Interesting Careers Paper Dec09pdf

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

The Dynamics of

Interesting Careers 64 Games that Your Life & Work Are and 64 Ways to Play Those Games Well from People Having Superb Careers Abstract: Research Question 1 WHOSE CAREERS ARE MOST INTERESTING: Who are the people having the most interesting careers? What makes their careers interesting? Research Question 2 HOW DO PEOPLE CREATE INTERESTING CAREERS: What do people do that makes their careers more interesting than careers of others? Research Question 3 DO PEOPLE ACHIEVE INTERESTING CAREERS BY THE SAME OVERALL MEANS: Do people with interesting careers share a significant number of steps and means for making their careers interesting ones? Research Question 4 ARE CAREERS OUTSIDE OF BUSINESS AND LARGE ORGANIZATIONS DIFFERENT: If we look beyond business and large corporations do we find more interesting careers than there? why? This is a study (questionnaire and interview) of 150 people nominated as having “very interesting careers” by 315 eminent, highly accomplished, nominators distributed across 63 strata of society (5 for each stratum). Large, well ordered, categorical models of the components of such careers not found in less interesting ordinary careers were built, resulting in fractal concept models. These categorical models present dimensions of “interesting” careers both self-reported by the 150 nominees and other-reported by the 315 nominators as not found in ordinary careers. The models constitute a map of phenomena to be investigated later causally. At least mention by 12 nominees was required for all items included in the models presented here. The ten types of career components induced from subjects in the above way are organized causally in a path model at the end of the article and six hypotheses of evolution among relations on that model as “interesting” careers develop (suggested by subject responses to research instruments) are mentioned on that model. Method 1 IMPROVE CAREER RESEARCH USING FELDMAN’S RECOMMENDATIONS: Apply all 8 of Feldman’s published recommendations about how to fix what is wrong with usual career research. Method 2 FOCUS ON CAREER SKILLS NOT JUST CAREER INTERESTS: This is one of Feldman’s recommendations--here we emphasize career skills found shared among 150 people having highly interesting careers (as selected/reported by others). Feldman in a well written comprehensive review of the current state of career research (2002) recommended moving study of career away from business careers and MBA careers, studying career development changes within individuals as they progress in their careers, examining the role of career skills not just career interests, plotting the interplay of career stages with life stages by investigating extreme misfits between them in certain cases, and looking at careers as coping mechanisms and emotional support havens when family-life decays as a social support mechanism in modern industrial societies. He noted how sample bias in career research thus far (and hence generalizability) could be improved by moving beyond MBA and business career populations, how constructs like age (chronological, subjective, and relative) can be operationalized better when studying career development changes, and how reactions of research subjects to objective career conditions cannot be understood or even investigated if journals continue to reject articles based largely on self report data. This study fulfills all eight of the attributes of future career research listed above from his call for research improvement (it omits several of his requested improvements, however, due to inevitable limitations of time, resource, and method). Method 3 CAREER EXTREMES EXAMINED: By seeking “most interesting” careers, dimensions not reported by prior research were found, career: types, rules, tools, constraints, topographies, dynamics, approaches, and creativity. I n particular, this paper excels at the broad scope of non-business careers it includes and the substantial level of detail of career skills and skill use obtained for its research subjects. Also, by studying “highly interesting careers” extreme conditions, methods, skills, goals, personalities, results, lifestyles were investigated, nearly never encountered in usual publishings of the field of career research. Eight types contents of interesting careers were identified: career types, rules, tools, constraints, topographies, dynamics, approaches, and creativity, Causal relations among them were suggested by the data (though of course not proved). Six ways, suggested by respondents, that relations among these types, taken as career variables, develop through time, stated as hypotheses, close this article. RESULTS---10 Career Dimensions, 6 Hypotheses---all arranged in a causal diagram ordering, testable by future research. For occupational therapists, young people entering the world of work, and organizations attempting to attract and hold exceptional people, the dynamic contents of “highly interesting careers” offer practical, specific, attainable conditions that already attract and hold such people now in various organizations and good facsimiles or improvements on which could be set up in other organizations. Career Types: Cultivate, Distribute, Root, Alternate

decay of selected/designed types into emergent types over time (Hypothesis 1)

Approaches

voluntary

Blocks-Paradoxes

gradual increase in voluntary contents over time (Hypothesis 2)

Principles Tools

Moves

Constraints

imposed

Topography

gradual reduction of imposed contents over time (Hypothesis 3)

Rules gradual increase in recognition of creativity contents of career types over time (Hypothesis 4) Creativity Types: Revolution, Becoming Creative, Insight Process, Creation Models

after each move, approaches, principles, constraints, & rules change iteratively producing more blocks, topogrophy visited, tools, and moves (Hypothesis 5)

A Model of Components of Interesting Careers after some moves, shift to new career type and recognition of creativity aspect in that type occur, changing some of: approaches, principles, constraints, rules, blocks, topography, tools, and moves (Hypothesis 6)

Interesting Careers not Careers in General The topic of this study is finding the contents--traits and dynamics--that interesting careers have that are missing from ordinary careers (not the same as finding traits and dynamics that “make” interesting careers interesting). Any review of the research on careers in general exposes one to Prussian bureaucracy of the late 1800s--”fit”, “boss”, “promotion”, “firing”, “layoff”, “competition”, “qualification”, “pyramid effects”, “reprimand” and like concepts from Weberian bureaucracy and its embodiments in post office systems, major global corporations, and top heavy ineffective hierarchies in troops of monkeys. Sprinkled among German bureaucracy items are a few other perspectives “teaming” from total quality, “information systems” and “boundaryless” from Silicon Valley and GE, and the like. So much of past research on careers dealt with average persons in average industrial societies achieving average outcomes, that gold watches after 25 years of service seemed like the final lifetime outcome and goal of everyone. So much of past research was tainted by money, as researchers for some mysterious reason, concentrated on business careers, even on MBA or executive careers, that greed, manipulating others with power levers, and fitting into a corporate culture constituted much of careering. What are the careers of people who reject such outcomes, from their beginnings, like? What is common to highly “interesting” artist careers and highly “interesting” social activist ones, for example? What are the careers that outsiders observing them, as well as those “inside them” having them, judge “very interesting” like? How do people with such “very interesting” careers manage to obtain (create, invent) them? These are the topics of this study. What is an interesting career? It differs from an “interesting” occupation--your way through that occupation, the roles and choices you make, have to be interesting to get you into this research study, for example. First, in this paper that is defined as the entire process of moving from role to role, accomplishment to accomplishment, place to place, organization to nonorganization, and so on, not the end point achieved. It is not careers that produce great overall outcomes that are “interesting”, according to this research, but careers the individual steps of which fascinate and enthrall, that are interesting. Second, both outsiders, observing a particular career and judging it “interesting”, and insiders, those having such careers, judging them “interesting” are valid according to this research. A career that fascinates the person having it and persons observing it, is interesting in this study. Third, it is not just career con-

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

tents that a person plans for, works towards, and achieves that make a career interesting but also career contents that simply emerge, unexpectedly, while aiming for something else, that makes a career interesting. Fourth, interest obtained at too high a cost is somehow pyrrhic, and ultimately, not interesting. There is a cost/benefit (cost/interest) ratio needed to qualify a career as interesting in this study. If the cost of a certain level of interest is too high, the career that produced it is judged not interesting in this study. Finally we must distinguish “interesting” careers from “success” and “celebrity” as any particular culture sees them and “goodness” of career. In this study we are not dealing with successful people, famous people, and good people, rather, just people having “interesting” careers, to themselves and to others. For example, US media and society are so taken up with “success” measured largely by money, and “celebrity” that American respondents had a hard time identifying people with interesting careers--they constantly confused “interestingness” with wealth accumulation or media attention. The questionnaires and interviews used in this study strictly separated success, celebrity, goodness and other end points of careering from the process of having a career and, specifically, the process of having an interesting career, regardless of outcome achieved. Wealth and celebrity did not rule out a career from being “interesting” but they in no way helped rule it in, either, in this study. Note this study used a stratified sample of 63 diverse parts of society, so business careers were not central in the data obtained.

The Origin of this Work I taught a class to 40 business undergraduates visiting Japan for a year from 30 nations all over the world. Such classes around me in the particular college were shoveling information at these students but the students, and I, were dissatisfied with that. These students were visitors for one year in Japan and needed to get out and interview Japanese and get involved in structured engagements with Japanese, we all felt though other faculty continued to shovel information from books at students dying to get out and meet Japan. My first step was teaching structured interview techniques to students and sending them out in teams to conduct interviews with particular role, types, institutions of Japanese. My next step was sending them out twice, once to find the people now in Japan, of any sort, Japanese or other, having the most interesting careers, then sending them out again to actually meet and interview thoroughly people having those interesting types of career. This worked wonderfully--transforming us all as interview result came in. There were people with astonishing career types that none of us in our wildest imaginations would have thought of--a housewife with a second house across the street filled with 4,000+ inventions she had patented over a lifetime of daily life improving, a man who on a lark, one day, decided to work each year in a different nation, working in 46 nations overall, now retired with 20,000+ slides from all the 46 nations he had worked in, a woman who coaxed a plastic surgeon into enhancing her genitals in an unusual way allowing her to make a fortune in the sex industry which she used to create an NGO for orphans that, in her old age, flew her around the world arranging basic education and health institutions for refugee orphans. Truth was stranger than fiction in nearly every case presented. Plus, students viewing the personalities of these interesting career people, displayed on videos of interviews, saw that individual Japanese were courageous, bold, inventive--in short all the things most Japanese seemed to not be. The interview results completely changed student attitudes about ordinary Japanese. It was exposure to actual careers in this course and prior exposure to board games and game theory versions of human career building that gave me the idea to restructure some of my courses so as to research career dynamics more thoroughly and scientifically. While summarizing previous research on careers for these courses, I found little was useful because, frankly, such uninteresting careers, mostly careers in large business organizations, were investigated. I needed samples of careers from all parts of society, not business alone. I needed careers that passed into and out of businesses as much as ones that stayed around in them. A lot of initial observations guided this work: people seemed to have shells they enjoyed living in and occasionally darted out from to act boldly, people used present accomplishments to change identities opening entirely new directions of development so their careers zigzagged instead of moving straight ahead, people worked hard for “success” for decades then decayed spectacularly into error and disaster being unprepared for using success once they attained it (not having further goals to use it for), for three examples. When you read books and research articles on careers that derived from studying average careers a lot of such individual devices and dynamics were missing--people with superb and interesting careers were operating their careers differently than average or usual people. It was worth exploring how careers of people having superb careers differed from careers of people having ordinary or average ones. Perhaps since access to people with ordinary careers was easier and cheaper than access to people with superb careers, career research thus far tended toward dealing with average careers (nearly all of them business careers).

The Stratified Sample Used

Emerging

Establishment

Traditional

Social Change

Cultural

Political

Economic

Science

Art

technology ventures, idea markets, invention markets voting gaming representation campaigning ethics and religion policy making social clubs charities democratization globalization

museums, exhibitions, concerts, tours, coffee houses, clubs awards, cannons

astronomy geology meterology oceanography space sciences physics biology chemistry math information media silicon and non-silicon computing h/w

painting, music (song writers, performers, conductors), sculpture, dance, comedy, drama (theatre stars, movie stars), poetry,

art venture districts

social cabarets

performance, design

Humanities resource limitation management; mystifications, historic preservation agreement limitation management, power embeddings realization meaning limitation management. false consciousness identifying

Social Science

economics: markets, pricing, regulation, trade regimes & orgs political science: elections, campaigns, administrating, consensus anthropology: deliberate culture invention, community enhancement confidence and direction sociology: social prolimitation management, cess and structure-frame-limited revolts decline, fixing, invention history tribal community: philosophy festivals, calendars, wealth inheritance, bias in laws

literature, counseling regimes, critics, awards, theatre industries digital art, applied humanities, interactive art, group composing, socially composed art, cyberart, virtual worlds composing contests

Engineering

Professions

financial engineering, inventors agriculture cyberdemocracy, internet funding of campaigns, net volunteer management community organizing, environmental,

business and management advertising & marketing administration military

fashion designers, housing, communities branding, multi-indus- locale type try marketing by events party politics, third involvement dimensions party movements

Fad & Fashion

Lifestyle

religion education

lifestyle inventions, green movement

Systems technical innovation, quality movements policy deployment, dissatisfaction deployment

performing-consuming diversity management & balance; diet, videogam- expansion ing, manga

innovation movement builders venture districts/clusters

intellectual movements, social entrepreneurs, coalition building, founliberation movements self funding “profitable” dation grants charities

exploration, civil, architecture

crowd generation, trend riding marketing, trend seeding, social imbalance exacerbations epidemic generation, rights movements (human rights etc.)

medicine, nursing welfare

rise and fall of civiliza- mechanical, electrical, tions, rutted cultures aeronautics & space

law & justice

networks, social virtual- biological & genetic, computer, ity internet society, nano tech--their blends

info tech, quantum devices

festival organizers, theme parks, global event organizers

value sharing, negotiation, non-medical healing, reputation networks

consumer movement

value sustaining/imposition

internet options: 6 bil- lifestyle inventors, complex adaptive syslion channel TV broad- micro institution devel- tems research casting, agile economy opment via viral growth regimes

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

The Human Capability Definition: Research Process Flowchart Purpose:

Each nominator nominated 2 per their stratum = 10 from which 2 selected randomly for 126 total--24 more added by nominee suggestion.. This done for each of 20 sorts of high performance.

50 questionnaire items and 30 of the interview items, to fill gaps left in instruments that I designed using AI, TQ, and MBA student suggestions. They listed 54 orthogonol fields.

315 Eminent Nominators 5 each from 63 distributed strata

5

54 Orthogonal Fields + 150 Highly Educated-Acting People 150 Highly Effective People 150 Highly Creative People 150 Great Leaders 150 Greatly Led People 150 Highly Artful People 150 Greatly Affected by Art People 150 People Who Produce High Quality and 14 other sorts of high performance

Sets of Nominees

Each student selected 1 eminent person per box for 63 strata times 150 students = 150 eminent people per box/stratum; delphi process used to reduce 150 per stratum to 5 “most eminent”; international students mixed with US produced 315 nominators also globally mixed.

Structure

A

People nominators chose (2 from each stratum) + some nominated by interviewed nominees

Stratified Sample 7x9=63 Strata

2

24 Sets of People: 150 MBAs find 315 eminent nominators who nominate: 54 orthogonal fields + 150 educated-acting people, 150 effective people, 150 creative people; 150 great leaders, 150 people greatly led, 150 artful people, etc.

mean age = 41 years male = 61% mean education = 3.2 years of college US residents or citizens = 52% other nationalities = 43 mean # of nations lived in for 1 year of more (other than birth nation) = 1.3 mean # of long term friends not of own nationality = 1.8 mean years in present job/position/role = 5.8 mean years since last major career change = 9.5 mean # of books read in last month = 3.2 mean elapsed time since last met extrordinary individual person new to you = 7 months subjects having Nobel Prize = 22

Practice

Non-Linear Amplification

200 Item Questionnaire 50 Item Interview Nominators suggested

3

150 U of Chicago MBA Students

Dimensions of Products that Determine Customer Satisfaction

4

Supplant old talent vs. practice theories of capability with what total quality and artificial intelligence methods produce from highly distributed sets of high performers.

1

Talent

Total Quality

Artificial Intelligence Protocol Analysis of Mental Processes of cases: hard, easy, freq., rare

A New Mediate Variable Found Between Talent-Practice and Non-linear Amplifiers of Them into High Ability

7 Results: Induce hierarchy of categories; Regularize branch factor, name formats, ordering principle; = Fractal Concept Model of traits of X People

Categorical Models

6

Not determinants of average performance but of high performance.

B

Subjects distinguish types of high performance themselves.

C D

New assessment instruments. Trade-offs of how each environment variable helps some high performance traits and hurts others for each type of high performance.

E

Marked Transcripts Analyzed Questionnaires

by Richard Tabor Greene

Compare: categorical model from high performers with categorical model from theoretical/research literatures--how do those liviing an idea differ in their view of it from those who research it, when protocol analisys from AI and customer requirements methods from TQ are applied.

