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by
Reid Hoffman
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June 10 - June 16, 2019
During the boom years of the auto industry, the city of Detroit prospered. It was the land of dreams, riches, and next-generation technology. “This was Silicon Valley, man,” local newspaper columnist Tom Walsh told us, reflecting on Detroit’s golden age. Entrepreneurs were taking home colossal fortunes, and a million new people flooded into Detroit wanting a piece of it—an influx that made Detroit the fourth-most-populous city in the country.9 Wages were high; the city’s median income was the highest in America. Home ownership soared. Aside from being a great place to make a living, Detroit
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What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular.
more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market,
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Detroit did not burst overnight. It saw a gradual deflation. In fact, that was part of the problem. Because companies were still generating billions of dollars of revenue for years during their decline, it was easy for management to get complacent, to ignore the problems that were piling up. No one stress-tested the organization, or tried to identify and fix long-term weaknesses.
Why are so many winners ending up like Detroit? Each case is different, but underlying causes tend to include the hubris that comes from success, the failure to recognize and match competition, an unwillingness to exploit opportunities that contain risk, and an inability to adapt to relentless change.
Take intelligent and bold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a breakout opportunity.
Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. Keeping your career in permanent beta forces you to acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself, that you will need to adapt and evolve. But it’s still a mind-set brimming with optimism because it celebrates the fact that you have the power to improve yourself and, as important, improve the world around you.
In the following chapters, we’ll introduce how to: • Develop your competitive advantage in the market by combining three puzzle pieces: your assets, your aspirations, and the market realities. (Chapter 2) • Use ABZ Planning to formulate a Plan A based on your competitive advantages, and then iterate and adapt that plan based on feedback and lessons learned. (Chapter 3) • Build real, lasting relationships and deploy these relationships into a powerful professional network. (Chapter 4) • Find and create opportunities for yourself by tapping networks, being resourceful, and staying in motion.
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We’ll show you how to get healthy stability in your career by adapting. Adaptability creates stability.
Zappos massively differentiated itself from its competition by building a culture that is customer-centric in every way imaginable. This is what has made Zappos a trusted destination for millions of loyal online shoppers (and it’s also why it was acquired by Amazon for close to a billion dollars).
“A company hires me over other professionals because …” How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?
Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you offer the marketplace relative to the competition.
There are reasons Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google and Donald Trump started a real estate firm. Page and Brin were in a computer science doctoral program. Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer, and he had apprenticed in his father’s firm for five years. Their business goals emerged from their strengths, interests, and network of contacts.
You have two types of career assets to keep track of: soft and hard. Soft assets are things you can’t trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your reputation and personal brand; your strengths (things that come easily to you). Hard assets are what you’d typically list on a balance sheet: the cash in your wallet; the stocks you own; physical possessions like your desk and laptop. These matter because when you have an
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People list impressive-sounding-yet-vague statements like “I have two years of experience working at a marketing firm …” instead of specifying, explicitly and clearly, what they are able to do because of those two years of experience.
One of the best ways to remember how rich you are in intangible wealth—that is, the value of your soft assets—is to go to a networking event and ask people about their professional problems or needs. You’ll be surprised how many times you have a helpful idea, know somebody relevant, or think to yourself, “I could solve that pretty easily.”
Your asset mix is not fixed. You can strengthen it by investing in yourself—that’s what this book is about. So if you think you lack certain assets that would make you more competitive, don’t use it as an excuse. Start developing them.
This piece of the puzzle includes your core values, or what’s important to you in life, be it knowledge, autonomy, money, integrity, power, and so on. You may not be able to achieve all your aspirations or build a life that incorporates all your values. And they will certainly change over time. But you should at least orient yourself in the direction of a pole star, even if it changes.
Aspirations and values are both important pieces of your career competitive advantage quite simply because when you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better. The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.
That said, and contrary to what many bestselling authors and motivational gurus would have you believe, there is not a “true self” deep within that you can uncover via introspection and that will point you in the right direction.4 Yes, your aspirations shape what you do. But your aspirations are themselves shaped by your actions and experiences. You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.
It’s often said that entrepreneurs are dreamers. True. But good entrepreneurs are also firmly grounded in what’s available and possible right now. Specifically, entrepreneurs spend vast amounts of energy trying to figure out what customers will pay for. Because ultimately, the success of all businesses depends on customers willing to sign on the line that is dotted. In turn, the success of all professionals—the start-up of you—depends on employers and clients and partners choosing to buy your time.
In 1985, when Howard Schultz (current CEO of Starbucks) was preparing to launch coffee bars in America modeled after those already in Italy, he and his partners didn’t just launch the stores on a whim. They first did everything in their power to understand the dynamics of the market they were entering. They visited five hundred espresso bars in Milan and Verona to learn as much as they possibly could. How did the Italians design their cafés? What were the local coffee-drinking habits? How did the baristas serve coffee? What did the menus look like? They scribbled observations in notebooks.
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Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to anything.
Matt Cohler, now a partner at Benchmark Capital, spent six years in his late twenties and early thirties being a lieutenant to CEOs at LinkedIn (me) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg). Most supertalented people want to be the front man; few play the consigliere role well. In other words, there’s less competition and significant opportunity to be an all-star right-hand man.
• Think about how you’re currently adding value at work. If you stopped going to the office suddenly, what would not get done? What’s a day in the life of your company with you not there? That may be where you’re adding value. Think about the things people frequently compliment you on—those may be your strengths.
