s better if you can answer all these questions with stories. Each story should be a supporting brick in the foundation of your personal value proposition.

>> Craig Gould: In interview preparation, I think in the book you gave a great five or ten pages of kind of prospective questions that you might anticipate. But it’s again, it’s going to be differ based on your resume. It’s going to differ based on the company. It’s going to vary based on a number of factors. But you kind of have to do some scenario planning in terms of what might I anticipate if I were to empty my mind and look at myself, as a candidate, what might I ask myself? But also, you kind of have to prepare yourself from an education standpoint. What are the needs of the company? What are they facing? Why are they in this situation? Why are they hiring me? Are they growing? Are they retracting? what are their threats? I remember going through a particular interview process one time, being on a panel, hiring a VP of marketing and sales one time. And I, I really realized that each of the candidates was actually providing almost like free consultancy to us in terms of giving their perspective on, you know, what our company was, you know, in the middle of. I think you almost had to anticipate approaching that opportunity in that way.

>> Bill Barnett: It’s a very good thing to do if you have a sense or maybe even a point of view on how well a particular company or a particular function is doing. that is an excellent way to sort of show, you know, what you’re talking about. But also you need to start in a way. Of course, I don’t work here, but I will tell you that from the outside, all the things I’ve read about the company tell me that, blah. And it strikes me if that’s the case, well, then you may have a need for a priority that’s kind of like the function that you described in your, in your, job posting. And, I think I could help with that. Although you tell me. And, that’s, that’s obviously a good thing to prepare for is any insights you might have. And it may be that you don’t have insights, but you got some questions. your questions can’t be stupid. well, here at Procter and Gamble, do you all do much consumer market research, really? Yes. But a more interesting way of doing that would, be something like, I’m interested in marketing research. I’m sure you do a great deal of it. but I’ve often seen in other companies that it’s sometimes hard to tie the insights from research into product development choices. How do you bridge that? That’s pretty interesting. Or in market research, just the research itself, that’s about how you use it. But also, how do you conceive questions you might have for people who are in a market that you don’t yet serve? And how well does that work? so you can think about ways of talking about what’s going on in the company in a way that shows, insight. And it’s so much better to show insight than it is to say, I have insight, I know a lot about market research. But on the other hand, if I have three or four questions about your market research function, and if that is what this job is about, well, then that’s pretty interesting. And that demonstrates you both thought about our company, but that demonstrates that you have some insights about this kind of function. And of course you have to be kind, of humble when you do that. It’s always good to have some kind of preface which is to say, obviously, I don’t know, but, because I’m not working here. But I would say that from an outside in perspective, it looks like.

>> Craig Gould: But if we’re lucky, we get an offer. There are stories in your book of people who, under whatever circumstances, it just seems like an abundance of good fortune to have one, two, three options at a particular time. Two or three different offers. And at that point you have a decision to make and we have to analyze that decision. And sometimes maybe it’s just one offer, but the decision is, well, should I stay where I am or should I jump ship to this unknown opportunity?

Bill Barnett: Trying to weight probabilities and possibilities can be difficult

It was interesting that, a lot of the people that you interviewed or who you took from their experiences in the book kind of put together a way to quantify this decision analysis in a way that they tried to have a weighted scale of what each of the opportunities is bringing to the table. And trying to weight that weight probabilities and possibilities to try to take emotion out of it and try to, I mean, I guess emotions in there, but trying to help get past the qualitative to the quantitative and help you make a decision that you can have confidence in.

>> Bill Barnett: Yes. And, let’s say everything has gone well with research. You’ve turned up two or three potential opportunities and you’ve worked through those and you’ve made your best case and discern which of those you like best. And you get a couple of offers or maybe you just get one, but you could stay in your job. So if you got one, you got, you got two things to compare. Or let’s say you’re in school, you’re going to graduate in six months. I could take this job or I could keep looking. So you always have something to compare this offer to. So if you’re in that happy position of having an offer and you’re trying to decide whether to take this offer or the other offer or whether to take this offer or keep doing what I’m doing or to continue this job search and have to turn this one down because I don’t think it really meets my needs, typically it’s kind of like you probably do if you’re thinking about which automobile to buy or which refrigerator to buy or something else you think about. There are a lot of different features of an automobile. there are reputations that companies have that are probably, you know, you can Research this a little bit, where you can get a sense for which ones are the automobiles that are most reliable. You can think about the style and the flair. You can think about the finish, out interior. You can think about the gas mileage or in the case of electrics, you can think about various things through that. And when you do that, what you’re normally doing if you’re looking at these automobiles is oh, and there’s also of course the price, and the financing terms if you’re. So there are all these features, you can put all that on paper.