Research Approach The diagram above summarizes a whole series of commonly structured research studies. Three bodies of people were involved--150 MBAs students and their acquaintances, 315 eminent people “nominators” they selected (5 for each of 63 strata in society), and 150 nominees selected by these nominators in each of several categories--150 highly educated-acting people, 150 highly effective people, 150 people having very interesting careers. The latter were given interviews and questionnaires (partly generated by nominators who nominated them) the answers to which were organized in a hierarchy of categories by grouping similar items, naming groups, grouping groups, naming such super-groups, and so on. Regularization of such category hierarchies by imposing the same branch factor, naming formats, and principle of ordering at all nodes produced what is called a “fractal concept model”. Several such fractal concept models were produced in this research. Descriptive statistics for the 150 nominees having interesting careers, interviewed and given questionnaires for this particular study are given below (compare to the same traits for the 315 nominators who chose these 150 people having “interesting” careers, given in the diagram above):

mean age = 50.2 years male = 57% mean education = 3 years of college US residents or citizens = 38% mean # of nations lived in for 1 year or more (other than birth nation) = 3.3 mean # of long term friends not of own nationality = 1.8 mean years in present job/position/role = 5 years mean years since last major career change = 6.5 years mean # of books read in last month = 3.1 mean elapsed time since last met extraordinary individual person new to you = 5 months subjects having Nobel Prize = 8. The interview and questionnaire, designed after asking nominators for nominees plus questions to ask them about having interesting careers, were designed not just to get factors that differentiated ordinary from interesting careers, but primarily to survey the components of “interesting” careers not found in less interesting ordinary careers. The questionnaires administered to the nominees contained 200 items and the interviews 100. The nominators nominated people that they thought had interesting careers, 2 for each of 63 strata of society, and the rest, to make 150, were suggested by nominees during interviews, who thought of people having interesting careers while talking to us. Space limits of article length writing prevent presenting most of what went into design of the interview and questionnaire but a few characteristic and interesting items can be presented below. We all have careers and therefore we all have reflections on our careers and careers around us in acquaintances and family members. We all have a certain “folk” theory or two about careering, in all likelihood. The research instruments employed in this research were designed to check the validity and currency of such folk theories of careering. One pattern is doing things you like or getting involved in parts of the world you like till “something clicks” or “something seems to work well” then repeating that, elaborating on it, as increased responses and opportunities permit. Careers in this pattern are stabs in the dark till what matters personally also matters to forces in the world outside us that accelerate or amplify what we do suddenly into interest and/or success. This is a common folk theory of careering. Another such theory is the battle theory. Here a person chooses a battleground and fights successive battles there, conquering more and more ground till, some decades later, they stand alone as ruler of all they survey. This is the driven person, haunted by a need for power, success, recognition, revenge or the like, and never satisfied, always needing more. Are either of these types of careering interesting or capable of producing interesting careers? The research instruments of this study were specially designed to ferret out the answer to that sort of question. This was done a number of different ways. Musicians have a stereotyped version of the “explore till connect” type career described above. They probe the world with bands that play or CDs they cut till some of them produce a powerful response. That means musicians having that type of career pattern are not so interesting, because that pattern is usual to musician careering. However, a dentist or corporate manager having that career pattern is a bit more interesting--the manager probes the world with managements of extremely diverse situations at extremely diverse corporations till one “clicks”, for example. Similarly, corporate CEOs typically have the driven person type of career described above. Therefore, it is not an interesting career pattern for such people. However, a musician having such a career pattern is a bit more interesting--the musician picks a record company and level of fame and schemes, strategizes, markets, and deploys forces till all targets are achieved and fame walks in the door, purring like a pussy-cat. Interestingness, in a career, comes, in part, then, from career patterns usual for some occupations, being instead applied successfully to very different occupations. Therefore, the research instruments this research was based on asked people about career patterns observed in various occupations of people they knew and unusual combinations of career pattern with occupation that they had encountered (or accomplished). In a similar way a great number of other possible principles of “interesting” career were explored by the research instruments. Techniques common to artificial intelligence “expert system” building and customer requirement determination from total quality control were embedded in the questionnaires and interviews used as research instruments in this study. Self report data suffer from exaggeration, conformance to subltly communicated researcher preferences, whitewashing of personal repute, and like distortions that, Herbert Simon and Ericcson reported (Ericcson and Simon, 1984) could be effectively avoided while attaining replicable valid and reliable results using a method called protocol analysis. Tens of thousands of people effectively learned and applied this method to build expert systems in the last two decades of the 20th century. You get an expert to handle a highly frequent typical, difficult, and easy case, then a highly rare typical, difficult, and easy case, then a neither frequent nor rare typical, difficult, and easy case (for a total of nine cases). As the expert works you interrupt them at regular intervals asking for immediate statements of current mental contents, including goals, imagined next steps, easiness or uneasiness feelings about past, present, and next steps and some other things. Career cases include such things as: turning points, rivals, disappointments, lucky breaks, unlucky breaks, insights, misunderstandings, Alice in Wonderland events (discovering whole new realms of experience or approach or method). While this entire procedure cannot be entirely done within an interview or questionnaire, great important valid parts of it can be embedded in them.

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

Similarly total quality has a technique or two for obtaining and distinguishing the dimensions of anything that fully satisfy customers. It turns out research find 22 dimensions of any product or service that separately determine customer satisfaction with it. All these dimensions can be split into normal, expected, and delight quality. The latter corresponds to “interesting” in this paper’s “interesting career” topic. Hence, these dimensions were embedded in questionnaires and interviews to measure “delight quality” or “interest level” with a career or component of a career. As far as I have been able to determine this is the first published application of these techniques to career research. Finally, it must be noted that this research was not seeking what differentiated interesting careers from ordinary less interesting ones, because we all already know that. Interest, in general, and “interesting careers” in particular, are ones the violate our expectations, norms, traditions, and learned patterns. Rather, this study sought why certain people risked having an “interesting” rather than ordinary career, and exactly what the components are within interesting careers, especially components not found in ordinary careers. All aspects of interesting careers including special tactics of career building, special types of careers, special tools used in careers, special constraints and difficulties faced and handled in interesting careers, were sought. The results, presented in fractal concept models of career dynamics below, include a great many dimensions of careering. This was a broad study not seeking a few causal variables as much as seeking the overall lay of the land for interesting career ways and contents.

Career Dynamics: Types, Rules, Tools, Constraints Two fractal concept models were developed from respondent answers to the research instruments of this study. One is presented here and the other presented after this section. Both were developed the same way at the same time from the same pool of interview and questionnaire answers from all 150 respondents. These are categorical models, used for reaching completeness of coverage of empirical phenomena and checking completeness of coverage of theories posed. Any good theory in a domain should explain all or important ones of the principal phenomena, traits, behaviors found in that domain. Any empirical findings in a domain should connect categories in a good categorical model of that domain. Categorical models as checks on completeness precede development of causal models in most domains. Think about Darwin and many others, traipsing around the world collecting plant and animal specimens for fifty years before the theory of evolution was posed to explain the origin of that variety. Here, categorical models, collections if you will, of career phenomena quite general, are presented so that someone later can pose theories to explain them all. For cogency we want the fewest simplest theories sufficient to explain all the phenomena of interest in these categorical models. This is a categorical model as is the one in the following section. In reading it, keep in mind that all the contents, the ideas, in the model were respondent answers to questions about what makes a career interesting and what makes a career not interesting, to oneself and to others. Everything in the model was some sort of trait, method, or other content that helped make careers interesting, according to several respondents. Items not mentioned by 12 or more respondents, of the 150, were dropped from the model and did not get included in either the model above or the one immediately below. There are no other categorical models of “interesting career” phenomena having this level of detail and order, already published, that I have been able to find. These are the first models having 128 interesting career phenomena highly ordered hierarchically. These models came from 150 people having interesting careers in the opinions of 315 eminent people, 5 each from 63 different strata of society, approximately half resident in the US and half resident elsewhere in the world. I have been unable to find similar data on interesting careers published elsewhere. It is important to remind readers that it is not careers in general that are being studied here. Rather, it is “interesting careers” here studied and the models below are of contents and processes of developing such “interesting careers” (though components that specifically make a career “interesting” were not sought, rather “interesting” careers were sought then all components mentioned by subjects having such careers were elicited and categorized). There is a rising school within several social sciences that suggests studying interesting subpopulations rather than mean samples of a population reveals forces at play, principles at work, and processes of development nowhere covered, discovered, or presented in the dominant present studies of mean samples of populations (Cairns et al, 1998). emotion management

customer quality improvement

from total quality to global quality

Competitive Nets

Virtuality e-world face-world partners

instant JIT company formation

from company competitiveness to cluster competitiveness

from from departments knowledge hoarding to to initiatives knowledge sharing

Constraints accumulated library of fads & tools

globality

- weave

diversity

Softness

Plurality plural jobs & employers at one time

multicompany teams

manage software

work exploration vacation alternate

nation 1 nation 2 consulting alternate

one overlooked needy field

Alternate

role ladder in one profession

Types inventions

Cultivate network within one profession

manage inventing

one great person

public speaking circuits

5 ventures in 20 years

one idea one venture 5 stints of 8 years in different org types

Distribute 3 subfields within one profession

3 baby fields

secret speaking circuits

leadership practice events

job, lifework hobby, profession transfer business practices across cultures

invent publish teach

lunch circuit

fractal nature of success

field weaving

spontaneous idea rooms and room publishing

Shadow Leading

extreme product extrapolation

phone research

phone meeting debriefing

traps experienced and set

power evolution

social power

Mysteries

Power

secrets & secret lives

surprises received & given

company’s nature

society’s nature

logistic & position power

Rules

Situations reality’s nature

study events

Tools

Invention solution culture

VP adoption

Incremental Leading

Plurifications

Dimensions of Interesting Careers I

Root

work consultancy school customer alternate alternate

hot spot connection

attract & hold talent

alternative context customer contact

management’s nature

promotion process

idea power

job selection use process

Transitions resume process

Career types: cultivate: These are the first four of sixteen types of careers presented in this model. The cultivate types involve cultivating one organization, profession, opportunity or the like in some depth. It is career building via a kind of focus. One depends on intensity of effort and connection to build up a critical mass of something that breaks into success. You cultivate these areas, like a farmer tends his or her fields. Networking within one profession or organization involves ignoring the work and mission and functions of the organization and viewing it entirely as a community of people. You distort everything you do and are assigned to so as to use them for meeting people and putting them in contact with appropriate other people. Year by year you build your own sub-communities within the organization till in ten or so years, you know everyone and continually organize services and cooperations among them all. Though in some official sense you have particular jobs and assigned roles, you use each of them, bending them as much as possible, so they optimize the people you meet and put into contact with others. You are a community builder pure and simple, pretending to be a job holder moving up the career ladder by doing “a good job”.

interview process

Public speaking (or exhibition, performing) circuits are a way to build a career while in any profesunintere sion without depending your on main ideal work people for is organization Itwho with end up bad jobs that they dislike professions any way. in in matter they areis It doing hours after week, research of finding nights two aone conferences needing speakers submitting and abstracts applications ordesign willing give, readthen are and talks you tofor ing carefully evaluations of your presentations, responding thoroughly to the advice your audiences give you on how to improve and where to improve. Three years of thusly doing a presentation every two months (six a year) with evaluations by audiences, will, if you respond to audience advice, suffice to move you from being the worst rated speaker at such events to being the best. At that point you can make one speech a week for about US$1000 or $52,000 a year from speeches alone. That is the time to switch to the professional speakers circuit and get an agent to arrange bookings. In five years from start you should be able to make US$2000 a week for two speeches a week (a five day weekend every week). There are now about 2000 people in the US working at this level. It is as simple as listening to your audience-customers and obeying their opinions about how you need to improve. It is as simple as practice, regular evaluated practice. Public speaking is not equal to other skills in this regard. It is a major part of all careers (the quiet chemist who wins the Nobel prize and suddenly has to speak before the world for years, for one example). Sales and persuasion are part of all jobs and careers, and public speaking is a major avenue toward customer understanding and contact. Inventing is a lifestyle. If you study patent applications, in particular areas, and put into categories each new patent in that area, when you get about 30 categories, you will find yourself repeating. There are about 30 modifications types of an idea that generate 95% of all patent applications. It really does not matter much which product or service area you choose, the 30 modification types are the same. If, as an inventor, you master these 30 modifications, you can generate invention after invention on a systematic basis. If, in addition, you specialize

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

in a particular set of customers or in particular need types shared by several types of customers, for years, you will also multiply your career productivity. Critical mass in a field opens up publishing, speaking, teaching and other occupations to you. Hot spot connections are enough to establish great careers for people. You do not latch onto a skill, a profession, or even an industry. Instead, you latch onto a “hot spot” in the world’s economy or polity or cultures. You ride that hot spot as it wildly develops. If you manage to hold on, you will find more and more opportunities appearing to you. People entering Silicon Valley California in the early 1980s rode that hot spot to wealth.

Career types: distribute: These are the second four of sixteen types of careers presented in this model. The distribute types involve distributing time and effort among a variety of career-investments. One takes a chance not on one investment but on one of several diverse ones turning out successful. It is the distributedness of one’s invested effort that gives power to this. This is career building by a kind of betting on what will grow important in the future. Three subfields within one profession is a way of betting on one profession but spreading your risks by betting on three very different subfields within that one profession. Most well known professions are huge, anyway, containing many more interesting and unlikely roles than young people entering them realize. It almost does not matter which profession you choose, there are so many subfields within any one that any kind of life or work you want--art, speaking, performing, calculating, organizing, selling, venturing, inventing, and so on-already has an organized subfield for you to latch onto. Latching onto 3 (or so) baby fields and riding them as they wildly grow is another career approach. In this case you have to find baby fields--new areas of high future promise that now have less than 50 people in the world interested in and aware of them. You can find such baby fields in certain types of sessions at major conferences. The number 3 is important because not all baby fields grow to adulthood. Some develop for a while but never amount to anything important. It is a risk choosing baby fields, therefore, so you should choose 3 baby fields each rather different than the others, diversifying your investments of time and effort. Another way to build careers via distribution is to spend five years (or so) in each of eight entirely different fields or parts of the world (for example government civil servant, elected politician, think tank analyst, journalist, publisher, social movement leader). It is surprising the number of people who actually have such careers. Five years is long enough to make a contribution in each field and get some visibility while building personal networks in them that carry over to help you in the next field you choose. It helps, sometimes, if the organization you worked for in your past field is a customer of the new organization of your new field (or a supplier). The best known distribution career type is the Silicon Valley entrepreneur type. This involves five different venture businesses tried, with an equity stake, between the ages of 20 and 40. The idea is to get a “hit” with one of them letting it propel you to riches.

Career types: root: These are the third four of sixteen types of careers presented in this model. The root types are parasitical. You latch onto some source of power and hope to ride it to success. It is your stubborn loyalty to your own path that gives you power here. This is career building by risking all on one bet. Because most people shy away from that, there is not much competition for these types of career building. Climbing a role ladder in one profession or organization is the standard “organization man” career path type. The organization has well structured hierarchies with fewer and fewer roles as you climb upward toward greater pay, privilege, and responsibility. Organizations manage themselves so as to get most employees to envision themselves rising through this hierarchy, though in fact, most employees move laterally for a decade or more before realizing they will never get a chance at the good spots on top. Keeping up this illusion among masses of employees is the major function of human resource (personnel) functions in most organizations. Since there are fewer and fewer good roles as you climb higher, competition intensifies till you are quickly competing with people as smart as or much smart than you. This is where you stop progressing. Another root type is the one-venture one-career type. This is a major risk. People choose this career type when they are convinced their venture idea far surpasses the ideas around them or when they realize their own motive power is a large multiple of the staying power of those they compete with. If you think your way and idea are best, this is the path you follow. You can root yourself in one great person, too. This involves finding a person so great that nothing would be worth more than hanging around them and seeing daily how they do what they do. You can get unpaid jobs, volunteering to be a messenger, janitor, nurse, baby-sitter, secretary, or the like, just to get near enough to the great person to observe how they really work. Many great careers have been born this way. It generally is much more powerful than going to the world’s greatest graduate schools. You can choose a field that is overlooked, that no one thinks about seriously, where there is next to no competition and revive it. Finding abandoned fields is not hard. What is hard is seeing potential there that others fail to see. Reviving them is often rather easy--you merely apply techniques, standards, and goals from other booming fields, to define better quality outstanding problems in the abandoned field.

