The Long View by B. Fetherstonhaugh - Book Summary
This is my summary of ‘The Long View’ by Brian Fetherstonhaugh. My notes are informal and tailored to my own interests at the time of reading. They mostly contain quotes from the book as well as some of my own thoughts. I enjoyed this book and would recommend you read it yourself (check it out on Amazon).
What you should know about your career
Careers are not just about finding work you love, but building a life that you love as well.
For much of our lives, we spend more time working than sleeping. Many of us spend more time wedded to our careers than to our spouses. Some of us could easily spend 100,000 hours of our lives at work.
We need a work philosophy that encompasses all the parts of our lives, and one that can give us guidance on how to be ambitious and seek success without sacrificing other things we value deeply - family, friends, health, and purpose.
Building a career is like building a brand.
You need a great product, built on quality ingredients. It needs to stand for something. It needs to be nurtured and refreshed to evolve over time.
Careers last a surprisingly long time.
Take the number 69 and deduct your current age. That is the number of years you have left until early retirement.
For many people, they last more than 45 years.
For most people, there are more years of career after the age of 40 than before.
You will acquire 85-90% of your personal wealth after your 40th birthday.
An individual’s personal wealth tends to peak at about age 65, and their personal wealth at age 40 is only about 10-15% of that amount.
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The three big career stages
Stage one: start strong.
It is the time to discover what you are good at and what you love to do.
It is the time to explore and heal your weaknesses. If you are terrible at public speaking, take improv classes.If you are too tough or too weak with team members, get personal leadership coaching. Learning is more important than unadulterated success.
Your learning curve is more important than your job title. Your career efforts must be focused on discovery and equipping yourself for the long journey ahead.
Too many people do not spend enough time building their skills, experiences, and relationships early on. As a result, they run out of momentum midway through their careers, just when it should be getting the most interesting and rewarding.
Invest time in building your social eminence - your reputation online and in the industry at large. You can join industry associations, blog, and speak.
Stage two: reach high.
The prime objective for this stage is to find your sweet spot - the intersection of what you’re good at, what you love to do, and what the world appreciates.
Keep asking those three hard questions: What am I good at? What do I love to do? What does the world appreciate?
How high can I go, and how do I navigate the next step? How do I find my sweet spot, but avoid getting bored and stale? How do I increase my impact without just working longer hours and wrecking my life? How do I convert all of that great groundwork in stage one into some meaningful rewards?
Focus on your strengths and largely ignore your weaknesses.
If you are a good communicator, work to become the best public speaker in your company. If you are a talented communicator, take on tough team challenges that show your special abilities to integrate where others have failed.
Stand out.
Differentiate yourself from the pack, stand out, and become eligible for career pathways that will be most rewarding to you. Stand for something that others value. Fly your flag. You are a career brand. You are on the shelf with other well-intentioned brands. Some boss with a job opening or promotion is shopping for a solution to their problem and you need to get them to pick you.
McKinsey looks for “spiking” in a talent profile - areas of skill and passion that are way above average. Once we understand what makes us different, we need to spend time on it, nurture it, and celebrate it.
Stage three: achieve lasting impact.
(largely ignored because I won’t reach that stage before in 20 years at least)
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Career fuel
Fuel comes in three main forms:
Transportable skills
Meaningful experiences
Enduring relationships
Fuel is critical throughout your career. In stage one (start strong) you need to accumulate it, in stage two (reach high) you need to take advantage of it, and in stage three (achieve lasting impact) you need to refresh and preserve it.
Transportable skills:
Transportable skills are fundamental abilities that you will acquire and carry with you throughout your career. They are not just technical knowledge and jargon that help you to do your current job. They are capabilities and building blocks that you will carry with you from job to job, company to company, and even industry to industry.
Transportable skills mentioned in ‘The long view’:
Problem solving
Persuasive communication
Getting things done
Becoming a talent magnet
Giving and asking for help
Emotional intelligence (aka EQ)
Meaningful experiences:
Be open to new meaningful experiences. Volunteer for them.
There are many different kinds of experiences that can be meaningful to you:
Professional experience:
You can start something new.
You can rapidly expand a business
You can turn around a struggling business and make it healthy.
Personal travel.
International work assignments.
Community/volunteer activities.
Major events, product launches, famous initiatives to which you personally contributed.
