Fierce competition for market share and profits has upgraded our standards and broadened our perspective. More important, it s created a competitive marketplace in which just surviving-forget about racking up mega-profits-has been elevated to a 24-hour obsession.
Companies, tiny to multinational, are desperate to find great people. If you plan to throw impressive downsizing statistics in my face, forget it. I've seen them all. What's more, it's old news.
Downsizing is a fact of life. And it's not going away. Expect more cutbacks, layoffs, and corporate ghost towns for the remainder of the 1990s and beyond. But that's not the issue. Get beyond the buzzword and understand its real meaning-downsizing is a sterile word for dumping unnecessary human baggage. Just because corporate America continues to shed calories doesn't mean it no longer needs talented people. In fact, it needs them more than ever. The difference is, businesses are not looking for traditional, run-of-the-mill workers who show up and merely do their jobs. Instead, they want talented superstars with the management skills, energy, intuition, and plain common sense necessary to pilot organizations into the millennium. They're hungry for candidates with competitive skills who can survive an erratic marketplace in which tomorrow's widgets are already on the assembly line.
The best part is employers are bending the rules and sidestepping traditional hiring standards to find these workers. What worked in the past won't work in the future. Employers once demanded blue-chip candidates with Ivy League diplomas and experience from Fortune 500 companies. These staff members were politically correct button-down corporate clones that companies like IBM once prided themselves on hiring. Look what happened to Big Blue and hundreds of others. It has taken a while, but employers are now discovering that fancy titles from big companies are only a shallow indicator of talent.
THE DEATH OF THE JOB
That's not the half of it. Maybe you don't realize it, but like thousands of others scorned by employers that promised lifetime jobs, you've been liberated. You never have to work the way you did in the past. The reason is that the conventional job has gone the way of the dinosaur. William Bridges, author of Job Shift, has put the "job" on the list of endangered species. Many organizations are well on their way to being what Bridges calls "de jobbed." That's the hot new buzzword for getting work done without hiring full-timers for conventional jobs. It means hiring temps or contract/project workers and leasing employees.
Bridges explains that prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was no such thing as a job per se, in which someone reported to work and did the same tasks 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Instead, people worked on a "shifting cluster of tasks in a variety of locations on a schedule set by the sun, the weather, and the needs of the day." Only when work started to be packaged in factories and companies began emerging in a newly industrialized nation at the turn of the nineteenth century did the job emerge.
At the time, the concept behind a job made sense. Yet Bridges asserts it was a flawed social artifact destined for a brief life. The present marketplace is living proof. Remember when a job not only meant doing the same thing every day, but also represented a source of financial and emotional security? Back in the old days when you worked for a Big Blue clone, healthy companies actually took care of their flock. In the best of circumstances, they were surrogate mommies and daddies. You reported to the same place and hung out with the same people year in and year out. Lifestyles were spun around your employer.
Any futurist will tell you it won't be long before nomadic workers are operating out of cars, in airports, on buses, and at shifting workplaces. All the office equipment needed to run a multimillion-dollar company will be crammed into an attaché case. The modern company, according to Bridges, is rapidly being transformed from a structure built out of jobs into a field of "work needing to be done." This means work will no longer be departmentalized. Like the early craftspeople who fashioned their own work styles, modern workers must be creative chameleons-adaptable, flexible, multifaceted, veritable learning sponges capable of spinning on a dime and doing something completely different tomorrow.
It's already happening. Bridges' reading of the present and future job market is right on the money. The astute worker of the 1990s must forget about jobs completely and focus on "work needing to be done." Present an employer with the best (most efficient and profitable) way to achieve a goal and you're on the payroll. In essence, you're creating your own job by making yourself indispensable. Make sense? You bet it does. And you've got the background and skills to do it. Just activate your gray matter and you'll find a way.
TELL ME WHAT TO DO?
Put it all together and you'll discover a compelling new business environment in which to create your own job. Smart entrepreneurs are wising up and listening to experienced pros like you, people who can spot and solve problems. That spells job creation, particularly in this elastic market.
The career gurus never told you not to apply for jobs the way you did in the past. You've got insight and abilities that your younger counterparts don't. These are the priceless skills allowing you to spot opportunities no one else sees. That's what creating your own job is all about.
Start the process by making the assumption that employers don't always know what they want. Job descriptions are the best example. Countless professionals have told me their actual jobs are far different from the capsulized job descriptions which brought them to the company. This is especially true in small companies. Only weeks after being hired, employees found themselves doing countless chores that weren't even hinted at in their job descriptions.
It's easy to understand why this happens. Most entrepreneurs are guilty of minimizing a job. It's usually because they previously handled the job by rote. When translated to paper, it's inadequately explained. If it takes the entrepreneur 2 days to complete an essential part of a task, assume it'll take anyone else twice as long.
Employers lack objectivity because they live and breathe their business 7 days a week. No wonder they don't always know what a job entails or the talents and skills needed to run their organization. Countless entrepreneurs find themselves at a dangerous impasse once their businesses reach a certain plateau. To move to the next level, entrepreneurs must bring in professional managers or perish. Often, it's an advisory board, an accountant or attorney, or maybe colleagues or friends who present the business owner with irrefutable logic. It usually sounds like this; "Your energy and vision have taken the company this far. But the company has gotten so big; there is no way you can run it by yourself. You need people with skills you don't have."
Naturally, the entrepreneur will balk, insisting it's a waste of money. No one understands the business better than its founder. But if our weary entrepreneur is reasonably mature and has a solid grip on reality, he or she will agree to hiring fresh blood. This is where you enter the picture.