Career types: alternate: These are the fourth four of sixteen types of careers presented in this model. The alternative types involve building bridges by alternative positions or roles among two or so different entities. One uses the connections and knowledge one builds up in both communities to expand into consulting, diplomacy, investing or like bridges between them. This is career building by turning relationships into ventures. Customer consultant alternation is one of the most common career types. You work at a company doing innovative things. Then you use that experience to join a consultancy helping other similar firms do that same innovation. Then via a firm you meet as a consultant, you get a job offer to manage at a high level similar such innovations at a major firm in your industry. Then you get a job as a managing director consultant selling to other major firms in related industries. Work school alternation is another common career type. You work for three or four years, till work bores then go to graduate school in a critical skill area, discovered needed in the world of work. Upon graduation you interview with a better firm and go to work for them for three or four years, till work, again, bores. You then go to graduate school in a prestigious highly paid professional area. You then interview for major positions in major firms. Nation one nation two consulting alternation is less well known but still quite common in the world. People choose an industry, say for example, the drug industry. They work for a leading firm in it in the US for 8 years or so. Then they work to get transferred to Japan in that same industry. They work for that industry in Japan for 8 or so years. If they build good people networks in that industry in both nations, they are now ready to create a consulting business helping firms in nation one find joint venture partners or investment or research partners in nation two and vice versa. Work exploration-vacation alternation is a rare but powerful career type. It is for people who want to make a fundamental change of career direction. You work for a firm of some sort, then you save up the maximum amount of vacation time, plus sick leave, plus unpaid sabbatical time allowed and take one hell of a vacation--two months to six months long, in a really outrageous or exotic location. There you get involved, take up part-time work, and build social networks so that in later years, after you go back to your firm to work, you can take shorter vacations that involve part-time work and getting better established in the vacation community. You keep using vacations there to build up businesses and homes and friends and entre to good medical and other needed services. Eventually there comes a point where your vacation job competes well with your regular job.

Rules: situations: These are the first four of sixteen rule types in career building. Career building is constrained by how the world is organized and works. A great deal of the insight needed in career building concerns finding unstated and hidden constraints. There are few wonderful roles and jobs in this world and the people who already have such luxuries defend them mightily, even paranoidly, using every trick in the book to keep others ignorant of them, unqualified for them, and untargeted at them. Learning the tactic constraints beyond the overt ones, the tacit knowledge underneath the formal knowledge, the tacit social dynamics beyond the official ones, is a key part of career building. Life is best lived backwards--that is one of the reality rules; we understand how to live after life is nearly over for us. Hence, interviewing people near the end of their lives provides powerful advice in terms of what they regret the most about how they lived their lives. Because people experience their lives as short, they cut corners and hurt other people in their frantic efforts to look important, get ahead, before death cuts it all short. This is a design flaw in life itself, from the point of view of people planning their lives. You can count on weaker types of people living life more ruthlessly than stronger types, because weak men, in particular, get more and more neurotic about pushing other people around now, quickly, in their anxiety to “get ahead”. This is another reality rule. There are lots of these, and careers built without them, fail. Between age 22 and 32 you are invisible in any large organization. No one will notice anything you do however good (though bad things will, because they make others feel superior to you, get wide circulation). However, when you become 32 to 35 years old, suddenly old people in the organization who hold real power will take an interest in what you have been doing the previous ten years. This feels unfair--for ten years they completely ignored your existence, then, suddenly they pay a lot of attention to what you did during ten years. If you have wisely spent those ten years, you are invited onto the personal team of various vice presidents--such teams run things in large organizations. If you have spent those ten years in an average or sloppy manner, you are not invited onto anyone’s team. Thus, your fate at 42 (whether you are invited onto the top management track or not) is really determined when you are 32 (whether any vice president invites you onto his or her personal team). This is a management rule. Careers built in ignorance of such rules, fail. Visibility is 9/10s of all promotion and success. This is a society rule. There are endless examples--in Japan, the daughter of a terrorist is given half a dozen TV interviews and a book contract simply because her mom was a well known criminal who helped blow up innocent people in explosions. In the US, a radical speaker and demonstration organizer, with communist beliefs, became visible on the nightly news because of the violence that the demonstrations he organized led to. Thirty years later he is on Wall Street as a successful investment bank manager, hired because of the thousands of colleagues and friends he made during his street demonstration organizer days and the money they now have to invest. Professional wrestlers and porno movie stars with giant breasts are members of parliament in the US and Italy, for similar reasons. Visibility, whether because of good or bad things you do, propels

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

you to leadership and prominence in our modern industrial societies. Why? Because societies crave interest, entertainment, more than they crave value. They want leaders who are interesting to see on the news, not good leaders who have bland boring personalities when on the TV news. Ignoring such society rules ruins your chances for a good career. Companies are monkey like, not a few anthropologists say. They are organized the same way that groups of chimpanzees are organized in the wilds of various jungles in Sumatra. There is a dominant male monkey who has sex with many women and who shares sexual resources with some upper level partner males. Then there are males lesser in the hierarchy who have nearly no sex but slave away being obedient to the dominant males in the hope of being dominant males themselves some day. Their collective illusion, given their numbers and the few numbers of actual leadership positions available, that they each will be top monkey is laughable were it not so pitiful to see them all spending years being docile and obedient for no actual reward. This is a company rule--that the number of good positions is much smaller than the number of monkeys competing for them, so personnel departments who keep up the illusions that all the lesser monkeys should work hard because they have a chance to be a top monkey, are basically lying to employees. If you know this rule you see your real chances for promotion, instead of taking part in the collective illusion your firm’s personnel department actively fosters. Careers that ignore this rule die an early and ugly death (when in one’s early 40s one discovers that 100 are competing for one “department chief” position and all think they are likely to be chosen in spite of all of them having roughly equal qualifications). Harsh though such a competing monkey viewpoint may be, by stripping human niceties from our vision, it opens us to important realities. Not a few people with interesting careers astonish others with the harshness of their way of viewing the world.

Rules: transitions: These are the second four of sixteen rule types in career building. These rules concern how you make transitions from one job to another in your chosen career path. The processes of transition are highly constrained. To be successful you must learn what those constraints actually are. There are two capabilities people look for in resumes--your own capabilities for contributing and your own capabilities for contributing. Bad resumes emphasize your capabilities and prove you can do a lot of things. Bad resumes emphasize your willingness to fit in, accept sometimes unexpected hard assignments, and really help an organization with its needs, even when those organization needs to do well fit your own requirements. Good resumes balance both of these perfectly--they prove you have personal capability and they prove in the past you have used it to greatly help those around you, even at some sacrifice to your own goals and preferences. In other words good resumes have a service and self balance. This is just one of several resume rules, that, if ignored, hurt your career. Organizations (fields administrating creative domains you can say) will only hire you to do what you already have done well; you will only apply for jobs that grow you by asking you to do what you have never done before. This is an interview rule, that, if slighted will hurt your career. It is one of many interview rules. It is what makes interviews exciting for both sides. Fundamentally in interviews, all of them, you are make qualifications for a preparatory job to the one you want look like qualifications for the one you want and the interviewer is sometimes helping you sell that exaggeration and sometimes working against you. If, during the interview, you can skillfully probe for what prior candidates who were interviewed, lacked, it will guide you to how to sell yourself. Bad jobs are well advertised and good jobs are secret. This is a job selection rule. It reflects the truth that good jobs are highly valued and hence even the planning of changes that might result in such jobs causes people involved in that planning to secretly line up their friends and acquaintances for applying for them, before the jobs themselves are even specifically designated. Thus to find good jobs you have to build a network among people who participate in inventing new initiatives and institutional parts of organizations who can warn you months early about positions being thought of and designed now. This is one of several job selection rules that, if slighted, hinder your career. Promotion systems are designed by personnel departments to switch your job value on the open market for your job value on a within-firm market that values you far below your open market value. Fundamentally all promotion systems are for mice, not humans. This is one of several promotion rules, essential for career building. If you know this rule, you explore your open market value and if necessary exercise it by switching firms or negotiating much better deals than what your local personnel department calls “fair” “what other employees settle for”.

Rules: power: These are the third four rule types of sixteen in career building. These rules concern learning the types of power and learning how to leverage them. Most people cannot see various types of power, and ignore them, never learning to use them or defend themselves from them. Career building requires gathering power and deploying power of all types in all its forms. Large organizations are nearly always dominated by men who organize themselves as monkeys do in the wild, into hierarchies, with authority and power increasing as rank increases in the hierarchy. Positional authority and power are fixed, stable, and well defined. You do not have to think much to do or exercise them. That is their attractive point. Their negative point is they are sitting, highly visible targets that attract enormous numbers of people competing for them. To try for positional power you have to become the enemy of nearly everyone around you. That cost, guarantees that when you get positional power you will have too little social power to be effective. Positional power, therefore, is always an illusion. This is one of the positional power rules; ignoring it hurts your career. The opposite in many ways of positional power is idea power. You invent roles and institutions and bring them into being by having ideas that no one else around you can construct and selling those ideas to upper level positional power people, in a careful way so they cannot steal the idea from you and use it themselves but instead have to increase their profile by being the one to spot you and your idea and provide the political and visibility resources necessary to bring your idea to fruition. This is one of several idea power rules the ignoring of which hurts careers. If you treat the organization you are in as a community, ignoring completely what it does and produces, and spend time networking till you know nearly everybody (their needs, capabilities, and interests) better than anyone else, you become leader, given various positional power positions though such positions never constitute your actual power base. This is social power and one of the social power rules, the ignoring of which is dangerous to careers. Power, in all its forms, starts as negative power, the power to make trouble. It evolves from that into assertive power--getting your ideas onto the group agenda--and from that into partnering then transforming power. People too shy to make trouble for others, therefore, never develop and manage any power at all in their work and lives. All power begins with demonstrating your ability to cause trouble for others whenever they do not first consult you and incorporate some of your needs into what generally is planned and going on. This is one of the power evolution rules that are essential for career building.

Rules: mysteries: These are the fourth four rules of sixteen in career building. These rules concern the unexpected, the anomalous and its use. Being predictable means being an easy target. Career building requires handling mystery created by others and creating mystery yourself. Innovations and creations are not welcomed, ever, by large organizations. They disrupt existing power lines, threaten top monkeys, hence develop enemies. Hence, innovations and creations have to be disguised as less, far less than they are, till they have evident results and powerful political and customer sponsors who can overpower all enemies and resistors. The trick of career building, then, is to grow, in the dark, hidden away, scarfing resources from other initiatives without notice, for months or years, initiatives till they are no longer babies easily killed by older stronger powers. This is one of the secrets rules of career success. Ignoring it kills careers. As your career progresses, in a large organization, people, more and more, study you and learn how to defeat you from your weaknesses and omissions. Everything that you concentrate on is also things you are thereby not concentrating on that can be used by others to defeat you. Hence, you have to be surprises as well as dependables--you have to produce both what, obviously given what you were working on, you promised, and some things that no one at all could have predicted you would produce. You have to produce expectables and surprises, both, if you are to defeat all those peers trying to get promoted ahead of you. This is one of the surprise rules of career development, essential for building careers that interest you and others. In a hierarchy there are monkeys below you and monkeys above you, who, not infrequently are mentally ill, psychopaths, for whom other people are not beings but tools for their own selfish worlds and imaginings. When you find yourself sandwiched between people the continued cooperation with which will harm you and the firm, you have to play hardball. That means you have to have skills for developing traps and getting people to entice themselves into the traps you set for them. Helping destructive people self destruct, hence, getting them out of the way of you yourself and of your firm’s mission, is a powerful skill all leaders develop. It is essential. This is one of the trap rules of career success. People unable or unwilling to be this mean to other people allow mean psychopaths in the organization to be much meaner than this to dozens or hundreds of other people, ruining lives and careers that could have meant much to the organization. Success over a 30 year career is based on successes over five year stretches during that career. Those five year successes are based on yearly successes. Those yearly ones are based on quarterly successes which are based on weekly successes which are based on daily ones. Success is fractal--the same patterns appearing on multiple size scales--30 years, 5 years, one year, 3-months, one week, one day. Similarly interest is fractal, repeating on all size scales. If you have visibility, innovation, social power tactics for building your success or the interestingness of your self and career, you can expect to have to work on them simultaneously on all of these size scales. This is a fractal rule, one of several essential for building interesting careers.

Tools: invention: These are the first four tools of career building. Nearly everyone in the best careers uses them at one time or another. The invention tools are ways to invent solutions and new initiatives beyond what others can imagine. The nicest attribute of this is new solutions and initiatives add to the power and capabilities of groups. You do not have to fight over old already existing power. Instead you can create new power of your own invention, using such tools. This reduces greatly the drag on your career from envy by others, competition of others, and backbiting by others who are willing to be ugly and dishonest in the ways that they compete with you. Many successful people, as well as most people having interesting careers, have used the solution culture method. They sense a gap between customers and the organization sustained by the culture of the organization. They reverse these culture attributes in the part of the organization they manage and use that inverted culture to imagine and produce entirely unexpected services or products to which customers strongly positively react, bringing themselves as the authors of this work to the attention of the president and chairman of the company. This is

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

one of the most general keys to career interest, the solution culture method of getting success and visibility. It is essential for career success, and a contributing factor to career interest in that it amounts to a person tackling a whole constellation of subtly inter-related factors where others choose to tackle only a handful of such factors. It is an expansion of the size scales at which you work. Many other people with interesting careers have studied a new market, gone into it, finding ridiculous products and service there that no other part of the world would tolerate or make successful. They use these extreme product examples to find abstract features of customers in this market that make such products successful. Those abstract features of customers become a model of what succeeds in this market, that they then use to develop new products for their firm. Again and again some of the world’s most famous people have used this method for extrapolating extreme products. Many people of interesting career have entered one field, then applied to it brand new concepts, methods, people, and resources that no one before ever applied. These are field weavers-they study fields outside their own and regularly borrow ideas from them to apply to their own, knowing competitors within their own field will not have thus studied abroad and not thus borrowed, hence, will have no defenses against such new methods. This is the field weaving method of career success. Many of the world’s biggest business failures--costing companies billions for decades--have come from applying in one culture methods or practice from another. Even the most elemental analysis of differences in application area is not done in such cases. Euro-Disney is one of the most famous examples (structured to give Disney a larger share of profits than Tokyo Disneyland but instead Disney got a larger share of immense losses, French lunches without wine, parking lots marked for California size cars not smaller European ones, and endless other faux pas), as is Lincoln Electric’s extension of its piece-work pay system to Europe (where in many nations they suddenly found it to be illegal). If, on the contrary, people look at what supports and hinders a set of business practices in the nation of origin of the practices and what supports and hinders them in the target new nation of application, and assign tactics to compensate (where origin supports but not target, where origin hinders but not target, where target hinders but not origin, where target supports but not origin) all goes well. This is the transfer of business practices across cultures method. More than transplanting your self, your career, your methods across cultural boundaries is involved here. It is the poise and confidence to expand the scope of your inputting, the scope of your dreams and schemes, the scope of your results across boundaries that stop your peers and even the organizations to which they belong and on which they depend that is being presented here.

