Working Identity
Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career by Herminia Ibarra, Harvard Business School Press, 2003
What is "unconventional" about the strategies in Ibarra's title is they turn the normal advice about career transitions upside down. Hundreds of books say that a successful transition starts with forethought: set goals, audit one's resources and values, clarify the options and so on. No, she says, get moving. Experiment. Flirt with possibilities. Just try things out.
The key to her reversal of 'plan' and 'do' is her observation that we learn who we are and what we want to do by testing reality not merely imagining it:
We discover the true possibilities trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models…
Only by testing do we learn what is really appealing and feasible…
What we want clarifies with experience and validation from others along the way.
Ibarra has worked with an array of people changing direction and she has thought carefully and intelligently about their experiences. It has led her to conclude that the transition to a new phase of work is simply another learning process and, like all learning, it is a gradual "back and forth" business: doing something then reflecting on it leading to an improvement in the next doing and more reflection:
We take actions one step at a time and respond to the consequences of those actions. The self-knowledge needed is neither an 'inner truth' nor an input from someone else but tangible information about ourselves relative to specific possibilities…. The kind of knowledge we need can be acquired only in the process of making change.
The one thing we at Re-vision have found curious about the book is her insistence that it is not for people moving out of full time work. She is addressing, she thinks, the forty-somethings and advises the fifty- and sixty-somethings to go elsewhere.
This perplexes us because the transition to retirement is nothing if not reinventing one's career - the exact subtitle she gives the book. And her advice is as appropriate to retirement transitions as it is to mid-career ones.
Perhaps it is the simply the unexamined stereotype of a younger woman who imagines that not being in full-time paid employment means one is no longer engaged in meaningful work, no longer learning, no longer interested in new challenges and new directions. How silly of her.
In fact, some of her ideas may sit more comfortably with older than younger people. The example that comes to mind is her insight that the ancient wisdom "know thyself" turns out to be the prize at the end of the journey rather than the light at its beginning.