>> Bill Barnett: And what you can do if you think about it in the way you’re describing is you can actually say, you know what, There are four or five things that I care most about if I’m going to buy a car. If you ask Bill Barnett, it’s about reliability, it’s about certain aspects of style. And my judgment about style is going to be different than your listeners. Everybody’s different on that. It may have a little something to do with the quality of the dealer. If the dealer is close to where I live. Because you want to be able to get easy service, you don’t want to be driving 15 miles to get service twice a year or whenever you have a problem. And so you’ve got these criteria kind of laid out and then you can take each of your options and kind of evaluate the options on each of these criteria. Now you can start with that by saying this one scores high, medium or low or you’re going to have some kind of plus plus or 1 plus or 0 or something on the options. So if we put it in job search terms, I’ve decided that I care most about personal growth and about having an organization where I’m proud to be part of it. Okay, so those are two high important criteria. And then I’ve got some other criteria too which has to do in this particular case. I’m making up some fiction. But where I care a whole lot about excitement, day to day, I care about the teamwork that exists. And I’m very interested in building my reputation. So I take those criteria and I put them across, I put them down the page and then I cross the top, I put my two or three alternatives and I try to just sort of score it a little bit. It could be high, medium, low, or it could be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 for how I rate each of the ones. And then if you’re going crazy with this, you can actually have a, weighted value of each attribute and you can actually have scores like divide up 100 points among these. You can actually kind of calculate an answer. Now if you do that, and doing that can be for analytically inclined people, a very good way to do it. It’s not necessarily the right way to do the, to get the right answer because once you go through that you often think of another criteria or you often think, well, you know what I’ve been thinking. What I really wanted was personal growth, and I did. But I actually think million, but I think I care more about something else. and of course money is part of that or how stressful will it be, or how much business travel is there, so on. So there are also some negatives. And you put all that together and you can really imagine a little matrix with offsets across the top and down the left axis where you have criteria, that you’re going to use to kind of make the trade offs. And you can do that with qualitative way or you can actually try to put numbers on. What I’ve seen is that most people don’t trust the numbers and they really don’t want to do the numbers unless I make them when I’m counseling. But when they do the numbers they often get surprised at what the results are. That doesn’t mean that they decide based on the way the numbers come out, because that would be just two mechanists, especially for something that’s so personal. But they can come to a greater insight about what is driving their decisions. And at worst construct a logic for what they think they most like to do, which is pretty helpful at best. construct the logic and then decide what you think you’d most like to do.

Using the PVP can help you make decisions based on scenarios

Another factor here is the uncertainty as to what happens when I take this path. So I’m making this decision to take the first job offer and I’ve used this kind of formula that I described at least conceptually to get to that decision. But there’s one more thing to do, which is scenarios. Let me imagine where I am two years from now or four years from now. How am I progressing towards the goals that I have for the 10 year period? Will I do well? How well will I do? What if I like it and really want to stay? What if I don’t like it? And so you m. Ask yourself a bunch of questions like that and that becomes an important criteria that you didn’t first think about because you’re thinking about. So does this prepare me better for this future that’s certainly going to have events that I can’t now predict, or does it not prepare me very well for that? And, if you can do all of that together, you suddenly are in a pretty sound position to make a decision.

>> Craig Gould: The scientific method takes us back to the PVP and, you know, do we need to revise it and start all over again? Right. With our annual birthday audit?

>> Bill Barnett: Yes, exactly.

Bill, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate your time

>> Craig Gould: Well, Bill, this has been, I feel like we could, talk for a whole other hour. I really appreciate your time. I feel like this conversation is. Is so valuable for everyone out there who’s trying to actively manage their careers. And I, highly suggest the book, the Strategic Career. Bill, thank you for being on the show.

>> Bill Barnett: I’ve had fun with this. It’s been a good experience, and I hope that this is of some help.