Tools: shadow leading: These are the second four tools of career building. Nearly everyone in the best careers uses them at one time or another. People are chosen to be leaders only after they have been successfully been leading groups for quite some time. Hence, the only route to leadership is by doing it without formal authorization, authority, or resources. Only people able to lead anywhere, regardless of their rank or position, regardless of their fame or power, can, by practicing such shadow leading for years, get noticed by others and respected enough to be later chosen to be formal official leader. Indeed, you can only be leader by having made those around you leaders for years. Then they, having benefitted from your past small informal leadership, which you used to make them leaders, wholly support anyone wanting to make you a more powerful official leader. Imagine five people who all go to a library for two hours, wherein each person gets 20 journal articles on some area and extracts a list of the 50 most famous ideas and people/institutions in that area. They combine their lists at lunch to get 75 good journal articles and lists of the 100 best ideas and the 100 best people/institutions in the area. They divide those into sublists of 20 ideas and 20 best people/institutions. After lunch each person phones the 20 people on their lists, asking all about the 20 ideas on their list. That night they compile results from the afternoon’s call in the form of a 400 page book of all they have learned. After dinner they make a list of the 200 questions they still need answers to, carefully grouping similar questions, and groups of similar questions, until a question hierarchy results. The next morning they each call 20 people in order to get 40 of those questions (assigned to each person) answered. This is a small quick simplified example of phone research. With it in two or three days people knowing nothing about a topic can become world experts. It is intense but worthwhile. It is an essential tactic for leading by knowledge development. Nearly all the subjects of this study having interesting careers had this method or a version of it for mastering entirely new knowledge very quickly and intensively, in periods of time that others in their field would not believe. It was partly the surprise of Joe, say, knowing nothing about X on Tuesday the 13th and knowing all about X on Tuesday the 20th, that made Joe (and people in general having interesting careers) interesting to others. After any interesting or important meeting, phone everyone who attended the meeting, and showing real interest in their personal insights and reactions, ask each of them what they thought about the meeting, how they reacted to particular ideas or people, and what they think is appropriate as next steps. In this way, eliciting people’s reactions and feeding selectively to some people what other people also thought about the meeting, you create a second “shadow” phone meeting after the meeting that changes how people value and react to the meeting, making you leader of the overall process without having any formal leadership role. You lead simply by asking people what they felt about something they attended. This is the phone meeting debriefing method. Generally there are no laws against publishing within any large organization. Simply pick a topic nearly everyone is concerned about and, on your own time, start a newsletter about it, summarizing key outside books and resources, then branching out into conducting interviews and surveys of outsiders and competitors and eventually of people and projects within your own organization. Involve others gradually as reporters, informally, for you and get them to author key articles making them look good and allowing them to bring ideas before more senior people in the hierarchy. Send the newsletter to intermediate level people till, after a few issues, you have “tuned” it so they react entirely positively, then send it to all the upper level people in the organization. Be careful to emphasize content not self praise or promotion. This is the spontaneous publishing method of career promotion. Within a year it can bring your ideas to the attention of all the top people in the organization without in any way bothering anyone. Turn your own office and or the hallways near it into information gathering workshops that people passing through are invited to contribute to. Put large questions on the wall and places below for people to write answers while reading what others have answered. Change the walls daily, summarizing the previous day’s contributions and evolving the question accordingly to go to the next cognitive step. Then, after a month, write up the contents as a 100 page book, authored by all the names of the wall contributors, and distribute it widely throughout your organization. This is the idea rooms method of career building.

Tools: incremental leading: These are the third four tools of career building. Nearly everyone in the best careers uses them at one time or another. These tools are ways to lead all sorts of informal, transient, and personal processes so that entire communities of people grow up used to your leadership--all done without formal authority or position. You learn to train others in following your directions. There are usually no rules about who to eat lunch with in any large organization. Hence, you can make a list of the 100 people you want eventually to meet and then make a list of the 100 friends of them who are easier to meet, given your current low status in the organization. Casually find out what the interests, background, hobbies, and current projects are of such people and casually arrange to have lunch with them, being sure to say nearly nothing about yourself and instead asking question after question to get their wisdom and experience of things. After seeing all the friend-100, use your connection to them to have lunch with your main 100. After every 10 such lunches summarize ideas, project possibilities, and new initiatives for the organization that were mentioned or implicit in what those 10 lunches discussed. Use them as the basis of a new set of questions to ask the next 10 people you lunch with. This is a broad sketch of the lunch circuits method of career building. A great number of people having interesting careers depend on some version of this to become expert in whatever organization they choose work in (even when that organization is a loosely knit global network of lone-venturer artists or social activists or the like). Inventing study groups and using the members of such groups to regularly hold study events that involve many more people than are willing to meet regularly in a study group, is a key method of career building. For example, you can gather people interested in studying and improving their own creativity and the creativity of the organization. Once a month you can hold dinner meetings wherein members report on key books they read, key people they interview, or questionnaires they give to parts of the organization. Twice a year all day off-site workshops involving study group members as workshop leaders and outsiders and others as participants can be held. The results of these workshops can then be written up as 50 page booklets and widely distributed within and outside the organization. Most large organizations are organized as the personal teams of vice presidents. VPs begin choosing team members when they become 32 to 35 years old--old enough to have proven their value yet young enough to join a team and flexibly grow with it. A major career boost happens when you are chosen by such a vice president for their team. You can prepare for this by yourself choosing a vice president and team to be later chosen by. By loyally studying and working with that team before they choose you, you can make choice of you the “obvious choice” years later. This is the VP adoption method of career building. Substitute “leader in my field” or “Nobel winner in that lab” for Vice President and you have the same method but not inside a hierarchic business organization. Imagine people who go on ski trips that you organize, who play tennis in tournaments you organize, who take their boyfriends or girlfriends to cooking school events you organize, who live in dorms you administrate. Without any formal position of authority in work you can yet exert myriad other forms of authority in the organizations around work where people relax or live. In these other organizations you can train people to depend on you as a leader for years before formal leadership at work is available to you. By that time you have hundreds or thousands who have been trained dozens of times a year to depend on your organizing talents. This is the leadership practice events method for career development. A great deal of the interest found in interesting careers comes from casual lifestyle, relaxation, and hobby activities done with the world’s most unusual and interesting people, deliberately, semi-deliberately, or casually.

Tools: plurification: These are the fourth four tools for career building. These tools concern getting multiple benefits and profits out of any one activity that you do. By using successes as the basis of further successes and services you amplify small victories into much larger ones. Practicing such amplification is a major part of learning to amplify the sales, mission, success of large groups of people--much of the content of leadership. When you are in a large organization you will find yourself competing with people of inherited wealth who do not depend on any job for financial security. These people will play far uglier, without rules, in trying to ruin you and anyone else they compete with. They play so ugly because they do not fear losing their present job. Their family’s wealth makes them utterly ruthless, willing to take awful risks that you, depending on the company for financial security, are less willing to take. To defeat such competitors you have to have instant ways to get much better work if your present job disappears suddenly as a result of a risk you take fighting such ugly opponents. One of the methods for dealing with this is called dual simultaneous jobs. This means applying for an outside-the-company job, continually while working in the company, and collecting real job offers which you do not say yes to, unless you are

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

forced to by problems with your present company. By continually interviewing for good outside jobs you accomplish several things: get well known in your field, learn what competitors are interested in, learn weaknesses in your firm’s culture and outlook, learn what skills people are looking for. A bigger, better version of this method is called job/lifework/hobby/profession. This method involves a person in successive jobs (done for money and rank and training), along with a ultimate lifework project (doing your dream step by step), along with hobbies that you intensify to the point that they make you wealthy and famous (extreme concentrations of action and interest), along with social roles within your profession that turn it from a part-time volunteer activity into a full time job (influencing research grants, opening museums or exhibitions, and the like). By developing all four of these dimensions of your life at once, every week and month, for years, you never depend on your present job. Your contacts in your profession building roles easily get new jobs for you; your hobby easily brings in money for you; your lifework ultimately fulfills you and ultimately brings in money. You play them all against each other to keep each other honest and useful to you. Getting paid three ways for any good initiative you take is essential for good career building. The invent/publish/teach method involves you in doing some innovative thing at work, writing up your experience, methods, and result of that and publishing it, then using that publication to develop seminars at conferences and in local hotels, where you teach what you invented. In this way you get paid three ways for each innovation you launch. Secret speaking circuits are a two phase method. First, you practice public speaking six times or more a year at conferences where audiences in detail write feedback on each speaker. You do this for three or more years till you are the best rated speaker at such events, handling 800 people all day alone without breaks yet with excellent evaluations on all dimensions. (This takes even beginners no more than about 3 years of 6 times a year practice.) At this point you are ready for phase two: selecting key professions or business groups (or NGO groups) and making yourself a favorite speaker on their speaking circuit. Here you build influence and personal contacts with all the interesting supply organizations to your own and all the interesting customers of your own organization. This two phase method allows you to suddenly surprise within company opponents with your powerful outside-of-company support network. Alternative context customer contact is a method of developing strong relations with key customers of your own organization but doing so outside of work, through hobby, volunteer, education, community, or social movement involvements. You deliberately use such casual involvements to develop strong thorough networks in such organizations that are customers of your own, then use their endorsement and power to help you with inside-the-company initiatives and competitors.

Constraints: plurality: These are the first four constraints the intermediate future is putting on career building. What was simple, stable, and unitary in careers is becoming complex, transient, and plural. People are learning to simultaneously hold more than one job, to work for more than one organization at a time, and to turn the daily results of any one job they hold into a business selling them on the side, for example. The future is one person working for several companies at the same time. Jobs will be more and more defined by particular outputs per unit time, allowing talented people who work fast to take more than one job at the same time. Already many software and design jobs are structured this way. More of the time of most jobs is being spent on multi-company teams, instead of teams from one company. The managers of such teams cannot fire employees who they have trouble with, requiring good diplomatic skills to replace autocratic old managerial habits. Globality is increasing, causing business teams to combine people from a dozen nations, both genders, of all ages. Managing such diversity is not the same as managing people like yourself. It requires an interior psychology journey inside yourself to find unconscious habits and values you use blindly just because of what you were born and raised. Waves of intellectual and method movements sweep over global organizations every eight years. Many people remember total quality, then re-engineering, then ecommerce, then other movements, that every organization eventually mastered and applied. As companies and persons accumulate experience of such waves of new ways, continual re-packaging of your self and your skills is required. Also such movements open up competitive opportunities for people who understand the real contribution of them at a much more profound level than most appliers.

Constraints: softness: These are the second four constraints the intermediate future is putting on career building. Knowledge, software, and cultures are what people now manage, not departments, processes, and people. Organizations and business and art are becoming more cognitive, more intensely mental. This is making careers more abstract. Many a company discovered that all of their ideas and habits and structures were built when manufacturing was their primary value but today the software they put into products is their primary value but they are not structured that way. The softness of the entire economy is assured as knowledge in the form of software gets embedded in socks, food packages, clothing, doors, and nearly everything. The world is becoming coated with knowledge, but most business organizations are structured for a different world. In a world where knowledge value in a product is most of the product’s value, the primary process in industry changes from production of things to producing knowledge--that is, creativity. Yet most organizations are structured to produce things not creativity. The biggest resource a company has when the knowledge embedded in products is the primary value, is talented people who can create new ideas. Yet companies are structured as if financial assets are the only ones worth accounting for and rewarding for. With multi-job persons, working on multi-company teams, with multi-nationalities, there are no common values or viewpoints you can count on in business. Companies respond two ways--some become more the past, they become more one homogenous race or type of person. They thereby erase the entire world. They lose the ability to attract the best people from a population of 6 billion and instead they attract the best people from a population of 200 million. Such odds are absolutely hopeless. This approach is just fear and cowardice. The other approach is restructuring for diversity. This requires inventing entirely new ways to lead and manage.

Constraints: competitive nets These are the third four constraints that the intermediate future is putting on career building. Individual people are being evaluated on how well they increase the value of other people in collaborative networks, across companies, with them. The measure of individual accomplishment is group accomplishment fostered by individual contributions. It is not enough to do a great version of your job. You have to spot and leverage the capabilities of entire groups. Your competitiveness is their competitiveness and theirs is yours. A kind of schizo-phrenia is developing in organizations as what gets noticed and rewarded splits, into a traditional part that is shrinking and dying, and a new part that is growing. One such switch is from department power to initiative power being noticed and rewarded. Another is from knowledge hoarding being noticed and rewarded to knowledge sharing. A third is from companies being the unit of competitiveness to clusters (Silicon Valleys of related company-spawning companies) being the unit of competitiveness. A fourth is from totalizing quality so all employees in an organization are responsible for it, to globalizing quality so that ten different types of quality--quality of product, quality of the earth, quality of conflict, quality of knowledge, quality of learning etc.--become special tools sets that entire workforce sets, from related firms in a cluster, master.

Constraints: virtuality These are the fourth four constraints that the intermediate future is putting on career building. New technical and social infrastructures are arising. They define the tools we use to get things done. Physical spaces are partnering with electronic virtual spaces. The two types of spaces are weaving into each other. This makes each more complex. It is clear that the internet is not replacing usual shopping or businesses. It is becoming a partner, an amplifier of them instead. A few special functions will evolve into having only an electronic network form, but most functions will continue to have both face to face and ecommerce forms, that are designed to complement each other. Secondly, we are developing an ability to instantly create new companies as soon as new process capabilities or new customer wants are detected. The automation of venture business establishment is well along. Third, companies and suppliers have improved their quality. The future is asking customers to improve their quality by making themselves better informed about buying choices, using the internet as an information source, at least, is not a shopping venue. Fourth, the management of emotions, both by products and services that people buy, and by organizations and managers, is rising as a solution to the brittle materialism and selfishness of industrial world people in the early 21st century.

Career Dimensions: Topography, Dynamics, Approaches, Creativity This is the second fractal concept model developed from respondent answers of this study. It presents four aspects of careers slightly different than the aspects presented above in the first model. All the items in this second model were derived at the same time in the same way as the items in the first model, from all the interview and questionnaire answers of all 150 respondents of this study. This is a categorical model as is the one above. In reading it, keep in mind that all the contents, the ideas, in the model were respondent answers to questions about what makes a career interesting and what makes a career not interesting, to oneself and to others. Everything in the model was some sort of trait, method, or other content that helped make careers interesting, according to several respondents. Items not mentioned by 12 or more respondents, of the 150, were dropped from the model and did not get included in either the model above or the one immediately below.

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

Purity, Self, Mind Purity, Self, Mind Models

Knowledge Evolution, Knowledge ev olution, Experiment, Experiment, System System Models Models

Despair Doorway-Punchline effect from Give Up on Favored sudden frame change Frames, Habits, Ways

CREATIVITY CREATIVITY MODELS MODELS

Careerssas asCreations Creations Career (SocialRevolution) Revolution) (Social

Alternate Alternate Engagement Engage & Detachment, Detach: Global Local vertically, & Scope horizontally

Existing 5Try Steps:

Frame, Stop try extant frame Frame, stop extant New frame specify new frame Frame, generate Candidate Parts, candidate solution components Reduce & Test reduce and test

Subsetsof ofthe the11Story Story Subsets thatAll AllStories StoriesAre Are that

Careeras as Career Extending Extending theCreating Creating the ofaaSelf Self of

Befriending Befriending theAnxieties Anxieties the ofExistence Existence of

SOCIAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION REVOLUTION Liberty, Liberation, Negative Negative Power, power, Call to Call to Adventure Adventure

Create Creation Create Creation Machine & Think Machine, Think

You,Career, Career,as as You, Culture& &Culture Culture Culture Sequences Sequences

Combinatorics Combinatorics

Mental Mental Travel & Travel, Perceive Perceive Paradox Paradox

Make Make Interior Interior & Exterior Room, Room Make Exterior Room

Psychic Growth, Fix & Use Flaws, Psychic growth Beauty Change EnvirUse Beauty, Enthuse Demystify onment, Enthuse, Invent Solution culture Tell & untell Demystify, Solution Culture, Stop responses & stories Tell Stories, Stop Responses & Bridge communities Strategize Strategy, Love Bridge Community Love

Update Update Commonsense Commonsense Regularly Regularly

AS AS INFLUENCE INFLUENCE

AS AS CULTURE CULTURE

BECOMING BECOMING CREATIVE CREATIVE Freedom, Freedom, Assertive Assertive Power, power, Trials & Supreme Helpers, Ordeal

Social Waves Waves Social

CAREER CAREER APPROACHES APPROACHES Conquer & Conquer, Manage Manage Emergence Emergence

Historic Dream, Historic Dream, Partnering Partnering Power, Supreme power, Ordeal The Return

StructuralFocal FocalPoints Points Structural

AS AS ENTERPRISE ENTERPRISE

CAREER CAREER AS AS CREATIVITY CREATIVITY Conserve Novelty, Conserving Novelty, Tranformative Power, Transformative power, Return with Elixir the Elixir institutionalized

Personal Motivations Personal Motivations

ASDRAMA DRAMA AS AS SHOW SHOW AS

INSIGHT INSIGHT PROCESS PROCESS Social& & Social GroupModels Models Group

Catalog & Catalog & Blend Models Blend Models

Accumulate Build failure Failure index, Index and reverse intoReverse solution into Solution Spec spec

Culture Culture Fits& &Gaps Gaps Fits

Regular Regular Refounding, Refounding, Reinventing Reinventing Self/Career Self/Career

Persuading, Persuade Leading, Lead Negotiating, Negotiate Reasoning Reason & & Arguing Argue

Communicate, Communicate Transplant, Transplant Changeminds Minds, Change Sell Sell Fix/Use Mental flaws

DIMENSIONS DIMENSIONS OF INTERESTING OF INTERESTING CAREERS II CAREERS II MultiplierConnects Connects Multiplier

