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An Open Letter Copyright February, 2003 John C. Demma All Rights Reserved PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THIS COPYRIGHT Is ex GE CEO, Jack Welch, considering entering the "careers" business? On the phantom website, CEOwannabe.com, he reportedly had the following unverified exchange with an admirer… Dear Jack, Sorry to hear about your troubles but oooooboy I got em too. Job's ending and I'm afraid I won't get any traction in my job search. Worse, Peter Drucker and others say most hires and promotions are misfires. Some put misfires at higher than 66%, which gives me at best only a 1 in 3 chance of being the right candidate in the right moment for the right outfit and a 2 in 3 OR WORSE chance of being the wrong one in the wrong moment for the wrong outfit. Scary. Outfits are more comfortable with the devil they know than the devil they don't. How can I buck the lousy odds and break through the tough times? Some disrespectful non-team players say that you, Jack Welch yourself, the CEO guru of CEO gurus, and my hero-of-heroes, would probably miss the cut in the "Best Practice" hiring processes outfits now follow. What gives? And not at all encouraging either is what happened to Michael Armstrong at AT&T. He was chosen because he had a vision for AT&T. And he made that vision happen, right down to the meltdown of billions of dollars of shareholder value. Jack, Jack, shareholder value. Billions gone. Pipe smoke. Is Drucker right? Again? If outfits can't get the cream right, what kind of crap-shoot chance does that give lesser mortals slogging through Alan Greenspan's jobless recovery soft patch? Please review my resume and advise. Dynamic, visionary, passionate, results-driven CEO (aspirant) Dear DVPRD CEO (Aspirant) Straight-from-the-gut, Time for the tail to start wagging the bull so grab the horns and put some traction in that soft-patch. Here's how. Abandon recruiters and HR folks. No downside. Their track record stinks. When it comes to resumes, their inside the box "expertise" is over rated. A super majority of resumes are lemming look-alikes. Consuming a steady diet of junk documents makes them "expert"? C'mon. Does serious "food critic" leap to mind in describing a person whose diet's limited to "hold everything" Big Macs? How can they be "expert" when their diet's limited to the resume equivalent of junk food dittoed for consumption from San Francisco to Charlotte? So stay outside the box where you claim you've always been and let the chips fall. Let go of inside-the-boxers. Next, do the due diligence (your resume claims you're good at) in analyzing the moment and the enterprise to make a case for advancing your own candidacy as the "right" one. And so what if you miss. So what if your candidacy isn't quite the perfect intersection with an outfit's challenge of the moment. Just means you're a "no" closer to "yes". Then put the cross-hairs on other outfits that your business acumen says face similar challenges. What's better, taking a shot or not trying? How many "jobs" can you hold at one time anyway? While you're at it, deconstruct your resume. It's a lemming stinker. More than a hodge-podge of scannable data, your resume's the voice of your candidacy. That's "voice" singular not plural. So let go of the notion you're a Pavarotti talent scaled for "CIO", "Chief Business Development & Sales" or a host of other "C" job titles. Resume jiggling to accommodate such screwy notions produces croaky Karaoke not 200 buck-a-seat tenor clarity. Your audience has every right to know just what "mission" you're singing. Fixing your resume to feign you're on key when you're clueless is gaming the system. That what you're up to…gaming? Leave that to the Ken Lay's, Jeff Skillings', and Andy Fastow's of the world. They were products of HR "best practices" selection and super at "gaming". Where'd it get em and all of Enron's stakeholders? Accept that your candidacy's probably the wrong one for a huge portion of the outfits and jobs you THINK you qualify for. Let that hard truth liberate instead of hogtie you. Stop expecting everyone to instantly fall in love with your resume or you. Not the way love or business excellence happens. So what. You've delivered "solutions" but do you offer evidence of the precise problems and challenges you solved? No. You're a "strategic thinker" and a purposeful, goal setter/achiever, but are you applying your "business acumen" (in your resume) and stating what the next challenge is that your career evidence shows you're ready to solve? No. You're a "go-to" person who's "made a difference" but are you crystal clear about what the "difference" was? No. Instead, your resume's an incoherent (but scannable) grocery list of "achievements", "keywords", and "skills". Incoherency contributes to landing jobs that have a 2 in 3 chance of being the wrong one, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong moment, ala Michael Armstrong. Yes, Drucker's right. Again. At the end of the day, that's the reason for the 66% misfires. It happens at all levels because of incoherent inside-the-box thinking and because of blindness in vetting job candidates. "Risk-taker", huh? How does that square with your enthusiasm for taking a stand from the get-go (with your resume) that may shoot down your candidacy? Cobbling a mile wide, inch deep, patch quilt resume that risks nothing and provokes nothing yields a candidacy without traction, a real wheel spinner. Naked stands the "entrepreneur" -that favorite old resume chestnut- whose transparent finery reveals "risk averse". Careers don't soar on the wings of chestnuts, DV, but they can slip, slide, and crash n' burn prior to take off from too many under a resume's wheels. Yours is wobbly and close to wheels-off, which isn't the way to get traction. (See, CEO stuff isn't rocket science.) Are you ready to risk being shot DOWN for a million reasons but NOT because your targeted audience doesn't see payoffs, coherence and relevance for them right now? Can't tell from your resume whether you have the moral courage to take a stand and risk that. How many outfits do you think are worried about hiring the next Andy Fastow, or some gender harassing, book-cooker low-life whose ethical boundaries stop at what's-in-it-for-me? Do you think your courage and honor are important to signal at the resume stage of your candidacy? And I'm not talking here about larding your resume with words like "integrity". Courage isn't an abstraction. Can be as simple as laying out informative resume content that exudes credibility for the right audience. That's under your control. Why bother to court and impress a mass audience of inside-the-box hip shooters who don't care about properly vetting your candidacy because they've prejudged you as part of a vast herd of supplicants? How many times in your past have you advanced propositions whose "bullet-proofness" was on the line? Then why aren't you taking the same stance with the most important "proposition" you'll ever undertake? Your resume suggests you don't have the self-awareness and haven't done the due diligence demanded to understand the trajectory of your candidacy in positioning it for a solid connection with outfits that need what you can bring to them at this moment. You're making the audience connect the dots of your candidacy…BUT THAT'S NOT THEIR JOB. If you don't risk being shot down, you won't be of compelling urgency to anyone. Safe and stuck in the soft patch with a vast herd of job supplicants cowing under the herder's prod and afraid of being shot. That your aim? No, I didn't think so. Has no upside. No risk no gain. And tell me, DV, where's the downside in taking that risk? Being marginalized and devalued by blind herders and inside-the-box outfits whose own courage and "business acumen" are questionable? Some downside. While you're deconstructing, jettison one more notion that's tombstone dead. That's the idea that you want to connect with a stable outfit. Post-Enron who's going to argue that any business's "stability" is more than a 90 day quarter away from uncertainty and its 1st cousin instability? Find a corporate chief who's not running scared…if not from subpoenas then from a steamed Audit Committee, shareholders, global competition and capitalism's super skill, the simultaneous killing/birthing of businesses at warp speed. Even Bill Gates runs scared, according to his public testimony in Microsoft's trial. So cue "scared", DV. You're in high company. Accept that not only are you a niche solution but also one with the shelf life of fresh spinach. Timely, not timeless candidacies will get continuing shots at the brass ring. The issue's how much and how quickly you make business value happen whether you're a power red ensemble or big cigar running corporate USA…or wannabe. Jack Copyright February, 2003 John C. Demma All Rights Reserved PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE THIS COPYRIGHT |
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