Our 30th Year of Providing Personalized Marketing and Management Services for Presidents and Vice Presidents ONLY.™For those in transition and considering a career move, I would like to provide you with some positive information on how you might address your career concerns. I do not have all the answers. But in thirty years and with several thousand success stories, I would like to share how we work with senior executives in helping each create the context to their career decisions.
Let’s start with some of your concerns and questions and let’s see if any of these are familiar.
How do I transition from working for 25 years to not working at all? How do I maintain my self-esteem? How do I still demonstrate my value and worth to my family and my community? How do I find a second or third career… something that will be really challenging and exciting? What firms are looking for someone who has my capabilities? What do you mean I don’t have value? Doesn’t the contribution and accomplishments I have made count for anything? And what is the process that is the best way to present and package myself to prospective employers and explore new opportunities?
Satisfaction; hunger to contribute; need to be part of a team; opportunity to demonstrate and exhibit your leadership qualities. Do any of you still feel the need to compete? Perhaps you are frustrated, even angered. If so then listen to how you can apply your energies for re-entering the fray.
To start with you have to be willing to assess three areas that provide a context to finding the optimum answers. These three are 1) looking within yourself 2) looking at the external environment around you and 3) looking at how the future is unfolding and how you can fit in. I have labeled each of these three areas:
1) AWARENESS
2) CHANGE
3) PEOPLE.
Let’s take a moment to look at each, briefly.
How astute are your levels of AWARENESS?
Measuring awareness goes beyond the morning newspaper, CNBC and reading BusinessWeek. Today, a person, who is a key decision-maker, must drill down deeper than a superficial level and ask questions of key managers and direct reports that demonstrates full engagement and interest.
Questions like how are we doing, what else can we do? How does this compare to our competitors? How are we measuring the results and how does this impact our productivity represent a sampling of the 60 basic questions that represent a leader’s perspective.
Just having a passing familiarity with information is not good enough. You must constantly be reading and adding to your digital IQ or what Bill Gates called The Digital Nervous System of every company. But how do we really tap into the true productivity gains of technology when the average person utilizes less than 5% of the features on their desktop or mobile device?
Are you aware that to become a global economic leader, China is building 6 new cities that will all be larger than New York with 30-40,000 skyscrapers? Each city will have over 10-20 million people. Their goal: to achieve this in 17-20 years.
Did you know that the explosion of the Internet and interactive marketing now mandates that the top marketing executive in every firm has a command of over 88 areas of applications? Similar depth is required for those heading Finance, HR, IT, Administration, Distribution, Manufacturing and Customer Service. The good news is that by knowing and pinpointing the 16 internal and external performance drivers you can achieve a high probability of success.
In short, awareness of top executives has dramatically shifted from passive knowledge to active interest. Interest in social networking, active engagement in corporate social responsibility, active participation in education and community organizations and causes, and understanding and applying coaching, mentoring and teaching and self awareness. It culminates in what Dr. Abraham Maslow called self-actualization.
CHANGE The second area of building a solid context to defining and understanding your value focuses on your interpretation and flexibility to accepting and applying CHANGE. None of us are comfortable with the speed and degree of change. None of us find it easy to adopt new habits, learn new approaches and processes and change the way we do things. To a large degree we have no choice. Take email as an example. Could you do without it?
What the speed of change forces us to address are new approaches to strategy and scenario planning. It alters our approach to our customers, how we manage and measure operations and how timely and effective are our organization’s reflexes and responses to change.
Norman Augustine, the past CEO of Lockheed Martin noted 10 factors that he had to address concerning change as his firm fought to be only one of four prime government aerospace contractors to survive the merger wave of the nineties. Today, Lockheed thrives because they created a new culture, a new operating policy, new products and services and a new mission.
As executives must address changing career issues, it is important to look at your leadership strengths and weakness, your style to management and working with others, your skills and competencies, your motivational factors and identifying what barriers that may be holding you back from accomplishing your next level of growth.
PEOPLE The third area which defines the context framework is how well you relate and work with PEOPLE. Are you looked at as an “old stick-in-the mud” or someone who is open to new ideas and innovation? Have you evaluated your critical thinking areas which include your decision-making and decision influencing processes? What was the last time you re-engineered and radically overhauled an operational area? Have you kept abreast of some of the key contemporary and future drivers like knowledge management, human capital, social networking and distance learning?
Have the people you work with also kept pace with human resource shifts in workplace flexibility, global business practices, work and society, workforce development, the redefinition of jobs into roles, the new application of cross-functional collaboration, and the increasing importance and value of human resources to corporate strategy and profitability.
These changes apply to all types of organizations structure ranging from entrepreneurial, functional, divisional, holding company or matrix-based entities.
One of our firm’s distinct benefits is helping you pinpoint the attributes and values that you have perfected and how you can apply these to a career opportunity. In short, we sharpen the focus of what you can offer, why you can make a difference, and how you can improve and add-value to a specific organization.
In addressing these objectives we follow a proven methodology which I developed and have refined over the past three decades. It is simple, comprehensive and elegant. It is only for senior people and top executives. It has worked well for many and it will work well for you.
When our firm works with you, we must focus on the future. Where will you be in 2 , 5 or 8 years from today? What goals and objectives have you written down on what you want to achieve? What values are important to you and which firms out there are eager to talk to you?
By defining your current capabilities, we start to sculpt and design the opportunity that you really want to achieve. Together we formulate definitive response to the following: What are the ways you can immediately contribute to an organization? Who would you love to mentor, coach, teach, advise and lead? What mistakes and potholes would your experience be invaluable to helping younger and less experienced managers and executives avoid? And how could you contribute to better critical thinking that would lead to a better vision and strategic plan for an organization?
Many of you have gained exceptional insight into understanding the complexity and nuance involved in sophisticated decision-making. But where do you go to share this knowledge? What and where are the firms that are also looking for you?
Our success in helping you find the optimum opportunity follows a very simple, common sense approach customized to meet your specific needs. This starts with a discussion based on your input and goals. It is how we develop a unique marketing strategy that is pertinent only to you.
Next, we support this strategy with a set of tools that puts the strategy in action. These tools include crisp, cogent letters, effective and succinct resumes, use of electronic portfolios and presentations to emphasize your style, application of highly unique databases, ongoing coaching and support, introduction to contact networks and consultation on negotiating the most favorable deal for you.
In summary, David Werner International provides a unique resource for successful business people who want to take the next step in completing their career. Maintaining a low-key, highly confidential approach and treating your needs as a super premium brand, those who seek true customization and outstanding outcomes have found entering into a dialogue with us has led to a truly enlightening opportunity to address their career near and long term needs.