Careeras asRaces Racesor or Career Drills Drills

Livingon onHalf HalfYour Your Living Income Income

SHAPES SHAPES

Transplant Taguchi Taguchi & &Cluster Cluster Transplant You& & DynamicsOptimization Optimization You Dynamics Career Career Across Across Cultures Cultures

SCALES SCALES Location Location -tippingpoints points -tipping -whistlepoints points -whistle -structural -structural holes holes

Directionality Directionality -linear -linear -orthogonal -orthogonal -non-linear -non-linear

Windows Windows toGreatness Greatness to

MOVES MOVES Projecting Projecting Contributing Contributing AcrossSize Size Across Scales Scales

Plural Plural Parallel Parallel Simultaneous Simultaneous Investments Investments

Psychic Psychic Growth Growth Career: Career: Mind Mind Extensions Extensions Career Career

Grondona Grondona Development Development Culture Culture

Leadingby by Leading Enviroment Enviroment

Leadingthru thruGaps Gaps& & Leading Cracks Cracks

Using/fixingNeuroses Neuroses Using/fixing &Developmental Developmental & Imagesof ofOthers Others Images

SIGHT SIGHT Toffler Toffler De-massDe-massification ification

Invisibility Invisibility

Inabilityto to Inability Choose: Choose: (livein in (live possibility) possibility)

CAREER CAREER DYNAMICS DYNAMICS

BATTLEFIELD BATTLEFIELD Giddens Giddens De-localDe-localization ization

Uneducatedness: Uneducatedness: unovercomeschooling, schooling, unovercome parents,nationality, nationality, parents, gender,era, era,professn. professn. gender,

BLOCKS BLOCKS Solution Solution Culture, Culture, Social Social Automaton, Automaton, ViralGrowth Growth Viral

CAREER CAREER TOPOGRAPHY TOPOGRAPHY Malone Malone CoordinationTheory Theory Coordination

RequireImmediate Immediate Require Linkbetween betweeninvestinvestLink mentsand andreturns returns ments

Competitive Competitive Framework Framework Repertoire Repertoire

Process: Process: jobshrink, shrink, job solutn.culture, culture, solutn. whistlepoint, point, whistle Manageby byEvents Events Manage

PerfectOwn Own Perfect RoleWhile While Role EntireOrg.n Org.n Entire Dies Dies

PRINCIPLES PRINCIPLES Peripheral Peripheral Participation Participation

SunTsu: Tsu: Sun Victory== Victory abilityto to ability notfight fight not

TooDecent Decentto toProtect Protect Too Decency;Help HelpBoss Boss Decency; KeepYou YouDown Down Keep

PARADOXES PARADOXES Become Become leaderby by leader makingothers others making leaders leaders

WellPaid Paid Well Exploring Exploring

Hireto toDo Do Hire WhatYou You What AlreadyDid Did Already

Topography: Battleground (or Playing Field) These are the first four career dimensions under career Topography. Careers have shapes and their take place in spaces having shapes. The lay of the land affects the lay of the career you develop. Strategy in layouts of topography take the form of positioning, path exploration and choice, and like spatial dimensions. The current world differs from the world 20 years ago, so every generation faces a different institutional, societal, cultural, technological playing field for aspirations, talents, skills, and accomplishments than other generations. People cognizant of such changes can find or invent career types never seen before or implement known types on institutional or other substrates never in existence before. People not aware of these changes may by happenstance do the same thing but they are much less likely to succeed at that than people aware of the ground upon which their careers play out. First, under career Battleground is de-local-ization. New infrastructures--cellular communications, the internet, cable television, and others--invade ordinary homes, offices, and lives, exposing people to diversity, their hunger for content scouring the world continually for something to attract local interest worldwide. The exposure to others’ ways from these media, makes ordinary daily life highly educative worldwide, without schools. This relativizes local values, raising doubts about traditional authorities, and it causes people to reside not in families or communities or homes but in communities of practice--professions of work--that give stability and meaning, organizing daily life. Rising relativism pushes people into seeking intimacy in subworlds, building their own identities instead of inheriting roles from some tradition, and inventing instead of following authorities. These three produce a cost--a large workload of self reflection to daily life. People are continually at risk of losing meaning because of overly narcissistic structuring of modern lives. Rising residing in subworlds of intimacy causes career spaces to become more and more cognitive, and exposes people more and more to risks from the narrowness of the cognitive spaces they inhabit. Narrow specialization makes people expert but before tinier audiences equally narrow. These two--intimate subworlds and increase risk from cognitive narrowness--produce a cost--yearning for authority missing in modern lives. We all have one narrow expertise we reside in cognitively but in tern we live in a world of hundreds of expertises we are not personally masters of, so we are incapable in 99% of life as a cost of being expert in 1%. These two costs cause a paradox: we want the easy authority and tradition we just worked hard to liberate ourselves from. Exposure to other ways makes lives more relative and more cognitive, removing easy authorities and homes in traditions and forcing people invent their selves and ways, continually, risking narcissism-caused loss of meaning and total ignorance from narrowness of personal expertise. So we long for authority we can follow to eliminate the risk of self invention and the risk of loss of meaning from narrow cognitive homes. Careers can recognize and use this huge growing nature to contemporary life or they can ignore it. Cynical people use this by offering people magical authorities they long for, simplifying lives by ruining them. Less cynical people use this by offering people communal events wherein local narrow expertises combine to enrich we narrow modern people with knowledge from others expert in other fields than our own. Whether your career produces products, policies, or art the above forces in contemporary life are the land your careering takes place upon. There are diverse ways, some good, other bad, to use this “land” and its “layout” for career building. Second under career Battleground is de-mass-ification. The standard systems of mass production, mass broadcasting, and the like invade localities exposing them to diverse ways, different than their own. They also speed up images and change everywhere. Invading localities with diversity produces two paradoxes: one, uniform systems foster diversity exposure and diverse responses to diversity exposure; two, institutions and products appear to be sized wrongly, either too big or too small for our needs. The first paradox is central standard systems by exposing us to diversity make us more and more dissatisfied with central standard systems--such systems self destruct. Centrality is too uniform for us so we see leaders as wrong sized--too obtuse, too insensitive to detail and local needs, too bureaucratic, as are the solutions they promote. Centrality is also too slow in responding so we see leaders and their solutions as out of step, behind the times, too late to help. The second paradox is the scale of the doer does not match the scale of the needer--solutions end up being too big or too small. Institutions appear too big and too little at the same time. We yearn for inter-regional cooperation and more localized solutions--we want bigger scale coalitions to act and small scale responders to our needs, both at the same time. Products also appear too big and too small at the same time. We want custom designs for everything while also wanting global inter-facing and inter-connecting of all our local items and systems. We want global networking of entirely local and unique devises and designs. We want larger and smaller scale products and solutions at the same time.

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

A third and fourth paradox exist. The third paradox is mass standard systems make us the same as everyone else in being entirely lonely. We are united in loneliness. The fourth paradox is mass standard systems make us yearn for what we just left behind. We yearn for what we just liberated ourselves from. The third paradox means nuclear families do not work. A mom, dad, plus kid or two, is too small a unit of care to raise children well. It is also too large a unit, imposing two adults’ biases on kids who must daily function in a dozen different institutions and contexts. As a result blurring occurs as child labor, home work, hobby mentors, neighborhood friend parents become family to kids. The fourth paradox means we liberate ourselves without attaining freedom. We end up seeking a new one “right” way to replace tradition’s imposed one right way. Liberation is too large for us, overwhelming us with choice, responsibility, and options, while being too small for us, paralyzing us with fear and anxiety, driving us to phony authorities and specious new pseudo-traditions and cults. All the above are huge powerful forces found everywhere in the industrial world. These forces are huge, omnipresent, and completely unaltered by government policy and personal lifestyle choice. The forces do not reduce or go away, though we can influence greatly our ability to derive satisfaction from living around, in, on, or among them. Careers that see these forces and design themselves to use them, find power to direct far beyond other careers. This can be done everywhere, in every industrial nation, in every organization, in every family. Third under career Battleground is the culture of development. It turns out the economic development requires a certain set of shared habits and values if it is to take place. All cultures that have developed economically have shared these values and habits; all cultures that have failed lack them. Three things must be fully present for economic development to occur: one, a set of infrastructures that expand the scope of action of strivers, incrementally; two, a “near future” that can be invested in because it is based on certain reliabilities of person, law, and system; three, a population of local risk-takers willing to violate past norms while fulfilling deep parts of those norms, putting society on successive new infrastructure bases. The infrastructures must include education, democracy of sorts, partnering formats and laws, and technologies of finding and connecting and collaborating. The near future must include reliable personal behavior, reliable legal and political behavior, and reliable systems, economic and cultural. The population of striving risk-takers must include training for risk, entooling for it, promotion and tolerance of rivalry. Careers can embody these values of economic development or omit some or all of them. Careers that do not develop economically lack one or more such values. The identity you build as a person can embody infrastructures, establish a near future that is reliable, and take risks with rivals or it can omit one or all of these. Leading others involves setting up such a culture of development among them, whether economically directed or artistically directed. Leading then consists of infrastructure embodiment, reliable near future establishment, and populating both with risk-takers acting in rivalry. Fourth under career Battleground is coordination science. New technologies, taken as a whole, are continuously reducing the costs of coordinating, replacing coordination functions in the past done by people in hierarchies with technical systems, not needing hierarchy to coordinate much more activity much better, with more accuracy, speed, quality, feedback, and growth. This vast lowering of the costs of coordinating work affects individuals, and large organizations. It makes individuals form fluid coalitions “virtual ventures” on the net that come together for particular projects then disperse for others. It makes large organizations either break up into markets of teams bidding against each other for parts of projects in fluid coalitions or form fluid coalitions with other large organizations so huge networks of parts of various large organizations take on projects much larger than could be handled in the past. These new technologies are creating smaller more temporary structures of work among people and teams in firms, and larger more temporary structures of work among firms. Organizational form becomes, not an input and fixed, but something that emerges from many units bidding and coalescing across networks. Careers optimized for lone individual work or large organization teamwork will fail to develop in this new world of lowered coordination costs. Instead capable individuals will fluidly come together in various teams that themselves come together to form virtual temporary companies to get projects and get project work done. Just-in-Time assembly of capabilities will replace fixed bureaucratic libraries of capabilities. Pay for status and seniority will give way to pay for a track-record of accomplishments. Repute from organization will give way to repute from satisfied customers. Some have coined terms like “the brand called ‘You’” (Tom Peters) for parts of this phenomenon.

Topography: Sight These are the second four career dimensions under career Topography. Careers have shapes that evolve on shapes--societal, technological, and others. However, if you cannot see the layout there, it cannot guide or help your career and it can only make your career interesting via unhappy surprises and disappointments. Becoming able to see the lay of the land for career moves is an essential part of building interesting careers (where the interest/cost ratio is positive). First, under Sight is having a competitive repertoire of frameworks. Young people work hard at meeting attractive members of the opposite sex--mating. However very few of them study the psychology and values of the opposite sex. Training in the discourse differences between the sexes researched by Deborah Tannen over a 30 year career drastically improves interaction and success in this activity common to young people. People exposed to Tannen’s theory actually see behaviors and aspects to behaviors that others do not notice and react to. In general, any theory allows people to see things not noticed by people lacking exposure to that theory. Therefore, people entering a situation having a personal repertoire of hundreds of theories, notice thousands of aspects of the situation unseen by people lacking that repertoire. Theorists live in larger worlds than non-theorists. We are all theorists, however, but divided into two type--people whose only theories are those they unconsciously imbibed from when and where they grew up, and people who deliberately, consciously, explored hundreds of theories invented by other people and applied them to view the world. Careers of people unable to see 99% of what is there in the situations that they face to be seen (given all the theories relevant to that part of the world that are in existence at the time), underperform careers of people able to see a vast territory of aspects in the same situations due to mastery of a very large repertoire of very diverse theories. Much scientific discovery, for example, happens not to experts in a field but to visiting outsiders whose different frameworks highlight unvalued, unexamined parts of situations that experts miss, lacking those diverse frameworks. All insight processes, for another example, work by driving people to exhaust all the frameworks they know till they fall into utter despair, then, giving up emotionally all confidence in themselves and what they now know, they open their minds a little to entirely new frameworks they do not favor and never usually consider. Insight comes from such departure from favored frameworks and views. Second, under Sight is peripheral participation, snooping, going where you do not belong, learning what you are not supposed to know. We must learn, since we start life so very local. Yet institutions are loathe to divulge or give access to all sorts of meetings, persons, files, and functions. All careers face the challenge of learning in a world primarily structured to prevent ordinary access to its information and people. Status gets involved all all but the best and most general people gradually learn to not waste time answering the questions of strangers and the unlearned masses “below” them. Thus learning has to involve violating myriad status divides, organization walls, secret coalitions, manipulative conspirators, and the like. Learning becomes almost synonymous with going where one “should” not go and being where one “should” not be. Learning becomes violation pure and simple. It must be noted that internal embarrassment and hesitancy to be a baby in a room full if experts is enough of a barrier to keep most people from learning or hanging around where they “do not belong”. Boundaries do not have to be socially enforced to be powerful. Careers of people too timid to violate boundaries, status divides and the like wither. Third, under Sight is leading via gaps and cracks that you spot but that others cannot see. When you are with people or in institutions you get socialized to certain standards and expectations and traditions so that all that happens around you seems normal and unexceptional for the most part. You share with those around you common views and common sense, common frameworks, and common histories and expectations. This happens, social psychologists have found, very rapidly so that people just introduced to utter strangers yet are powerfully drawn to sharing view and values with them. Some people, however, are aware of this force in human affairs and deliberately resist it, though overtly going along. As a result they notice that most people and organizations operate at horrendously low levels of quality and performance. They notice that most organizations have laughably low levels and standards of performance. They socialize their people to extremely low levels of performance, praising them--the people and the standards--as world best, benchmark leaders and the like. Entire organizations are filled mostly with buffoons who turn any conversational encounter into self praise events about how great they are or were, as if bombastically advertising yourself gets respect anywhere in the world. This Dilbert nature of organizational life in some nations and cultures insures us that a stranger visiting such places can spot hundreds of possible and needed improvements in every situation and hour. If you resist the self stories and culture of a place and its people, you find that what they praise is really unbelievably sloppy performance and low expectations and standards. You find you can improve almost everything you see, in every situation. The prerequisite and cost of this, however, is seeing stark negatives where others see “normality” and “great stuff”. You come across as negative compared to others if you are not careful. Yet the ability to see needs that others cannot see because of self praise, self illusion, and self concern is a powerful basis for career building and leadership of all sorts. An artist able to name several dozen conformist, copy-cat, unimaginative, herd phenomena in a new school of painting, has the chance to surpass the entire school in dozens of ways. An artist unable to see such limitations with specificity has little chance of such surpassing. This is really a corollary under a principle--visiting all organizations and groups in your life as a cultural anthropologists visits primitive people and jungle tribes. If you explore every group you visit as if it were a unique culture and history and tradition, examining its peculiar practices and prospects, you spot limitations in what it can see and do, in what is allowed to be said and imagined. You see the imaginary, emotive, social, and physical boundaries it is afraid to explore or cross. You see myriad ways to improve and extend it. Fourth, under Sight is leading by environments you set up that others adapt to. Here you become the lay of the land, the battleground that others fight on. Talking to others is too direct, tiresome, and oppressive in many fields. It is inefficient, in that the same contents have to be repeated across a thousand conversations, year in and year out. In every field as careers progress, people develop tools other than themselves that communicate for them. It could be books, sculptures, exhibitions, conferences, workshops, videos, disciples, schools, certification programs or any of a host of other devices. These environments speak for you instead of you speaking for you with words. Setting up environments that communicate by being something that others adapt themselves to, makes communication automatic, thorough, and actually interiorized and applied rather than just heard and memorized as verbiage. Careers that depend on personal talk too long dwindle and diminish, overwhelmed by repetition and limited access to their best ideas.

