Smart Moves [antikvár]

1 The Context: That Uncertain Feeling (Careers can be viewed as fictions about the past to help us feel better about the future.' That was the conclusion reached by two psychologists from Sheffield University, Nigel Nicholson and Michael West, in their study of the career patterns of 2300 members of the British Institute of Management - a veritable Kinsey Report on how the turbulent business environment of the past decade has affected middle and senior managers.1 Their phrase produced an uneasy smile of recognition from everyone we talked to in the course of researching this book, because in fact very few people have a career plan that is anything more than a set of expedients. That is odd. In all their other activities managers operate on a basis of business plans, forecasts and budgets. But when it came to managing their own careers, Nicholson and West found that in most cases, and at almost any level, careers were a set of improvizations based on loose assumptions about the future, rather than a coherent match between personal values and skills and corporate needs and goals. Typically, they are made up of some of the following ingredients: • Opportunistic moves in the direction of money, promotion and job satisfaction - reading the job advertisements or talking to recruitment intermediaries in response to a gut feeling that the time is ripe to make a move, for whatever reason • A blind belief that since everything has gone well so far, it will continue to do so in the future - in the light of the growing