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by
Reid Hoffman
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November 9, 2018 - November 27, 2021
Professional loyalty now flows “horizontally” to and from your network rather than “vertically” to your boss, as Dan Pink has noted.
By the time the red alarm started ringing—that is, when GM lost $82 billion in the three and a half years leading up to the federal bailout—it was too late. The auto industry’s collapse has left the Motor City in dire straits. “The great thing about living in America’s most abandoned city,” deadpanned Walsh, the local columnist, “is that there is never any traffic at any hour.” Abandoned is certainly the word that comes to mind if you walk the streets just outside of the main downtown drag in Detroit. You can go blocks without seeing anybody. Empty houses languish. Some are professionally
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What do these companies have in common? The principles of Silicon Valley are the principles in this book. 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.
Jeff Bezos, founder/CEO of Amazon, concludes every annual letter to shareholders by reminding readers, as he did in his first annual letter in 1997, that “it’s still Day 1” of the Internet and of Amazon.com: “Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.”19 In other words, Amazon is never finished: it’s always Day 1. For entrepreneurs, finished is an F-word. They know that great companies are always evolving. Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress.
Andy Hargadon, head of the entrepreneurship center at the University of California–Davis, says that for many people “twenty years of experience” is really one year of experience repeated twenty times.20 If you’re in permanent beta in your career, twenty years of experience actually is twenty years of experience because each year will be marked by new, enriching challenges and opportunities. Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth. Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving
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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. (Chapter 5) • Accurately appraise and take on
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What this book will teach me:
“1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special?”1 While one million might be an exaggeration, what’s not an exaggeration is that lots of other people can and want to have your dream job. For anything desirable, there’s competition: a ticket to a championship game, the arm of an attractive man or woman, admission to a good college, and every solid professional opportunity. Being better than the competition
Very important
you want to chart a course that differentiates you from other professionals in the marketplace, the first step is being able to complete the sentence, “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?
Very important 2
Competitive advantage underpins all career strategy. It helps answer the classic question, “What should I be doing with my life?”
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.
On competitive advantage
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).
Soft and hard assets
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.” Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.3
I should do this
For a start-up, a compelling vision that acts as a pole star is a meaningful piece of a company’s competitive advantage.
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.
My pole star is to design and build human ecosystems using entrepreneurship, technology, and finance. I build networks of people using entrepreneurship, finance, and technology as enablers. Whatever your values and aspirations, know that they will evolve over time.
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.
A good career plan accounts for the interplay of the three pieces—your assets, aspirations, and the market realities.
What if you’re passionate but not competent, relative to others? Finally, being a slave to market realities isn’t sustainable.
But graduate school, while stimulating, turned out to be grounded in a culture and incentive scheme that promoted hyperspecialization; I discovered that academics end up writing for a scholarly elite of typically about fifty people.
Locking myself in a room for a weekend and becoming a Photoshop ninja was not an endeavor I thought was important while studying philosophy. However, being able to use Photoshop was necessary to pursue a product development career and therefore I learned it in order to advance in the industry.
Trade-offs are inevitable when you’re balancing different considerations such as the market realities of employment and your own natural interests.
My significant operating experience at scale differentiates me from other VCs with finance backgrounds or limited operational backgrounds. This gives me a meaningful advantage in how I can partner with entrepreneurs and help them succeed. And since I can work with entrepreneurs whose companies build and define massive human ecosystems, I can help improve society at large scale, which meets my aspirations as a public intellectual. The three pieces fit.
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. Matt excelled at this role, building a portfolio of accomplishments and relationships along the way. This professional differentiation in the market set him up to achieve a long-standing goal, which was to become a partner at a
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Great example
Network Intelligence Meet with three trusted connections and ask them what they see as your greatest strengths. If they had to come to you for help or advice on one topic, what would it be?
You’re supposed to craft detailed, specific goals. You’re urged to figure out who you are and where you want to be in ten years, and then work backward to develop a roadmap for getting there.
