Leadership Series
This Leadership Series of articles is targeted at those of my followers who are early in their careers and seeking advice on how they can develop themselves personally to achieve career progression
Privilege, Ambition & Ability
By Roger Hulbert
Roger Bio (to come)
“Steve Jobs has a saying that A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z players” – Guy Kawasaki, ‘Apple Evangelist’
This guest blog post begins on the topic of privilege. I was fortunate enough to attend private school, including Eton, and when younger struggled with guilt. How come I was in this position whilst others were not? My response was twofold:
A strong desire to prove myself academically. I wanted to maximise the opportunity
A belief that you should judge (and be judged) on who you were and what you did, rather than on where you came from.
“Maximum meaning, minimum means” – Abram Games, UK graphic designer
On the academic side, I went onto study Natural Sciences at Cambridge and have retained a love of learning. I love developing insight from information, essentially forecasting the future, and then improving processes or positioning off the back of this. I also love the visual summarisation of data. Data visualisation shares insight most effectively, whilst also requiring creativity.
However, 20 years into a career it is clear that “success” at work is far more than academics. Large companies are sufficiently complex that few, if any, staff members can confidently state who does what, or how well they do it. As such others’ perception of you and your work is far more important than the reality of what you achieved. Performance must be coupled to self-promotion.
“He who has a why can survive any how” – Victor Frankl, holocaust survivor & author
Self-promotion does not come easily to everyone. Ambition, defined here as a desire for greater social or financial status, helps greatly. Ambition fuels most business success stories, whether it is an entrepreneur founding a new company or a salesperson developing new markets. But ambition can also have downsides as I saw during my first job working at Andersen on the audit of Enron.
Ambition supports social mobility since those with the strongest incentives to succeed are those from less privileged backgrounds. As such ambition and ability (here I lean more to the Confucian view that ability comes from hard work rather than the Western belief in innate talent) are some of society’s best weapons for combating entrenched privilege.
“I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey” – Clayton Christensen, academic and business consultant
The quote above comes from “How Will You Measure Your Life?”, which was published two years after Christensen was diagnosed with cancer and then suffered a stroke. Roughly half-way through my working life I am still refining my answer to this question. It is clear that the answer is personal and that achieving someone else’s dream will not be fulfilling. When it comes to career money, status, interest, value-alignment and work-life balance are all important to vary degrees.
Whilst ambition is the main driver of career trajectory, it is not confined to the nicest or most talented individuals. For most people working in a team that pushes you to achieve your best through relationships based upon trust and respect (in other words “A players”) will be core part of a “successful” career. I consider myself blessed to have worked with a few.