How business principles can guide careers

In the realm of career advice, “follow your bliss” may be a popular refrain. A new book by Bill Barnett, an adjunct professor in management at Rice, offers an alternative approach and argues that the best way to navigate a long and satisfying career is to apply the tools of business strategy.

“The Strategic Career: Let Business Principles Guide You” was published this month by Stanford University Press. The 304-page book provides readers with a guide to career choices – both short-term and long.

“When people deploy business concepts to plan their careers, they come up with more ideas, better assessments of those ideas, better decisions and stronger convictions,” Barnett said.

A former director of the management consulting firm McKinsey and Co., where he led the firm’s strategy practice, Barnett bases his guidance in part on insights honed in popular career-strategy courses he taught first at Yale University and now at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

“Many who are planning their careers find that the job market has shifted to the advantage of employers, whether as a result of the recession, globalization, information technology-driven productivity or other changes in the business landscape,” Barnett said. “Faced with these tough circumstances, it is more critical than ever for professionals to create a plan of attack and make sound decisions as they navigate their careers.”

Rather than approaching career development from the perspective of psychology and counseling, Barnett introduces concrete business tools that any consultant or business student may find familiar: enterprise visioning, developing a value proposition, market research, game theory and scenario planning that looks five to 10 years out. He explores how near-term decisions can derail or advance long-term strategy and shows how to think these decisions through in both words and self-assessments. He also describes how an aspirational personal value proposition is the cornerstone of a long career, but doesn’t take the place of career-path planning, education, reputation building and networking.

Barnett follows 33 individuals as they make their way through the thicket of career options. Readers learn from the real-life personal stories of people such as Isabel, a consultant who refuses a promotion that would derail her husband’s career; James, a 37-year-old senior vice president who decided against the risk of a new job where he’d be competing against his current colleagues; and Blair, a lawyer trying to decide whether to become a law professor or rejoin a law firm after a stimulating stint as a clerk for a federal district judge.

“If you want more from your career — not just more money, but more satisfaction, more engagement and more control — read Bill’s book,” said reviewer Scott Uhrig, founder and managing partner of Whiterock Partners. “Career success is not a matter of luck; it’s a matter of strategy.”

For more information about Barnett’s book and his research, visit http://thestrategiccareer.com.