Product Description

What is different about the careers of people like Lou Gerstner, the acclaimed, recently retired chairman and CEO of IBM? Or Senator Elizabeth Dole, Yahoo! COO Dan Rosensweig, and Tom Freston, chairman and CEO of MTV Networks?

Why did they ascend to the top and prosper—why did they have extraordinary careers—while others equally talented never reached their potential or aspirations?

Jim Citrin and Rick Smith of Spencer Stuart, the world’s most influential executive search firm, set out to explore this question. The result—based on in-depth, original research—is sure to be the most important and useful book for anyone seeking to crack the code of how to build a rewarding, personally satisfying career.

Like weather systems and financial markets, careers contain patterns. What Citrin and Smith found from their research and extensive experience is that people with extraordinary careers are guided by five straightforward patterns that can be harnessed and used by everyone. These individuals:

• Understand the value of you by translating their knowledge and experience into action, building their personal value over each phase of their career
• Practice benevolent leadership by not clawing their way to the top but by being carried there
• Solve the permission paradox, the dilemma of not being able to get a job without experience and not getting the experience without the job
• Differentiate using the 20/80 principle of performance by storming past their defined jobs to create breakthrough ideas and deliver unexpected impact
• Do not micromanage their careers, but macromanage them by gravitating toward the things they are best at and have a passion for, and working with people they like and respect

No one manages your career for you. But with Citrin and Smith as your guide, you’ll be able to understand—and act on—the root causes of success. And what better source for strategic career advice than Spencer Stuart, the firm that over the past ten years has conducted more than 60 percent of the searches for Fortune 1000 CEOs?


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #368732 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-25
• Released on: 2005-01-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400081684
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Aside from some perfunctory tips on job searching, resume writing and interviewing, the authors, both consultants with the head-hunting firm Spencer Stuart, approach careers as problems in psychology and group dynamics. They urge mid-career executives with suppressed feelings of anxiety and helplessness to view a career as a free-form project of self-actualization that should fit with their personalities and inspire passion. More pragmatically, career building is also an exercise in image-management that should convey potential and experience to employers and their head-hunting consultants. This partly involves canny career moves allowing talent to shine. But climbing the ladder also requires consummate office politics-manipulating perceptions, networking with the powerful, strategic quid pro quos, gaining power by "masquerading as the leader"-all accomplished without stepping on toes, stifling subordinates or "sucking up." The authors convey these lessons in a sometimes turgid mixture of opaque managementese ("successful executives... literally achieve positive impact at an accelerating rate"), squishy survey data ("extraordinary executives... leverage both their strengths and their passions more than six times as often as average employees") and case studies in which executives move from industry to industry in a meteoric, triumphal procession of nebulous jobs in consulting, marketing and finance. The blend of motivational therapeutics and softly Machiavellian tactics may help some executives get out of their rut, but the generic, almost contentless corporate work experiences on display seem far from extraordinary.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Certainly, Citrin's latest book (after Lessons from the Top, 1999, and Zoom! 2002, with Tomas J. Neff) is filled with accolades for executive recruiter Spencer Stuart, his employer. Overlook that, for a while; instead, focus on the enormous potential his company has to analyze a vast array of executive talent and uncover patterns of achievement. That is exactly what Citrin, with coauthor Smith, does. Five differentiating principles--the contrast between a merely successful professional and the extraordinary executive--are not only described but also demonstrated in real C-level individuals in U.S. corporations. For the first principle, "understand the value of you," winning bicyclist Lance Armstrong is profiled, as is Yahoo!'s COO Dan Rosensweig. The benevolent leader, an executive focused on the success of others, is best exemplified in Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, among other singled-out individuals. Lists go on and on; what's more important is the application of these principles to the organization, which creates extraordinary people. Finally, the recognition and proof that talent matters to business! Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
It’s compact, well-written and wise, full of relevant examples and mercifully free of H.R. mumbo jumbo -- The Washington Post, August 10, 2003

Customer Reviews

If You Aren't Strategizing About Your Career, You Must Read!
The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, by James M. Citrin and Richard A. Smith was an easy read, and a worthwhile one. Given that I am at a juncture in my career where I need to be making some rather important strategic decisions about going back for the MBA, or staying in the full-time workforce. In reality, my further education will likely be a compromise of those two disciplines, but nonetheless, I need to be strategic.

The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers held no breakthrough insights for me, but it did serve to hone my focus on a few key elements of my career management, and shed some light on how I'm currently doing things that I wasn't aware of.

There were five basic 'patterns' that the book detaiuled are as follows:

1. Understand the Value of You. People with extrordinary careers understand how value is created in the organization and manage their careers according to the value chain. There are three phases of your value, the Potential phase, where employers hire your what you will be able to do, the Experiential phase, where employers hire you to put your previous successes to the test, and Harvest phase, where you are reaping the seads of knowledge sewn in the years of past experience.