In his first chapter, Parachute author Richard Bolles writes, “It is important, before you enter the job hunt, to decide exactly what you are looking for—whether you call it your passion, or your purpose in life, or your mission.… Passion first, job-hunt later.”
Habit number two of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is, “Begin with the end in mind”: you should produce a personal mission statement that puts your goals in focus.
Conventional career planning can work under conditions of relative stability, but in times of uncertainty and rapid change, it is severely limiting, if not dangerous. You will change. The environment around you will change. Your allies and competitors will change.
Second, this philosophy presumes that fixed, accurate self-knowledge can be easily attained. In fact, lofty questions about identity and moral purpose, along with deceptively simple ones like “What am I passionate about?” take time to work out, and the answers frequently change.
Should you follow a plan or stay flexible? Should you listen to your heart or listen to the market? The answer is both. They’re false choices—the same false choices entrepreneurs are frequently dealt. Entrepreneurs are told they must be really persistent in fulfilling their vision, but also be ready to change their business based on market feedback. They are told to do a business they’re passionate about, but also to adapt to customer needs. The successful ones do both. They are flexibly persistent: they start companies that are true to their values and vision, yet they remain flexible enough
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In 2005 Yahoo! acquired the company, making it a Web 2.0 poster child. But more than just a Silicon Valley success story, the evolution of Flickr is a case study in smart adapting: its founders were in constant motion early on, tried many things to see what would work, and nimbly shifted their plans based on what they learned.
“No, no! Get out of the weeds. Go where there’s fast growth, because fast growth creates all opportunities,”2 he told her. It was outstanding advice: Work in a market with natural momentum. Ride the big waves.
Flickr contradicts the idea that winning start-ups come out of nowhere and ride the founders’ brilliant idea to take over the world. In reality, most companies don’t execute a single brilliant master plan. They go through stops and starts, a couple near-death experiences, and a great deal of adaptation.
Sheryl’s story contradicts the analogous assumption that massively successful people find their calling at an early age, devise a bulletproof life plan, and then follow it unwaveringly until attainment. Sheryl’s career plan wasn’t something she crafted once in her early twenties and then followed blindly.
Instead of locking herself in to a single career path, she evaluated new opportunities as they presented themselves, taking into consideration her (ever-growing) set of intellectual and experiential assets. She pivoted to new professional tracks without ever losing sight of what really mattered to her. “The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options,” she says.3
Winning careers, like winning start-ups, are in permanent beta: always a work in progress.
ABZ Planning isn’t something you do once early in your career. It’s a process as important for someone in their forties or fifties as for a newly minted college grad. There is no beginning, middle, or end to a career journey; no matter how old you are or at what stage, you will always be planning and adapting.
They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind. They compare their cash salary to their peers’ instead of comparing lessons learned. They invest in the stock market and neglect investing in themselves. They focus, in short, on hard assets instead of soft assets. This is a mistake. We’re not suggesting you be a starving, unshaven graduate student forever; you do need to earn money and build economic assets. But as much as you can, prioritize plans that offer the best chance at learning about yourself and the world. Not only will you make more money in the long
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For careers, too, you don’t know what the best plan is until you try. It was only after I spent time in that graduate program that I learned academia wasn’t the path for me. When I moved to the business world, I mistakenly thought my competitive advantage was being able to hold complexity in my head and master abstractions. But when I started working, I discovered my real advantage in the Internet industry was having the ability to think simultaneously about individual psychology and social dynamics on a massive scale.
The business professor Clayton Christensen once told graduating students at Harvard Business School, “If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find [a] predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.” At the same time, though, don’t do the opposite and think ahead too far in the future. Again, you will change, the world will change, the competition will change. It’s why Plan C, Plan D, or Plan E are not part of this framework.
Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry. For example, make the headline of your LinkedIn profile not a specific job title (e.g., “VP of Marketing at Company X”) but personal-brand or asset-focused (e.g., “Entrepreneur. Product Strategist. Investor.”). Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer.
What I learned from the PayPal experience equipped me for my next pivot: trying again to start my own company. That company was LinkedIn.
How do you know when to pivot from Plan A (what you’re doing now) to a Plan B? When is it time to change divisions, change jobs, or even change the industry you work in? You’ll rarely know for sure when to pivot or when to persist in what you’re doing. In general, a lesson from the technology industry is that it’s better to be in front of a big change than to be behind it. But the question of when to shift exactly is a question of both art and science, intuitive judgment combined with the best feedback or data you can collect—something we’ll discuss in the network intelligence chapter. And of
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The best Plan B is different but very much related to what you’re already doing. As you think about your own Plan B alternatives, favor options that let you keep one foot planted while the other one swings to the new territory. Pivot into an adjacent niche.
The way to feel comfortable with these entrepreneurial strategies is to have one plan in your life that’s highly certain. That’s Plan Z: a reliable plan you shift to when you no longer have confidence in Plan A and B, or when your plans get severely disrupted. The certainty of the Plan Z backstop is what enables you to be aggressive—not tentative—about Plans A and B. With a Plan Z, you’ll at least know you can tolerate failure.
Invoking Plan Z should allow you to retreat, regroup, and develop an entirely new Plan A. It’s not an endpoint—it’s what will keep you afloat while you reload and then relaunch yourself on a brand-new voyage, a brand-new Plan A.