Public speaking / writing experiences.
Teaching / advisory / mentoring experiences.
Hobbies, activities, and passions outside of work.
Enduring relationships:
This includes both the employer brands you associate with and the people you connect with throughout the journey.
If you want to see what employer brands carry the best reputation, consult sources like the WPP Brandz list of the world’s most valuable brands or Fortune’s most admired companies.
Personal relationships include:
Your bosses.
No one has more impact than your immediate boss. Are you learning best practices and good habits? Are you working for a respected career professional who is going places? Have you learned from an entrepreneur who will teach you about risk-taking and other transportable skills?
Your boss is the #1 factor for job success and happiness. Your boss’s boss is also a critical influencer. If they think you’re a genius (or an idiot) it makes a big difference in your pathway.
Clients/customer relationships.
Business partners. Are you working with excellent business partners such as consultants, agency partners, technology vendors, or talent recruiters who can support and propel your career down the road?
Talent around you. Ask yourself, “If I started my own company, who from around here would I want to bring with me (and would they come if I asked them)?”
Find your tribe. Check out professional networks and communities like Summit and Ten Thousand Coffees.
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How to make career decisions
Put your choices in a bigger context.
It’s pretty easy to do a superficial side-by-side comparison of two jobs and check off the obvious pros and cons. Will I get more pay? Does it come with a sexier title, or more vacation, or a better dental plan? These kinds of technical comparisons miss the point. You need to put your choices into a bigger context.
Instead, think about your career ambition: “To become _____ within _____ years.”
What fuel do you already have? What fuel do you need to get there?
Then evaluate the job offers you have and compare them with your current position. Which type of fuel will you be able to acquire in each of them?
Look for a place where you’ll be surrounded by people who are smarter than you.
Find a company where at least 30% of people are smarter than you.
People tend to hire those they know, and many of these people will likely be your colleagues for the next thirty years.
One simple heuristic to determine how smart the people are at the company is how selective they are in hiring. You want to pick the company that has a really hard (and often long) recruiting process where you need to meet a lot of people, complete a project, and have some grueling interviews.
Look for a place where you’ll be given an opportunity to fail.
While definite success initially feels good, it doesn’t help you grow. Find an organization that will give you projects where there is a high chance of failure.
Look for a place that has a history of giving massive responsibility to people like you.
Find people who joined the company with a similar profile as you and see if some of these people were given outsized responsibility in the company.
Make career decisions in the right frame of mind.
Don’t be bullied by a boss or headhunter to make a snap decision.
Don’t entrust your career to flash mobs or any other knee-jerk urge to change. Talk to at least three people in your current firm before making a decision (your boss, HR, and at least one other trusted voice in the organization). Explore options in your current company.
If you deliver an ultimatum with only a few days for the company to respond, you need to be prepared for the consequences.
It is healthy and constructive to express your ambitions to your bosses. But your goal should be about creating a pathway and a timetable, not necessarily an instant solution. If you deliver an ultimatum, most of the time, the company will not make a counter offer.
Don’t close any doors until you’re forty-five.
Before making a career decision, ask: “Will this open or close doors for me?” A lot of my peers left too early for bigger titles or bigger money. But often these moves closed doors instead of opening them.
Working for a second-rate company closes doors.
If you decide to leave, exit with grace.
Former colleagues and employers are a critical part of your career ecosystem. They will provide ratings and opinions about you for years to come.
Wrap up your assignments with notable diligence and accountability. Heal wounds as appropriate. Say thank you.
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‘The Long View’ also covered many more insightful topics. You’ll find them below in alphabetical order.
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Cognitive biases
Temporal discounting.
We undervalue benefits that come in the future. We all resist taking on pain in the present (harder work for less salary, less prestige) in order to gain something in the future - even if the future benefit will actually end up greater. As humans, we just don’t trust that the future benefits will come, and we factor them down very sharply.
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Communication
How you know you’re an effective communicator:
When you try to convince someone in an email, how often does it come back with the reply “Got it, thanks”? Or do your emails tend to ignite an email war?
Learn how to spot communication breakdowns and adjust your approach accordingly.
Correspondence is when two people use different words to say the same thing.
Conflict can arise when two people use the same word but mean different things. This comes up a lot when talking about abstract concepts like “efficiency” or “quality”.