2. Practice Benevolent Leadership. Behind every great managers are great employees and great mentors. Use your friends wisely!

3. Overcome the Permission Paradox. Bottom line - successful careers are built on those things that were weren't told you couldn't do, not those things you were givent perimission to do. Understand explicit permission versus implicit permission, and use that to your advantage!

4. Use the 20/80 Principle of Performance. Get out of your defined job and create some real value against the 20% that really matters!

5. Find the Right Fit. No passion, move on to the next gig. This is a major part of the battle. Don't be too successful at something you don't like!

So, what am I doing differently now? Not much really. I've always been an 'implicit permission' kind of guy, I'm quite aware of my current value and am always testing it, and I'm very passionate about what I do. Are you?

Don't forget to check out the book's official website http://www.5patterns.com/

Take Hold of Your Career
I read a short article about "The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers" on the Internet and decided it might be worth reading. Most of the career "guides" I had read up to this time were of the, `choose your ideal career through completing a series of tests to identify your strengths' variety. But what intrigued me about this book was that rather than selecting the "right" career it was more about making the most of the career of you have. Still, Citrin and Smith do acknowledge the importance of being in a career that plays to your, "strengths, passions, and people" by making it one of the "patterns" of extraordinary careers; oddly, though, it is the last of the five rather the first. Perhaps one of my favorite quotes comes from this pattern, "...many people find, partway up the ascent, that their ladders were leaning against the wrong wall." Again, though, this book is more about what to do with the your career once you have found the "right" one. And therein lies perhaps the most important maxim of this book, successful careers are managed, sometimes unconsciously, rather than driven by fate or luck; a corollary is that opportunities are created and actively sought after rather than passively waited for. Even the authors acknowledge that these ideas aren't new. But the patterns represent a distillation of the interviews and surveys of extraordinary executives conducted across Industry boundaries and they, perhaps, are new, or are at least fresh.

The core of the book is chapters 2 - 6, one for each of the patterns: Understanding the Value of You, Practice Benevolent Leadership, Overcome the Permission Paradox, Differentiate Using the 20/80 Principle, and Find the Right Fit. Citrin and Smith go on to extend the patterns to extraordinary organizations in chapter 7. They use specific examples gleaned from their interviews to illustrate each of the patterns. And while these examples are certainly condensed, in order to fit within the scope of a single volume, they generally, if not specifically and in detail, prove the point. What is less clear though, are how technical careers fall into these patterns. All of the chosen examples are CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, presidents, vice-presidents, and perhaps a Director or two. Though they try to generalize these success patterns you are still left with the impression that extraordinary careers are, at least in part, defined by having entered the executive ranks. I am sure that Citrin and Smith would disagree, but I am still struggling with how to apply these patterns to my rather technical career of Software Engineering without becoming a manager.

Overall this has been a valuable book - if for no other reason than that it has caused me to think about my career in concrete terms and how I can actively manage it rather than waiting for it to happen. The book isn't overly long and can be read in a week during your lunch breaks. Thinking about your career and how to apply the patterns is where the hard work begins.

Take Your Career and Make it Extraordinary! Read This Book!
The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction by James M. Citrin and Richard A. Smith. This is a refreshing look at the Self-Help Career book genre. Job seekers, employers, and human resource professionals - in short, anyone that's interested in enriching their career - will benefit from this book.

THE FIVE PATTERNS OF EXTRAORDINARY CAREERS

1. Understand the Value of You. People with extraordinary careers understand how value is created in the workplace, and translate that knowledge into action, building their personal value over each phase of their careers.

2. Practice Benevolent Leadership. People with extraordinary careers do not claw their way to the top, they are carried there.

3. Overcome the Permission Paradox. People with extraordinary careers overcome one of the great Catch-22s of business: You can't get the job without experience and you can't get the experience without the job.

4. Differentiate Using the 20/80 Principle of Performance. People with extraordinary careers do their defined jobs exceptionally well but don't stop there. They storm past pre-determined objectives to create breakthrough ideas and deliver unexpected impact.

5. Find the Right Fit (Strengths, Passions & People). People with extraordinary careers make decisions with the long-term in mind. They willfully migrate toward positions that fit their natural strengths and passions and where they can work with people they like and respect.

The authors have developed a razor-sharp vocabulary that brings welcome dialogue about careers into the new age of business. The executives in this book are all focused on their career, this is one aspect of those with successful careers. The authors have proven that ignoring one's career can greatly supress chances at success.

Is it the best book I ever read? No, but it did help me to focus my attention on skills I was utilizing, just not to my best advantage.