Topography: Scales These are the third four career dimensions under career Topography. Careers, because they have shapes and take place on shaped landscapes, also are sensitive to size scales and size effects. A critical variables is how many scales you see and operate on, at any one time and across periods of time. Phenomena on various different size scales interact across levels, so, sometimes, large scale phenomena form break throughs on small size scales and vice versa sometimes accumulations on small scales break through to strongly affect large scales. First, under Scales is plural parallel simultaneous investments. Many people have plural simultaneous careers that they develop in parallel, somewhat like herding cattle except you herd each cow in a different direction, rather than herding them all in the same direction. Consider an insurance executive, who writes famed poetry, while teaching in a local college, and publishing, from time to time, video documentaries of places where he vacations regularly. Suppose he pushes each of these further and further in quality or economic returns or networking with people. This is what is being discussed here. In not a few people these separate careers are deliberately dispersed among quite different fields, persons, institutions, and, for that matter, nations. When progress in one career direction is stymied, investment is raised in one or more of the others. Each gets nudged at times while work is done on the others. It is very much like a board game with five or six pieces being advanced, in turn, as dice are rolled. People tend to rest by investing in another career rather than vacationing in general from

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

the all. In this way huge productivity is obtained while being rested by investing in extremely different types of work of each career. To manage more than one career at a time a person has to be able to shrink requirements and execute remaining requirements with great efficiency. These abilities to focus on core issues and execute efficiently, along with resting by switching to another career type for a while, plus having four or more diverse careers one pursues at the same time, define a type of career itself, one might say. Second, under Scales is projecting and contributing across size scales. Careers can easily get caught up in one or two size scales of effort, person, institution, and tradition. Omitting smaller scales and larger scales is not noticed so not done, a person supposes. Sometimes work on one size scale sparks smaller scale or larger scale reactions, unexpected. Other times a person deliberately arranges work on one size scale hoping that it will at some point cause something to emerge on larger or smaller size scales. Careers that are cognizant of multiple size scales possible and that work to link them and inter-relate their contents outshine those that do not, in most cases. Third, under Scales is windows to greatness--getting close enough to people great in a field to observe and learn the keys to recognition, contribution, and major upsets of a field. A major path to greatness is getting near greatness of a previous generation Almost any sort of “getting near” will do--from being a messenger boy in their office, to serving them tea, to cleaning their office floor. Many canny people scheme and connive till they manage to get near a particular great person of their dreams. What is it about nearness that is so powerful? It may be in what you observe, but it may be in a self-fulfilling way, in what gets you motivated enough to connive to get near them, or it may be a relationship you develop with the great one, however initially tangential. It may be the confidence you get from finding that your great one is not all that great when viewed everyday, thus you, also not so great when thusly viewed, have a chance for greatness yourself. Fourth, under Scales is living on half your income--the principle represents many other similar principles of living that allow the same opportunities and chances that anyone else faces to, in your own case, produce, over time, huge unexpected accumulations of skill, resource, information or the like. Lifestyles of accumulating via sacrificing what others think are essential minima allow surprise to break forth, insuring wide repute and respect.

Topography: Shapes These are the fourth four career dimensions under career Topography. Careers have particular shapes as well as taking place on shaped landscapes of changes, opportunities, intersecting reputes and the like. A major decision people make is what shape of career to develop, whether by design or happenstance. There are preferences for career shapes that seem to be somewhat independent of preferred occupations, professions, and other career contents, filling those shapes. First, under Shapes is directionality--linear careers, orthogonal careers, and non-linear careers. Careers having linear shapes push in the same direction over periods of decades. They choose a direction early and push in that direction directly. Careers having orthogonal shapes push in one direction till some significant contribution gets documented, then, changing personal identity to reflect that accomplishment they project a new self in a new direction, till a significant contribution gets documented there, whereupon they repeat the entire process, changing direction after every major accomplishment. Careers having non-linear shapes create seeds that they inject into ongoing amplification forces, most missing and not getting any amplification, until one does get amplified, extending its initial seed into something unrecognizably huge and famous and impressive, do to non-linear forces in the environment that the initial seed latched onto somehow. Though there are many other career shapes, these three suffice to establish important observations. Linear careers explore one direction in depth, but involve little lateral exploration. Orthogonal careers maximize lateral exploration, giving up in depth exploration of any one direction. Non-linear careers explore whatever the non-linear amplification process in them exposes them to--exploration by “riding the wave” as it were. Other common shapes include spirals, where a person revisits the same sequence of roles or institutions at regular intervals with later visits involving expanded responsibility and influence, and broccoli, where a person starts with four diverse career directions, developing each simultaneously, with offshoots of one direction sometimes inter-twining with offshoots of another, and parthenogenetic “tip layering” career shapes, where one direction is developed far and fast till its peak falls over quite far from its base onto new territory where another tall fast tower of careering quickly grows till it totters and falls over, similarly. Any career shape can be interesting or not, though unusual shapes, like the broccoli one, tend to produce more interesting careers than some more common others. Second, under Shapes is location--tipping point finding, whistle point finding, structural hole finding. In real estate there is a principle of location, location, location as the source of value in a property. Careers are similar, at least some of them, in that where they are located contributes more to their value than what the person having the career contributes. If you locate modest actions in the right place they can change the history of the world, this idea goes. More specifically, there are bodies of knowledge that suggest why this is so--why location has powers of its own--and where to look for powerful locations. One such body of knowledge is non-linear system dynamics, the study of mathematically non-linear phenomena in general. This field suggests that most systems that humans occupy and concern themselves with have certain locations, called variously whistle points or tipping points, where slight inputs can change the state of entire systems. Other theories make more specific suggestions about the actual locations of such tipping/whistle points. Marxist contradiction theory looks at “problem generators” in society--places that generate myriad different problems over long period of time; Cultural anthropology theory looks at failure cultures that develop such what one is willing to call a solution is only something guaranteed to perpetuate one’s primary problems. Actions directed at problem generator points or failure culture points may strike nonlinear dynamic tipping points that switch the destiny of entire systems in new directions. Careers located at such points have the chance for the relatively small scale inputs of a single career similarly switching entire societies onto new tracks and directions. Third, under Shapes is career races or drills--setting up career processes to match or surpass other things in the world that evolve, and, setting up career steps to dig deeper and deeper into some dimension of depth, of psyche, knowledge layers, and others. Races are a matter of watching something and trying to match or surpass its speed. Many venture businesses are a matter of chasing the evolution of a particular customer need or technical capability. Drills are matters of pushing a single idea or capability deeper and deeper until really ultimate implications and applications of it appear. This is not as hard as it appears as the race people skim such ideas at their surfaces in their onrush, leaving ideas barely understood and exploited for slower, more careful others to drill until profound potentials appear. Fourth, under Shapes is connections to multipliers in society that take inputs and distribute them widely everywhere--publishing industries, venture technology businesses, cellular phoning, internet bloggs, and the like. Societies are lumpy with some lumps having very different abilities, powers, and potentials than other lumps. If you come from a somewhat economically poor society, somewhat therefore socially richer than rich nations, to a rich nation you notice all sorts of potentials and powers missing from your own society. You feel that you are in a rich environment with great machineries that multiply individual doings into whole society results, almost automatically. If you grow up in rich societies and live your entire life there, you may be aware of such “multipliers” but not notice them particularly and not value them highly. You miss, in short, the most powerful career boosters in your own society because you are a fish not noticing its water.

Dynamics: Principles These are the first four career dimensions under career Dynamics. The same principles turn up in very different types of career. Consistencies in human nature, the evolution of our modern world, and the hierarchic behaviors that organize lifespans and troops of “human” monkeys underlie these principles in most cases. First, under Principles is Sun Tsu’s idea that victory in careering (and war) comes from ability to avoid fighting. Sun Tsu about 500 B.C. in ancient China, meant that victory is latent in the layout of particular battlegrounds. This means that most battlegrounds mean imply defeat for you, so you must be able to avoid battle there. Avoiding battle in most battlegrounds requires great logistics, able to move your army with supplies quickly and far, at times, to avoid battle on battlegrounds where defeat is latent for you. The ability to avoid particular battlegrounds is the route to victory. In careering most jobs, roles, institutions, events, trends imply defeat for you and your personal skills. Only a few imply victory. However, we all need income, for self support, except those born rich. So we end up caught between a rock and a hard place--needing income yet the sources we immediately find imply defeat for what we most dream of and value. A number of ways to handle this are found. Some people cut expenses to the bone and keep searching, sometimes for years, for the right job or event or chance. Some people take unsatisfying first roles or jobs, but quickly upgrade each to a better fitting one, till, after years of changing, they arrive at something pretty satisfying (or till they give up, their dreams and goals eroded by years of unsatisfying work). Some people cleverly rework unsatisfying roles or jobs so as to make room for some of what they dream of doing. In all of these approaches the principle remains--victory comes from the ability to avoid fighting on battlegrounds where defeat is latent for you. The ability to pass on opportunities that do not fit your dreams is the key to finding ways to get paid to fulfill your dreams. Second, under Principles is becoming a leader by making those around you leaders. Though there are other ways to become a leader, this principle strictly limits their power and destiny. If you try to become leader of any field, alone, without first making those around you into leaders, then all those who ever served around you stand as a block, not wishing you into any new, larger, leadership role. So many people ignore this principle that it makes the apparent difficulty of becoming leader of establish powerful organizations no mystery. Since nearly all people wanting to lead do next to nothing to turn their acquaintances and friends and colleagues into leaders, there is next to no one wanting them to become leader. They never develop a constituency in whose interest it is for them to lead. Thus, there is no mystery why they do not eventually become leaders--no one wants to be led by them. On the rare otherhand, people who make their friends, acquaintances, and colleagues into leaders, with every position or role they play, develop a group around them who benefitted the last time they had an interesting role. Such people look forward to them getting a better role because that implies even better roles for the members of the group. This constitutes a natural constituency wanting a person to become leader, to get promoted, to enlarge scope of responsible action. Indeed, when you become leader without helping those around you, you create a negative constituency, determined to block you from becoming a leader in the future. Third, under Principles is a standard career process--shrink your job, invent a solution culture, direct it at whistle points, invent events--used by people in all roles, ages, and stages of careering. Time is the first thing that people learn to create in their careers, before creating anything “creative” or wonderful. Since nearly all jobs and roles in the world are structured to not be creative or wonderful, but boring repetitious execution of banal procedures barely capable of minimal performance, letting them occupy all your time guarantees you will become as boring and repetitious and uninteresting as those roles and jobs. The beginning of creating a creative career is finding time to do more creative things than your assigned role requires or allows. Fortunately, the world’s standards of performance are so low, particularly in big organizations, with so much of work stuffed with status behaviors from the monkey parts of human genetics and nature, that you can shrink nearly any job anywhere from 40 hours a week to 4 hours a week while improving quality of outcome and personal care delivered to customers of the job. Creative careering starts with job shrinking skills. You can see this in smart people, who, when assigned a new job, interview all those who receive outputs of that job, ascertaining whether and the degree to which they actually need and use those outputs. These interviews typically find that less than a third of the outputs of any job are actually valued and used by anyone else (especially in big organizations where reports are collected and filed away to be read by no one at all). I tested this in one job by inserting passages of text from the back of cereal boxes into the middle paragraphs of my reports and waiting years for anyone to notice--no one ever did. Through dozens of these sorts of methods people shrink the job, freeing up lots of time, weekly, for more inventive work. For not a few people who have shrunk the job successfully into few hours, freeing up many, the problem is how to do something inventive with that freed up time. Not a few people with great careers have described the culture of their institution as a failure culture that perpetually reproduces the same types of problems, decade after decade, due to deep blindspots in the

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

beliefs, ways of thinking, national and gender cultures of the people in the institution. They then reverse all the traits of that failure culture and apply that solution culture to invent a new way of work and product of work. Part of this is directing that solution culture at whistle points--places where slight inputs get magnified into having huge impacts. There are ways of finding whistle points in social and commercial, artistic and creative systems of all sorts. Finally, not a few careers culminate in creative events that bring people or institutions together in particular configurations using detailed procedures of interaction till wonderful results emerge. This process--job shrinkage making room for applying solution cultures to whistle points via invent events--is found in career after career in widely different field. It can be reworded as ruthless focus (shrinking of non-essential job components) followed by profound revision (existing cultures reverse into being solution cultures) followed by ruthless focus (directing solution cultures at whistle points instead of more plentiful non-whistle points in a system) followed by ruthless focus (invent events where the right roles and resources are gathered in a few days of intense, designed interaction to produce remarkable emergent results). The pattern is focus, profound revision, focus, focus. Careers are sloughing of the non-essential combined with profound revision of existing frameworks. Fourth, under Principles is using and fixing neuroses in persons, groups, organizations, eras, nations, genders, professions, and the like. A corollary of that is generating development images of others and dealing with them out of such images. Seeking the flaw, the exaggeration, the illusion, the phony, the self serving, the mis-representation in everything you see, though it makes you a rather negative-seeming person, allows you to powerfully improve every situation in hundreds of ways. Negation has improvement power. A corollary of this is this Principle of using and fixing the neuroses in things. Every talent or ability is a focus, attending to some things not others, over a period of time. As a result every talent has a cost, all those alternative things not attended to or developed. That we tend to see what we positively have developed and lost track of what that cost us in terms of things not developed defines neurosis. We are neurotic to the extent that we forget what our talents and abilities have cost us. We even believe they are costless positives in our lives, until some disaster reveals to us that one of them indeed did have a cost we lost track of. The person who, for every talent or ability or accomplishment shown him, sees the cost of that, and the neurotic forgetting or denial of that cost, is a rather negative person, yet who can save entire careers, lives, and societies from disaster.

Dynamics: Paradoxes These are the second four career dimensions under career Dynamics. Nearly all fields and occupations share the same paradoxes. Many of these come from human psychology and personality and mystifications common to how children are raised in modern industrial societies. First, under Paradoxes is getting yourself well paid while exploring career and occupation options. Youth face a problem--to choose their destiny while yet nearly entirely ignorant of what choices are available and what such choices are like. Some youth, perhaps because their family had or exposed them to a great person in a great occupation, get focus and direction early, ruling out all options save one beloved one. These are lucky lives in this way. Most youth, however, have as yet been exposed to nothing that interesting, so they hesitate to choose at all, and wish somehow to explore the world before choosing what to become and do. However, years of drifting become a track record of drift and lack of choice that makes such people more and more unattractive to institutions and built up efforts of this world. This is the paradox of choosing while ignorant of what the choices are and mean. This is the paradox of how to be well paid for exploring life. There are many resolutions of this paradox. Choosing three rather different careers and working in each, one after the other, for three years only, just enough time to make one significant creative contribution to each, allows a track record to be built up of contributions while exploring rather different careers, for one example. Second, under Paradoxes is the way the world is willing to hire you only to do jobs you have already done perfectly. Smart people in every career type solve this paradox by lying--they repackage parts of their past to make them look like the doing of what they now want to apply for. If organizations are so stupid that they expect people to want to do again what they have already mastered long before, then applicants should match that stupidity with distortive repackagings that make unrelated past components seem to qualify them to do what the applicant truly has never done before. Non-stupid organizations avoid this by recruiting people willing and interested in learning a position, under the guidance of departing or retired masters of it. Third, under Paradoxes being too decent a person to protect decent treatment of self and others in jungle-like nasty workplaces. This paradox has many corollaries such as helping your own boss keep you down. Goodness is a problem. For many it starts with mom, and her efforts to create good little boys and girls. However, nearly all of the adult world is not good, in mom’s sense. People do not keep their word, jobs are “open” but only to people with certain blood lines or inherited family wealth, backstabbing works better than talent development for promotions, and the like. Good people rapidly are torn apart and discarded by most real organizations. Protecting yourself from the jungle in any organization or part of the world is a sine qua non for leadership, influence, and careers of quality. Protecting others from such jungle forces is a sine qua non for greatness of any sort. Somehow we have to be decent people capable at a moment’s notice of great indecency, gentle people capable at a moment’s notice of great cruelty, good people capable at a moment’s notice, of great badness. More than this--we have to not fall into using the enemy’s means so much and so well that we become indistinguishable from the enemy. We have to minimize radically any indecency, cruelty, and badness we drawn on to defend our selves and others from the indecency, cruelty, and badness of others. Without the skill of minimizing such drops into the tactics of the enemy, we become, in a matter of months or years, the enemy at work. Yet to not have the ability to see, admit, and fight with fire the indecency, cruelty, and badness of others, is to condemn us and those we care for and are responsible for to being eaten alive by those willing to stoop low to get ahead. No follower can trust a leader willing to let his people be eaten alive by such forces. When you interview people experienced in this realm they usually handle it by letting indecency, cruelty, and badness accumulate till an overwhelming record is established, without yet anything devastating the hopes and dreams of any one real group or person. Then, when a record is there without great harm yet having occurred, overwhelming force is applied to rid the organization of the indecent, cruel, bad one. Here many acts are ignored, though recorded (and the blows from which often softened by surreptitiously delivered support to those attacked by the bad ones), but one final act causes immense reprisal without appeal. Fourth, under Paradoxes is perfecting your own role while the entire organization around you sinks into disaster. The highly individual person willingly even joyfully lets his entire organization sink while his own career thrives. The highly social person sacrifices his own career attainment for the sake of helping out the overall organization he is in. It is paradoxic to succeed individually while all around you sinks and to be in a thriving organization where you own career sinks. This paradox is resolved in careers by doing both, not by splitting effort but by linking them. People with interesting careers progress their own career in such a way that it saves the larger organization by addressing its primary challenges or deepest generator of problems.