Contrast happens where there is no overlap at all. This is when two colleagues cannot seem to see eye to eye.
Even if people have the right messages, they often choose the wrong medium to convey them.
Face-to-face meetings remain the most precious and expensive of all communication forms.
Email and text are lousy ways to resolve tough emotional conflict. That requires old-school channels like the phone or face-to-face time. It’s okay to use text or email as the set-up medium, but use something more personal as a closer: “Wow. This is a really important issue We must talk. Can we meet or talk by phone at 9:00am tomorrow?”
Even as the world goes digital, the written word still can play a beautiful role. I still send the occasional postcard, handwritten note, or letter because it is the best way to mark an emotional moment of truth. “Congratulations” “We’re glad you’re here” “Thank you” “I’m sorry” “My condolences”
Ways to improve your communication skills:
Could you do a two-minute video on a topic you are passionate about and attract more than a thousand views (without taking your clothes off)? Pick a topic, shoot a low-cost video, post it, and see what happens. Try some variations.
Listen to podcasts and the moth.
Watch videos of masters of public speaking and persuasion like Bill Clinton and Steve Jobs.
Critique your own speeches on video.
(Email) Say exactly what you want the audience to do next.
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Emotional intelligence
For leaders, emotional intelligence is almost 90 percent of what sets stars apart from the mediocre.
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Giving and asking for help
“Taking” is a pattern of asking without giving back, “matching” is giving, but with the expectation of something in return, and “giving” is unconditional giving with no major expectation of receiving something back.
Givers are more likely to be among the highest performing and most satisfied people.
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Happiness
Three main factors explain our happiness:
50% is genetically determined
10% is affected by life circumstances
40% is subject to voluntary, intentional activities
Our genetic set point.
The set point for happiness is similar to the set point for weight. Some people are blessed with skinny dispositions: even when they’re not trying, they easily maintain their weight. By contrast, others have to work extraordinarily hard to keep their weight at a desirable level, and the moment they slack off even a bit, the pounds creep back on.
Those of us with low happiness set points will have to work harder to achieve and maintain happiness, while those of us with high set points will find it easier to be happy under similar conditions.
Life circumstances.
Our life circumstances - including income - may matter less than we think. Once we achieve a threshold level of material wealth and comfort, our life circumstances do not seem to explain much about our happiness.
“Hedonistic adaptation”: we seem to begin taking things for granted and do not feel the same lift as when we first acquired the new status.
Intentional activities.
We can’t alter our genetic set points, and changes in life circumstances don’t have a lasting impact on our happiness, but we can increase and sustain our happiness through intentional activities.
If we observe genuinely happy people, they don’t just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings.
Evidence-based happiness-increasing tactics:
Expressing gratitude
Cultivating optimism
Avoiding overthinking and social comparison
Practicing acts of kindness
Nurturing social relationships
Developing strategies for coping
Learning to forgive
Increasing flow experiences
Savoring life’s joys
Committing to your goals
Practicing religion and spirituality
Taking care of your body
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Hiring
You need to become a talent magnet.
Leaders who have the ability to attract and mobilize top talent win.
Talent magnets don’t just perform at a higher level as individuals - they nurture and develop the next generation of stars, and attract fresh talent into the organization.
Ultimately, no one needs to work for you, they must want to work for you.
If you’re at a junior level, you can use the experiences you have with your bosses to identify the things that made you feel valued and the things you want to avoid when you’re further along.
I ask candidates for senior roles to tell me about the people who worked for them at various companies in the past. Where did you find the people - did you inherit them or recruit them? Most importantly, where are they now? Did they thrive within that firm or the industry? Did the best ones follow you to your next company? The worst answer someone can give is, “Good question. I don’t know where they are now.” This signals to me that the person is someone who doesn’t deeply value talent, and is likely deficient in the critical “talent magnet” skill.
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Leadership
Leadership style guidance.
Write different leadership dimensions on a piece of paper. It will look something like this:
Make 3 columns: Too little --- Ideal --- Too much. Then add the rows, which will be leadership dimensions:
Pushover --- Strong & warm --- Frantic
In the weeds --- Well-engaged --- In the clouds
Fort Knox --- Selective --- Facebook
Plot where you stand today for each dimension, and the direction you need to be moving. Then set a personal goal to move closer to the ideal.
