An article entitled “Managing Your Career as a Business” in today’s New York Times business section discusses my career experiences and what I’m seeing in the job market:
Joy Chen followed her own entrepreneurial career path. Ms. Chen, with a master’s degree in business administration from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, had been a deputy mayor of Los Angeles and then went to work for Heidrick & Struggles, the management search firm. She left to start her own recruiting firm, Chen Partners in 2007, just as the economy started to slow. Business was initially scarce, she said. “Many employers were even then hunkering down.”
Then this year, Ms. Chen said, things changed. “Many companies noticed that after all the layoffs and uncertainty, skilled people were available at lower salary demands than in former years. And now business is very active.” The lesson of the economy’s ups and downs, she said, is that workers cannot let hard times or lower pay discourage them. “It’s a change in the market, not a depreciation of who you are as a person.”
The article points out that you need to develop a more entrepreneurial mindset about managing your own career. The recession has laid to rest the notion that your company will take care of that for you. I’m always meeting people who make the mistake of being highly strategic on behalf of their companies, but not at all strategic for themselves. Certainly, when a company gives you a set of responsibilities you should identify with your job and try to excel in it. But just as the recession is forcing companies to innovate, people should innovate on their own behalf.
One way to be entrepreneurial, of course, is to go out and create your own company. My very first boss, Yue-Sai Kan (靳羽西), is China’s most famous woman, having built a media and retail conglomerate there over the past 30 years. When I started Chen Partners, I recalled her advice: “Never just work for other people. They could fire you!”
Candidates sometimes ask me what it’s like to own a small business. I never discourage them from exploring it, though if everyone ran off and started a business, I myself would be out of business. Being an entrepreneur is an exhilarating experience, and headhunting is a special joy. It’s exciting to help great people grow their companies.
This recession has turned many of our previously-held assumptions upside down. One lesson we may take away is that now, we’re all working for ourselves. That’s true whether we’re doing so within a larger company or in one that we’ve created ourselves.