Dynamics: Blocks These are the third four career dimensions under career Dynamics. Certain things block careers in nearly every field. First, under Blocks is invisibility. Like it or not we live in a mass society of tremendous uniformity, conformism, and standardization, of the insides of people’s minds and their exterior behaviors and conditions of living. Performance has been stripped from all ordinary lives and concentrated in central elites for form entertainment and related industries, so billions sit and watch instead of compose and perform (as they still do in “primitive” tribal societies worldwide and throughout history). Organizations, especially large ones, are filled with career and other noise making it very hard for any signal to be noticed, including crucial CEO policy initiatives and threatening competitor moves. In the noise of such organization, getting enough visibility to one’s career moves to attract resources and attention is a major challenge. Usually immense accomplishments instantly decay into lack of notice, outshined often by superficial but more visible happenings. People having interesting careers often are people good at gaining visibility, even for modest accomplishments. Second, under Blocks is inability to choose (living in possibility). Before choosing we are filled with possibility--anything is possible for us. After choosing we are denuded of 99 possibilities, only 1 of them now possible, the one we just chose. This feels terrible. It feels like we have lost much more than we have gained. Young people in their careers, often are daunted by this feeling of poverty after choice, so much so that they shy away from choice, shunning it. As years go by they turn little or nothing into actuality, preferring to live in possibilities that never become actual. This is a primary career block in one or another way handled well by people having interesting careers. Third, under Blocks is uneducatedness--failing to overcome what schooling, parents, nationality, gender, and professions put into you. People who we can guess the opinions, values, and habits of from knowing where they were born and raised, are not educated in a serious sense. Too much of what they are and do is predictable from where they came from. They have not processed the world, their own selves, and their lives inside their own heads enough to differ or be better than where and when they were raised. They are not products of their own conscious design work. We can ignore them and interact with their background instead, getting much the same ideas and responses. People, however, whose ideas and responses cannot be predicted from when and where they were raised, impress us as highly educated. They have processed themselves and their world inside their minds and come up with outcomes different from the forces and places that raised them. People having interesting careers tend to be highly educated in this sense. Fourth, under Blocks is requiring an immediate link between investments in your career and returns from it. There is a powerful kind of trust in people having interesting careers--they invest and invest, again and again, in their selves, and their careers without requiring any immediate or even mediate benefit from that. They are content to let years of decades elapse before an investment pays off. They “trust” that developing a certain idea, relationship, or skill will somehow someday open a door or breakthrough for them. Other people are antsy-they worry if too long a gap separates investment from benefit. They work to get some sort of payback rather soon from any investment in their selves or careers. This blocks having an interesting career for not a few people.

Dynamics: Moves These are the fourth four career dimensions under career Dynamics. There are moves, made in “making” your career, that are found in very different types of career. Such shared moves are the topic here. First, under Moves is psychic growth steps and mind extension steps. From the outside a person may opt for a lower status role, or for an out-of-the-mainstream location, or otherwise seem to backtrack on their career and progress. From the inside, however, that same move may amount to a person facing their biggest challenge, tackling more than they have ever tackled before, or facing down their biggest fear. In other words, the meaning, for a person, of any particular overt career move can be opposite of what is “apparent” and “objective”. Behavior is not meaning, acts are not interpretations, consequences are not next steps, accomplishments are not accomplishments. Two particular demonstrations of this gap between overt, observables and internal interpretative meanings are commonly found in interesting careers. One is a particular career move “moving” a person from one stage of psychic growth to a next stage, utterly transforming their views and potentials in the process. Another is a particular career move “moving” a person from depending on one particular mind extension to depending on another or to constructing another to depend on. Mind extensions include one’s personal professional library, personal file system, network of friends who perform cognitive functions for one, cognitive functions supported by the architecture, furniture, or apparel one uses, and the like. Career moves that extend personality growth or mind extension tool use may look suboptimal or even self destructive in overt terms but internally they can unleash disproportionate power. Second, under Moves, is erecting solution cultures, tuning social automatons, and setting up viral growth regimes. People having interesting careers tend to be good at getting lots of others working for their own purposes. They tend to unleash various varied forces towards goals they imagine and set up. In this way they multiply what is working towards their vision

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Copyright 2004 by Richard Tabor Greene, All Rights Reserved, US Government Registered

and goal, beyond themselves. They gather and marshal, motivate and focus, trigger and unleash forces beyond themselves towards visions only they have imagined fully. This can take the form of reversing failure cultures into solution ones, setting up structured work flows among arrays of people whose interactions get tuned till better-than-wanted results emerge, or planting locally a unique constellation of factors that generates local profits of energy, personnel, ideation or all three that naturally result in exponential growth of that local solution without outside resources or recognition being required. Third, under Moves, is optimizing careers via Taguchi technique and technology cluster dynamics. If you optimize your career “signal” transmission through the actual politics, human foibles, and organization change noises of real world action systems; if you optimize your career so that all your energy flows in intended channels and directions instead of being dissipated by happenstance opportunities, social pressures, and the like; if you optimize your career so as to find ranges of parameter values for all of which your career reliably achieves wonderful states or results--you are being realistic. Too many people get idealistic about achievement, ignoring the noise of real world competitiveness, the distractions that dissipate career energies, and set up fragile conditions that all have to be exactly met for career success to occur (knowing that any slight change in those conditions will ruin things). In addition, though individual bosses, companies, industries may lay claim to your mind, heart, and soul while building your career, people with interesting careers flow from boss to boss, company to company, industry to other industry as if boundaries were illusions. Indeed people with interesting careers optimize them not purely but against the background of actual realities they must contend with and optimize them by flowing them freely across boundaries that appeal to, intimidate, or sanction negatively other people. Fourth, under Moves, is transplanting you and your career across cultures. Real genius occurs when one person, one career, one set of skills, views, results, projects, appeals, funding, disciples transplants itself entire across boundaries of national culture, gender style, era, technical base, or sector of the economy (profit to non-profit, service to product, etc.). To build up something specifically wonderful and well regarded, functioning wonderfully, and uproot it then plant it successfully in entirely different, even mysterious, ground takes genius, most of us judge. People with interesting careers are able to cross really huge boundaries as well as casual and ordinary ones. It is not just that they themselves as persons cross such boundaries but that they transplant whole systems of ideas, methods, ways of work, goals, personal contacts, funding and the like across boundaries that stop and stymie most importation.

Approaches: Culture These are the first four career dimensions under career Approaches. Careers span a continuum from being things unto themselves, like certain types of art, to being things aimed at transforming aspects of others or societies. First, under Culture is careers as culture fits and gaps. When what you are matches what works well with some big other thing; when what you are matches what some big other thing really needs at the moment--that big other thing propels, accelerates, magnifies, multiplies you and what you do, in not a few cases. For example, if you are an “off the wall” creative irreverent type, mocking any established idols or local god, a giant modern corporate bureaucracy is not likely to propel, accelerate, magnify or otherwise use and amplify you. It is more likely to exterminate and extinguish you. If you are such a person, however, there are research ventures and consultancies that are looking for exactly such a person--short exposures to an intensely “off the wall” person will help, inspire, or entrance their clients. Some people wander the earth never finding a match-as-meshing-well and/or a match-as-fixing-well. Other people with their first real attempt at work miraculously latch onto a perfect such fit. Second under Culture is the regular re-inventing or refounding of careers upon new substrates. We educate ourselves, work till something we produce shines, become gods and heros, decline into has-beens, and get lost in history’s shuffle, for the most part. The few who avoid this fate do so by repeating it two, three, four or more time within one lifspan. They reinvent themselves, becoming babies all over again, starting from scratch in their chosen field or in new fields, at 30 years old, at 50 years old, at 70 years old. Frank Lloyd Wright had three careers, starting all over again twice after his first career crashed (he also had 3 wives, one for each new career--this is not a part of the argument being made here). Re-inventings tend to be erecting yourself on new updated substrates as the world changes around you. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s case, the physics, materials, and methods of architecture changed every 20 years enough so as to require years of intense full time study to update oneself. Few had the guts to endure inconveniences and indignities of being a baby again, except Wright. Third under Culture is regular updating of the commonsense of self and career. Waves of ideas pass over the world every eight years, it has been found. Every three or four such waves, even larger waves of new commonsense pass over the entire world. Recently people have stopped admiring iron for strength, replacing it with bone, because bone grows stronger as it is used exactly where it is stressed the most, and bone fixes itself when it breaks (all things that iron does not do). The world has switched from admiring physics to admiring biology. Stem cells renewing all body tissues promise the actual, concrete end of death (much to the chagrin of organizations founded on fear of death, namely, world religions). We have switched from mechano-sense to bio-sense. We can expect, however, that twenty or so years from now something will replace bones and biology in this regard. Stellar careers can emerge at the boundary between such switches--idea waves or commonsense waves. Those who do traditional things but from the viewpoints or using the methods of the new idea wave or commonsense wave, stand out as pioneers, leading the way for following others. Fourth under Culture is one’s self and one’s career as sequences of cultures built or cultures encountered or both. Careers are sequences of cultures, generally solution cultures we erect during years of struggling in one direction with one sort of problem or opportunity. That done, we switch to other challenges in other directions and envelop ourselves and our doings in other solution cultures. Engaging any problem of real depth deeply turns you into a new culture. You failed solution attempts, and growing despair as all that you now know and can do fails again and again, loosens the hold of your own past on you, and creates cracks, slacks, and spaces where new attachments and liaisons can grow. Pretty soon you are living in alternative ideas, sources, friends, and approaches never a part of your life before. You have become a new culture as work on your central problem continues to resist easy answers and great built up skills of your past. Similarly, each problem of real depth encountered becomes itself a culture you penetrate, just the way you penetrate the culture of a foreign nation when on a global assignment somewhere. At first you flounder around not knowing what things mean and where things are, unable to distinguish the fake from the genuine, the important from the superficial. Gradually you give up automatic internal images, preferences, and frameworks and let yourself absorb new ones around you, taking in new things a bit too openly and loosely, till some crisis forces you to recognize that not all new things and learned new things are good things. Penetrating real problems is just like penetrating real foreign national cultures and markets.

Approaches: Influence These are the second four career dimensions under career Approaches. Some careers in various ways are set up to influence others. First, under Influence is Persuading, Leading, Negotiating, Reasoning, and Arguing. Entire careers have been built on each of these, combinations of some of them, and in rare cases, combinations of them all. There is a certain heaviness, inertia, abyss of anxiety under life, daunting openness to mind, that stymies people, intimidates them, freezes them into inaction, much as Hamlet struggled to engage a world so ugly with human turpitude and heavy with the futility of action. Rare souls who love defining ambiguities, de-fogging vagueness, clearing up messes, defining issues can thrive in any field into which they are dropped, and thrive there, almost without ever really getting serious about where they are and where they work their miracles of clarification. Second under Influence is Communicating, Transplanting across Cultures, Changing Minds, and Selling/Unselling. Here the emphasis is on the simple act of generating messages that work well across various divides of interest, background, mental framework, cultural boundary, and the like. The messages might establish something or might dis-establish something-both have value. Entire careers have been built on these. Whereas the first items--persuading, leading, negotiating, reasoning, and arguing--are pro-active, rather aggressive, these second items emphasize crafting messages such that the messages alone work to persuade, lead, negotiate, reason, or argue. In the first set it is the entire person working multi-dimensionally that effects change; in the second set it is the messages themselves that effect change. Careers built upon the foundation of crafting such powerful messages have invented entire industries and media--advertising and narrow-cast cable TV programs for example. Third under Influence is Fix and Use Mental Flaws, Use Beauty, Enthuse, Invent Solution Cultures, Stop Automatic Responses, Build Bridge Communities. These are all influencing via targeting very particular aspects of humans, doorways in effect, through which partial messages or action inputs can effect more general changes, adaptations, re-orientations. Our cognitive mechanisms have systemic flaws that you can compensate for or exploit, we are subject to beauty that entrances us, we absorb unconsciously moods of people around us, the accumulate cultures around us to which we remain unaware (fish in water), we respond automatically to so much around us that we have a hard time changing our responses, and we have to associate with new people in order to change fundamentally as our friends and family resist any deep changes in us. There are people among us who spot and use these specific levers of change. Some invent entire new religions (often of dubious worth and honesty), some invent new lifestyles and social movements of compassion (of undoubed worth). Transformative movements, persons, organizations, and ideas come from such careers. Fourth under Influence is Psychic Growth, Changing Environments, Demystifying, Telling Stories, Untelling Stories, Strategizing, and Love. These are deep extensions of the third set of items just discussed above. Here you set up quite large, long-lasting, and complex things that affect others. Changing your own character is a major multi-decade project for most people, changing others often requires putting them into new environments to which they adapt over a period of years, often you have to undo hosts of ideas and stories people learned unconsciously while growing up in a particular family, gender, and nation if you wish to change someone, telling the right stories to the right audiences often is a powerful mechanism of change, strategies are where stories in action form are designed and set in motion, and love endures what nothing else endures, tries what nothing else tries, aims for what nothing else dares and wins by simply being more, longer, deeper, than any other effort, condition, or challenge. Entire careers have been established upon this type of influencing as a base. This is the large scale version of the third set above.

Approaches: Enterprises These are the third four career dimensions under career Approaches. Some careers are set up as enterprises. No, all careers are set up as enterprises--ventures. Many people, however, ignore (deliberately) or are ignorant of the risk, chancy-ness, uncertainty surrounding, underneath, or lying in wait for a selected career direction and effort. They think they are aiming for a certain target, not realizing that even “certain seeming” targets are risky ventures in a world as changing and complex as our own. First, under Enterprises is Social Waves, that are noticed and “ridden” when people have slack, with some people “riding” trends, substrates evolving, and discontinuity of rules creating gaps into which venturers venture. Social Waves seem to pick up some people not others, some careers, not others, and carry them forward. Spotting social waves and positioning oneself to catch and ride them is one approach to career building. Second, under Enterprises is Combinatorics, the combining of technologies, cultures, industries, and of all these and more in technology clusters like Silicon Valley. Quite a few careers combine impossible, unlikely, or many elements. It may even be hard to imagine places, situations, social networks capable of assembling such diverse unwieldy assemblages of things. Combinatorics as a basis of career building seeks elements and assembles them in particular configurations. A lot of playing around with what to select and how to assemble them may be involved. This approach to career building often resembles solving a puzzle, putting pieces together.

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Third, under Enterprises is Structural Focal Points, righting business imbalances, filling structural holes, institutionalizing non-linearities, and manufacturing ideas. Careers that find the right focus points direct the limited energies of one or a few people at precise points in society where non-linear amplification occurs, “tipping points” these have been called. Fourth, under Enterprises is Personal Motivations, refusal to salute established authorities and dogmas, personal chemistry between people, refusal of anonymity built into ordinary lives and bureaucratic “promotion” ladder careers, and parenting innovation by doing functions others entirely miss. People whose careers have this basis erect careers around primary involvements and interests regardless of destiny, wealth, and the future. They find some present engagement so fulfilling that continuing that will let the future take care of itself.