User very simple language and images for the dimensions like “pushy vs. pushover” and “in the weeds vs. in the clouds” so that people grasp and accept the feedback more readily.
Learn how to adjust your cruising altitude.
You need to transform from a doer to a leader. The approach that made you successful in stage one often doesn’t translate very well as you try to increase your impact without just working longer hours.
Leaders must be able to fly high enough to be strategic and see the big picture. Any senior executive must be able to do this, because you are one of the very few, maybe the only one, who can see the whole picture.
At the same time, effective leaders also require the ability to get extremely granular to solve a tough problem or close a deal. CEOs who have a serious crisis - like a mining disaster or a security breach - get right to the center of the issue and get their hands dirty and stay engaged until the mission is accomplished.
The trick is to be able to alter your cruising altitude like a dive-bomber. You fly high in the air to survey the landscape and spot big problems or opportunities. Once you identify a target, you have the ability to home in on it and crush the objective. We all know leaders who only have their heads in the clouds. We also know others who seem to operate a few inches off the ground, micromanaging and interfering.
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Learning
The secret ingredients to creating mastery are desire and time. We all know how much more deeply we learn when are motivated. If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention.
If you’re going to do something, find out who’s best and do it with them.
Skill sprints: periodically use cycles of ninety days to intensely focus on improving one specific ability.
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Managing conflict
Every meaningful business issue is solved in a small quiet room with a few people. Confrontation is healthy. Make sure it is tackled in the right forum. Avoid repetitive flame emails. Contentious issues might best be confronted in smaller groups rather than big, acrimonious public meetings.
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Managing your boss
If you are going to push for a raise or promotion, go in on a win.
If you expect to get promoted think about some candidates who could credibly replace you in your current job.
If you are a good performer, your boss will have some natural resistance to moving you into a new role. Make it easy for them to support your move by proposing some options around your succession plan.
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Mentoring
Three roles that mentors can play in our lives:
The Star. A successful role model who shows us how it can be done.
The Sage. Like Socrates doesn’t give us the answer but teaches us how to think.
The Agitator. Spurs and stretches us, and gives us the occasional kick in the pants.
When you find someone who sparks your career, do all you can to work for them, be useful to them, or spend time with them. If you are lucky enough to get their ear and their guidance, be a sponge.
Build a relationship by being a good student and a hard worker. Be loyal and committed to them and what they are trying to accomplish. And above all, be appreciative. Show them the impact they made, and thank them early and often. Periodically send them a note to let them know how you’re doing. Share victories and failures.
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Networking
The key to managing relationships is to do it with intention.
Imagine a pyramid with yourself on top.
Below that are your champions. They are the mentors and advocates who help advise, support, and propel you in your career. Usually five or fewer people. Champions say good things about you behind your back and promote your cause to others.
Below that are your critical colleagues. They are the five to ten people in your current company who decisively influence your progress. The list starts with your boss.
Below that is your community of experts. These are the people who have special knowledge and access that can help you succeed in your job and in your career. This community needs to be recruited and nurtured. The best way is not by asking for help, it’s by offering it.
The bottom of the pyramid is all of your connections. Your LinkedIn & Facebook contacts, your alumni networks (schools, foundations, jobs), etc.
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Onboarding on a new job
Your presence, attitude, and demeanor are now highly visible and contagious. Think hard about what signals you want to send. Staff will look to you like never before for signals on how well they are doing. Whether you are expressing happiness, stress, confidence, cynicism, disappointment or danger, effective today the staff will pick up your signals and adjust their own attitudes and behaviors accordingly.
Once you land on a vision, make it simple and repeat, repeat, repeat. It is so easy to overestimate the capacity of an organization to absorb vision and a rallying cry. Find a simple collection of words that expresses the basic direction you want the organization to go in. They need to be directionally correct and memorable, not perfect. Put “news” and changes in the context of your enduring beliefs and vision. “This is happening as a reflection of our deep belief that X is important.”
Decide early who is on your bus. Every leader needs a small core team of close colleagues who can deliver on the agenda and the mission. Choosing this group is often a leader’s most important task.
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Productivity
Are people at work trusting you with more and more high-profile projects, or are those being assigned to others? If you can deliver once, it’s a heroic act. If you can deliver consistently, it’s a powerful lifelong career skill.
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