Suppose its a bkt difficult
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.
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 run, but your career journey will be more fulfilling. Ask yourself, “Which plan will grow my soft assets the fastest?” Even simpler: “Which plan offers the most learning potential?”
Learn by doing. Not sure if you can break into the pharmaceutical industry? Spend six months interning at Pfizer making connections and see what happens. Curious whether marketing or product development is a better fit than what you currently do?
question people sometimes ask us is, “What’s the best way to get into Silicon Valley start-ups?” Well, there are various ways, but the first step is this: move here!
B. 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. This way, you’ll have a professional identity that you can carry with you as you shift jobs. You own yourself. It’s the start-up of you.
Interesting
It’s a common catch-22: for jobs that require prior experience, how do you get the experience the first time? My solution: do the job for free on the side. I sought out the head of product management within the eWorld group at Apple, James Isaacs, and told him I had a few product ideas.
Pivoting isn’t throwing a dart on the map and then going there. It’s changing direction or changing your path to get somewhere based on what you’ve learned along the way
Yet auctions demanded a person-to-person financial transaction.
Sheryl was hardly failing when she pivoted to the Google opportunity. If you find that the grass really is greener somewhere else, go there!
Sometimes we’re forced to go to Plan B. We could be fired, new technology could automate or offshore our routinized job, or the entire industry we work in could be disrupted.
He went on to become editor in chief of Flyp, a start-up online magazine that produced video and audio narratives on politics, finance, and social issues. At an online, multimedia magazine, Gaines had a lot to learn. And there was no formal training or classes. His youthful subordinates were his on-the-job teachers, instructing him on how to do video editing, audio editing, understand MySQL databases, and learn the pros and cons of other Internet protocols.
Instead of waiting for an inflection point to disrupt his career, Gaines adapted. Rather than try to preserve what has always been, Gaines parlayed his skills into new media. Throughout, he never lost sight of his competitive advantage in the career marketplace: his ability to tell stories that move people, regardless of the medium.
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.
Unless you need to take immediate action, one way to begin the process of pivoting is to start your potential Plan B on the side. Start learning a skill during the evenings and weekends. Start building relationships with people who work in an adjacent industry. Apply for a part-time internship. Start a side consulting practice. This is what I did when I began advising PayPal while still working at Socialnet: it was a side project that had the potential to become a full-blown Plan B later on (which it ultimately did).
With a Plan Z, you’ll at least know you can tolerate failure. Without it, you could be frozen in fear contemplating the worst-case scenarios. When I started my first company, my father offered up an extra room in his house
in the event it didn’t work out—living there and finding a job somewhere else to earn money was my Plan
Becoming homeless or bankrupt or permanently unemployable is an unacceptable outcome when one of your career plans fails. Your Plan Z is there to prevent these unacceptable outcomes from becoming realities.
In the next day: • Make a list of your key uncertainties, doubts, and questions you have about your career at the present moment. Make a list of the hypotheses you’re developing around these uncertainties—what are the things you’re looking for to figure out whether you should stick with your Plan A, or pivot to Plan B? • Write out your current Plan A and Plan Z, and jot some notes about what possible Plan B moves might be in your current situation. In the next week: • Schedule a coffee meeting with someone who used to work in your professional niche who pivoted to a new career plan. How did he
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Even if you realize the fact that you are in permanent beta, even if you develop a competitive advantage, even if you adapt your career plans to changing conditions—even if you do these things
but do so alone—you’ll fall short.
“The team you build is the company you build.” Mark Zuckerberg says he spends half his time recruiting.
course, unlike company founders, you aren’t hiring a fleet of employees who report to you, nor do you report to a board of directors. What you are doing—what you should be doing—is establishing a diverse team of allies and advisors with whom you grow over time.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, has marshaled evidence that shows that when it comes to getting promoted
your job, strong relationships and being on good terms with your boss can matter more than competence.
The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be
