Define Yourself

Positioning yourself and your career - ITpeople - Issue dtd : 12th July 2004

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PEOPLE WORKING ABROAD MANAGEMENT CAREERS COLUMNS

Positioning yourself and your career

TECH FORUM THE C# COLUMN BETWEEN THE BYTES

Most people believe that working hard is the secret of success. Al Ries and Jack Trout explain why working smart is the better way

TECHNOLOGY EC SERVICES IT APPOINTMENTS

If positioning strategies can be used to promote a product, why can’t they be used to promote yourself? No reason at all. So let’s review positioning theory as it might apply to your own personal career.

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Define yourself What are you? People suffer from the same disease as products. They try to be all things to all people. The problem with this approach is the mind of the prospect. It’s difficult enough to link one concept with each product. It’s almost impossible with two or three or more concepts. The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect’s wall of indifference. What are you? What is your own position in life? If you sum up your own position in a single concept? Then can you run your own career to establish and exploit that position? Most people aren’t ruthless enough to set up a single concept for themselves. They vacillate. They expect others to do it for them. “I’m the best lawyer in Dallas.” Are you? How often would your name be mentioned if we took a survey of the Dallas legal community? “I’m the best lawyer in Dallas” is a position that can be achieved with some talent, some luck and a lot of strategy. And, the first step is to isolate the concept that you are going to use to establish that long-term position. It’s not easy. But the rewards can be great. Make mistakes Anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing lousy. If it wasn’t worthwhile doing, you shouldn’t have done it at all. On the other hand, if it is worthwhile doing and you wait until you can do it perfectly, if you procrastinate, you run the risk of not doing it ever. Therefore, anything worthwhile doi-ng is worthwhile doing lousy. Your reputation will probably be better within the company if you try many times and succeed sometimes than if you fear failure and only try for sure things. People still remember Ty Cobb, who stole 96 bases out of 134 tries (70 percent); but they have forgotten Max Carey, who stole 51 bases out of 53 (96 percent). Eddie Arcaro, perhaps the greatest jockey who ever rode a horse, had 250 straight losers before he rode his first winner. Make sure your name is right Remember Leonard Slye? Few people did, until he changed his name to Roy Rogers, an important first step in becoming a motion picture star. How about Marion Morrison? A little feminine for a he-man cowboy, so he changed it to John Wayne. Or Issur Danielovitch? First changed to Isadore Demsky and then to Kirk Douglas. “Fate tried to conceal him,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, “by naming him Smith.” Common law grants you the right to adopt any name you want as long as you’re not trying to defraud or be deceptive. So don’t change your name to McDonald and open up a hamburger stand. Also, if you’re a politician, don’t bother to change your name to “None of the above.” Luther D Knox, a candidate in a Louisiana gubernatorial primary, had his name legally changed to just that However, a federal judge had Mr None of the Above’s name taken off the ballot because the move was deceptive.

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5/30/2006

Positioning yourself and your career - ITpeople - Issue dtd : 12th July 2004

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Avoid the no-name trap Many business people fall victim to initialitus personally as well as corporately. As young executives, they notice that top managers usually use initials: J S Smith, R H Jones. So they do the same on memos and in letters. It’s a mistake. You can afford to do that only if everyone knows who you are. If you’re on your way up, if you’re trying to burn your name into the minds of top management, you need a name, not a set of initials. For exactly the same reasons your company does. Write your name out and look at it. Roger P Dinkelacker. What a name like this says psychologically to management is: We are such a big company and you have such an insignificant job that you must use the “P” to differentiate yourself from the other Roger Dinkelackers on the staff. Not likely. It is possible, if your name is something like John Smith or Mary Jones, that you actually do need a middle initial to differentiate yourself from the other John Smiths or Mary Joneses. If so, what you really need is a new name. Confusion is the enemy of successful positioning. You can’t “burn in” a name that’s too common. How are other people going to differentiate between John X Smith and John S Smith? They won’t bother. They’ll just forget you along with the rest. And the no-name trap will have claimed another victim. Avoid the line-extension trap If you had three daughters, would you name them Mary 1, Mary 2 and Mary 3? As a matter of fact, would you name them Mary, Marian and Marilyn? Either way, you’re creating a lifetime of confusion. When you hang a junior on your son’s name, you do him no favour. He deserves a separate identity. In show business, where you must burn a clear-cut identity in the mind of the public, even a famous last name should probably not be used. Today Liza Minnelli is a bigger star than her mother, Judy Garland, ever was. As Liza Garland, she would have started with a handicap. Frank Sinatra, Jr, is an example of the most difficult kind of line-extension name. He literally started with two strikes against him: With a name like Frank Sinatra, Jr, the audience says to itself, “He’s not going to be able to sing as well as his father.” Since you hear what you expect to hear, of course he doesn’t. Nor for that matter did Will Rogers, Jr, make much of a name for himself. Find a horse to ride Some ambitious, intelligent people find themselves trapped in situations where their future looks bleak. So what do they generally do? They try harder. They try to compensate by long hours of hard work and effort. The secret of success is to keep your nose to the grindstone, do your job better than the next person, and fame and fortune will come your way, right? Wrong. Trying harder is rarely the pathway to, success. Trying smarter is the better way. It’s the story of the shoemaker’s children all over again. Too often, management people don’t how to manage their own careers. Their own promotional strategy is often based on the naive assumption that ability and hard work are all that counts. And so they dig in and work hard, waiting for the day that someone wall tap them on the shoulder with the magic wand. But that day seldom comes. The truth is, the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult far; the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself. Kennedy was wrong. Ask not what you can do your company. Ask what your company can do for you. Therefore, if you want to take maximum advantage of the opportunities that your career has to offer, you must keep your eyes open and find yourself horse to do the job for you. 1. The first horse to ride is your company. Where is your company going? Or more impolitely, is it-going anywhere at all? Too many good people have taken their good prospects and locked them into situations that doomed to failure. But failure at least gives you second chance. Even worse is the company with average chances for growth. No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays to cast your lot with a loser. Even the best officer on the Titanic wound up in the same lifeboat as the worst. And that’s if he was lucky enough to stay out of the water.

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5/30/2006

Positioning yourself and your career - ITpeople - Issue dtd : 12th July 2004

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You can’t do it yourself. If your company is going nowhere, get yourself a new one. While you can’t always pick an IBM or a Xerox, you ought to be able to considerably better than average. Place your bets on the growth industries. Tomorrow-type products like computers, electronics, optics, telecommunications. And don’t forget that soft services of all types are growing at a much faster rate than hard products. So look at banks, leasing, insurance, medical, financial and consulting service companies. 2. The second horse to ride is your boss. Ask yourself the same questions about your boss as you asked yourself about your company. Is he or she going anywhere? If not, who is? Always try to work for the smartest, brightest, most competent person you can find. If you look at biographies of successful people, it’s amazing to find how many crawled up the ladder of success right behind someone else. From their first assignment in some menial job to their last as president or CEO of a major company. Excerpt from ‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Reproduced with permission © 2003, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited

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http://www.expressitpeople.com/20040726/management1.shtml

5/30/2006