Approaches: Show and Drama These are the fourth four career dimensions under career Approaches. Some careers are from beginning to end for display. First, under Show and Drama is career as extension of creating a self. We all create a self as perhaps our very first creation. Some people see this as an act of creation and find bureaucratic careers in large organizations uncreative, that is, counter-careers. They struggle to create a self that is creative, as creative as creating a self in the first place was. Second, under Show and Drama is befriending the anxieties of existence. Being alive and conscious is fragile, something stretched over an abyss. Everything we think, feel, do, believe, and try is to keep certain anxieties, admitted or not, conscious or not, at bay. Learning to take peeks at these anxieties underneath all civilization and every career move, learning to take longer and longer peeks till we face regularly the scope and depth of each anxiety underneath human existence becomes career building for some people. These people have strange eyes. They shrug off horrendous disappointments and surprises that overwhelm the rest of us. They have a profound poise that builds career around them, almost automatically as they go through life with reality-burned eyes. Third, under Show and Drama is career as subsets of the one story that all stories are. As people age they find novels, TV programs, human careers, and the like more and more boring-they have heard all that before. It takes something really subtle, precise, expertly expressed to capture their interest and impress them. Every human wants to be more important than they are, lies to themselves and others about their own centrality, and becomes an embarrassing buffoon as they accumulate trinkets of wealth and power to somehow impress themselves and other that death will not take them, that history will not immediately forget them, that future ages will not ignore boring 2-dimensional movies and DVDs in worlds with holographic audience-participation media with smell and touch. All stories are subsets of one story--the story of self change, self transformation, growing into ego and then growing beyond ego. All efforts to impress others that our own story is best or most interesting are, therefore, lies. Careers built on this foundation learn to see what subset of the one story they are, and learn to see the one story in its fullness as other embody parts of it that you yourself omit. Such careers shrink egotism, self promotion, and self exaggeration of all around them, almost embarrassing people into profundity and sober modesty of existing. Such careers reveal realities long denied by institution and career and neurosis. Fourth, under Show and Drama is careers as sheer creations. We create careers, that is true. Some particular careers fall under attack and it takes creativity to hold them together and on track. Other careers decline into boredom and routine, requiring regular revolution and shaking up. In the course of creating career moves, some people discover that having a career at all is sheer creation. They might as well admit that having a career is creation and stop trying to have careers that are less than creativity. “If I do all this creation work to move from one career state to another I might as well do such creation to produce a creative work that represents the best of me long after I die to people far beyond those I can directly contact.”-this feels like.

Creativity: Social Revolution These are the first four career dimensions under career as Creativity. Some careers are revolutions. First, under Social Revolution is liberation, exercising negative power (saying “no” to authorities), seeing the call to adventure in life, setting out from homes (of various sorts). This is always a move from emotional richness to emotional poverty. Quite a few careers are founded in acts of liberation. Though social revolutionaries, Marxist or other, are most famous for this, there are many other career types founded in acts of liberation. The chemist who, forty years later gets a Nobel Prize, starts out by dis-respecting what teachers emphasize and colleague respect, going out on a limb no one respects or shows interest in, for one example. Second, under Social Revolution is freedom, assertive power (getting your needs on the agenda of others), going through trials and coming across helpers who assist you in handling those trials. Freedom is not liberty but three things: liberated ones coming together via promises they make and keep to invent the utterly new and bring it into history, emergence of the utterly new amid the intense work of liberated ones coming together, and the spontaneous emergence of “public” forms of happiness, far beyond what private “lifestyle” types of happiness provide--the happiness of one fragile human idea changing the rest of history by bringing something utterly new into the world and institutionalizing it. A very few careers capture all these dynamics, it would seem, but deeper probing beneath many interesting careers, reveals the dynamics of freedom, thusly defined. Washington, Jefferson, Franlkin, and the other “founding” fathers of the American revolution did this. This “public happiness” was their career, the defining feeling and purpose of their entire lives, outshining all other moments and motives, they wrote. Social movements of various sorts have captured this dynamic--the ecology movement, the anti-slavery movement, the consumer movement, and others--when major milestones have been reached. Seat belts and air bags in autos may seem a pedestrian career but those who pioneered these life saving standards saw and counted the hundreds of thousands of lives they would save every year and worked in nation after nation, legislature after legislature, election after election till these became realities, not just ideas. Collaborating to invent and implement the utterly new makes lives of freedom. Third, under Social Revolution is historic dreams, that attract immigrants and emulation worldwide, partnering power as pioneers in one time and place, influence myriad other times and places by what they do locally, fighting the supreme ordeal by extinguishing the last remnants of one’s old self and sources of confidence. Careers that have pioneered the utterly new attract people and emulation. Only some people and careers like this attention and manage it well, welcoming the whole world into participation in the same transformation journey. Fourth, under Social Revolution is conserving novelty once it is attained by protecting it form powerful forces of the past, exercising transformative power by injecting this novelty into several institutional frameworks, returning from the supreme ordeal with a magic elixir that embodies the part of one’s old self one lost and the new self components one has gained in that ordeal. Careers founded on this dynamic institutionalize novelty. They work out particular transformations of the world, turning the proven possibility of change into actual change.

Creativity: Becoming Creative These are the second four career dimensions under careers as Creativity. People are not born creators, though every baby is a powerful learning miracle. People do, however, become creative, some early in life, some late, some never. Particular stages in becoming creative can become the basis of entire careers. First, under Becoming Creative is making interior room for creating and exterior room for it. People whose lives are crowded with hassles, emotionally exhausting arguments, and draining worry seldom create. People whose time is constantly interrupted, who have no place to be alone, who are jerked hither and thither by others or commands, seldom create. People need interior emotional room and exterior lifestyle and facility room in which to create. Not a few careers are based on fighting for such room and fighting to maintain it. Second, under Becoming Creative is mental travel and perceiving paradox. People who have established interior and exterior room, travel widely, mentally, and the diversity that exposes them to pushes them into viewing paradoxes as their familiar mastered frameworks fail to handle novelties encountered in their mental travels. Entire careers can grow in the ground of mental travel and perception of paradox where one travels. People who always think outside any box they are put in, who always tap into new approaches no one else has heard of, are like this. Their constant mental travel makes them always outside the ruts and views of others. Third, under Becoming Creative is creating a creation machine that makes on efficient at coming up with novelty, and thinking through such novelties thoroughly, so only novelty that out-contributes established answers gets selected for use. Not a few careers emerge from this sort of foundation. People who turn enthusiasm for particular novelties into dust, proving the idea is attractive but weak, and people who turn contempt for particular novelties into surprising insights, proving the slighted idea is actually revolutionary and powerful, have this career foundation. Fourth, under Becoming Creative is conquering resistance and managing emergence. These are opposites so quite hard to do together. Creating inevitably requires trying all you know till you prove none of it is enough. You have to go beyond what you are and know in order to create. The extreme effort this takes can be enough to prevent you seeing the slight outlines of the utterly new emerging from a lot of noisy junk around it. Your onrush of effort can push you right past the creation you seek, missing its emerging outlines. So you need the superengagement of going beyond your self and the super-detachment of standing back as you engage prodigiously, and watching for subtle signs of the new emerging where you least expect it. Careers growing in this soil are careers of discernment, taste, perceptiveness, sensitivity, and subtle distinction.

Creativity: The Insight Process These are the third four career dimensions under careers as Creativity. All important career moves are problems posed and solutions invented. All such solutions are generated by insight processes. First, under the Insight Process is the steps of having insights: trying existing frames, stopping existing frame use, trying entirely new frames, gathering together candidate solution components in various configurations till one configuration works, reducing components and testing combinations till one works. Careers founded on these dynamics progress on all (or several) size scales through these steps of the insight process, so you find some years spent trying existing frames of a field, some years gradually giving up trying such frames, some years trying entirely unheard of ones, and so on, some months trying existing frames for a particular career move, some months gradually losing hope for such frames, and so on. Second, under the Insight Process is alternating engagement with detachment, global views with local details. Careers founded in this dynamic exhibit this alternation, sometimes quite dramatically--years on Wall Street, years lounging in the Bahamas, years founding a global NGO, years advising on a few NGO boards or the like. Such careers puzzle observers with their stark periods of entirely different work and emphasis. The most general and global abstract involvements are suddenly cast aside and replaced by utterly local and particular work, which then, in due time, is cast aside for another round of global involvements, for example.

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Third, under the Insight Process is accumulating a failure index till it becomes broad and deep enough to inversely become a good specification of what eventual solutions must be like. Careers grown in this soil fail and fail and fail again, somehow never getting discouraged by all the strung out failures. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, did this precisely, creating a string of failed hamburger fast food stores till, at 52, he hit a home run with his last try. Each failure to others was evidence of being on the wrong track, to him each was information, in inverse form, about what the eventual solution must be like. Fourth, under the Insight Process is despair as the doorway, giving up favored frames, habits, and ways, all of them, must happen before a person truly is open to seeking out new frames, habits, and ways. Careers driven to huge points of despair, careers that overtly give up on themselves, losing direction and hope, only to rise from the ashes in new form, utterly powerful, conquering all are like this. Phoenix careers we might call them.

Creativity: Creativity Models These are the fourth four career dimensions under careers as Creativity. There are many different models of what creativity is. Each is both a theory of what all creativity is as well as a particular way of being creative. First, under Creativity Models is catalog and blend models of creating. Careers founded on any of these models seek out and embody the most unbelievable diversity and number of unique elements. They blend and mix them in enormous numbers of configurations till something clicks. Second, under Creativity Models is social and group models of creating. Careers founded on any of these models take particular procedures or processes and invent ways of exposing huge numbers of people or groups to them, till the diversity in such populations make the outcomes of the procedures creative instead of ho-hum. Not a few careers involve a great procedure taken from elites and exposed to multitudes, who do wonders with it that the elites failed to produce. Third, under Creativity Models is the knowledge evolution, experiment, and system models of creating. Careers founded on any of these models treat things the rest of us think of as solid, defined, and unchangeable as mere experiments, trying out alternatives to them. They take the most solid and immovable parts of life and treat them as experiments to now be changed. They dissolve intimidation, authority, inertia that stop the rest of us. Fourth, under Creativity Models is the purity, self, and mind models, all highly interior. Careers founded on any of these models see the world as codes that limit what we can see and ask and imagine. They work to get the codes right, to find gaps and blends in them, then take the resulting slight innovations of idea and change the entire world with them. Huge multiplication and amplification of ideas characterize these careers. Also huge waits while work to get the codes right takes place characterize them. Career Types: Cultivate, Distribute, Root, Alternate

decay of selected/designed types into emergent types over time (Hypothesis 1)

Approaches

voluntary

Blocks-Paradoxes

gradual increase in voluntary contents over time (Hypothesis 2)

Principles

after each move, approaches, principles, constraints, & rules change iteratively producing more blocks, topogrophy visited, tools, and moves (Hypothesis 5)

A Model of Components of Interesting Careers

From 128 Interesting-Career Components to Causal Flows

The 150 subjects who mentioned the 128 career components in the two above fractal concept models, Constraints had careers judged “interesting” by 315 nominators who selected them imposed gradual reduction of imposed contents over time Topography and by themselves. Numerous (Hypothesis 3) questionnaire and interview quesRules tions, some derived from protocol after some moves, shift to new career type analysis in artificial intelligence and recognition of creativity aspect in practice, and some derived from gradual increase in recognition of creativity contents that type occur, changing some of: customer-requirements specificaof career types over time (Hypothesis 4) approaches, principles, constraints, rules, tion in total quality practice, problocks, topography, tools, and moves duced these components. (Hypothesis 6) Causally the components related as Creativity Types: Revolution, Becoming Creative, Insight Process, Creation Models diagrammed above. Subjects have a great deal of latitude in what career approach and principles they choose and even in what blocks and paradoxes they recognize and respond to. Knowing what they face (having chosen or formulated it) they then select tools and with those tools conduct the “moves” involved in career building. Subjects have little attitude in what career constraints they face and what career rules they must obey. Also, the topography of career landscapes, whether co-evolutionary or not, is not something most subjects can modify at will (though they can position themselves within such landscapes and avoid particular battlegrounds within them). Having recognized the constraints, rules, and topographic features of where they wish to go in career terms, they choose tools and make career moves. Both of these, the voluntary approach-principle-blocks path, and the imposed constraints-rules-topography path, end in tool selection and move making. All of this together constitutes types of careers and each such career type constitutes a type of creativity.

Tools

Moves

The voluntary-imposed distinction in the diagram above is not hard and fast. People mid-career or even mid-career-move discover an imposed entity has roots within how they were raised in childhood and is not as solid, necessary, and inevitable as they have always assumed, for one example. Rather, we can say that people think and feel about their career in these two ways at the same time, dividing many career contents into a voluntary influence-able-by-me part and an imposed not-easily-influenced-by-me part. More education, more experience, more frameworks, and the like may transform an imposed entity into a voluntary one and also vice versa may transform a voluntary one into an imposed inevitable one. Types of careers emerge much more than they are designed, in this study’s subjects. People may launch a particular type or topography of career, but they watch responses to that, what use of it reveals, and readily switch to emergent alternatives mid-move, mid-career. Deliberately preferred or tried career types are more locales for viewing emergent alternatives than fixed commitments. The creativity type that a particular chosen, designed, or emergent career type amounts to may never be consciously recognized but the trend is gradual realization that all careering was and is sheer creativity, as people get older. Along with this is a trend, in those having interesting careers, of reduction of the amount of career components seen as compulsory, them being seen as voluntary instead. References 1. Arthur and Rousseau, eds, The Boundaryless Career, Oxford, 1996 2. Arthur, Hall, Lawrence, eds., Handbook of Career Theory, Cambridge, 1989 3. Cairns, Bergman, Kagan, eds., Methods and Models for Studying the Individual, SAGE, 1998 4. Collin and Young, eds., The Future of Career, Cambridge, 2000 5. Feldman, edr., Work Careers, A Developmental Perspective, Jossey-Bass, 2002 6. Nolen, Beyond Performance, New Perspectives, 1999 7. Young and Collin, eds., Interpreting Careers, Hermeneutical Studies of Lives in Context, Praeger, 1992 8. Young and Borgen, eds., Methodological Approaches to the Study of Career, Praeger, 1990 Career (Personal History) Environments and Ecosystem Dynamics (new theory--career knowledge vs. domain vs. creativity knowledge) 1. The Boundaryless Career by Arthur and Rousseau, Oxford Univ., 1996@

2. Eikleberry, Carol; The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People, Ten Speed Press; Berkeley, 1999 3. Young and Collin; Interpreting Career; Praeger, London, 1992 4. Young&Burgen; Methodological Approaches to the Study of Career; Praeger; 1990 5. Kotkin, Tribes, how race religion and identity determine success, Random, 1993 6. Suleiman, editor; Exile and Creativity Duke, 1996@ 7. Warr, Editor; Psychology at Work, 5th Edition, Penquin, 2002 8. The Concept of Work, Ancient, Medieval,&Modernby Applebaum,SUNY 1992 9. John-Steiner, Vera; Creative Collaboration; Oxford University Press; NYC: 2000@ 10. Hirschhorn, Larry; The Workplace Within; MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.; 1988@ 11. Sternberg, Forsythe, et al, Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life, Cambridge, 2000 12. Sternberg and Horvath, eds; Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice, LEA, 1999@ 13. Managing as a Performing Art by Peter Vaill, Jossey-Bass, 1989@ 14. Arthur; Increasing Returns&Path Dependence in the Economy; U Michigan; 1994 15. Egan, Gerard; Working the Shadow Side; Jossey Bass, San Francisco, 1994 16. Zelinsky, Marilyn; New Workplaces for New Workstyles; McGraw Hill,NYC, 1998 17. Poundstone, How Would You Move Mount Fuji, Little Brown, 2003 18. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, HBJ, 1971 19. Citrin & Smith, The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers 20. Bardwick, The Plateauing Trap and how to avoid it in your career, Amacom, 86 The Creativity of Creating a Self, Life, and Career

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21. Arthur, M. and Rousseau, D.; The Boundaryless Career, Oxford Univ. Press, 1996 22. Applebaum, Herbert; The Concept of Work; SUNY, NYC, 1992 23. Brandstadter and Lerner, Action and Self Development, Sage, Beverley Hills, 1999 24. Cannon, Betty; Sartre and Psychoanalysis; Univ. of Kansas; 1994 25. Carrithers and Collins and Lukes; The Category of the Person; Cambridge, 1985 26. Ferrari and Sternberg; Self Awareness; The Guilford Press, London, 1998 27. Dumont, Louis; Essays on Individualism; Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago; 1986 28. Adams-Price, Carolyn; Creativity and Successful Aging; Springer, NYC, 1998 29. Kegan, Robert; In Over Our Heads; Harvard Univ. Press; Cambridge, Mass.; 1991 30. Klar, Fisher, Chinsky, Nadler; Self Change; Springer Verlag, NYC; 1992 31. Kohn,Alfie; Punished by Rewards; Houghton Mifflin, NYC: 1993 32. Palombo, Stanley; The Emergent Ego; International Universities; Madison, Conn.; 199 33. May, Rollo; The Courage to Create; Norton, NYC, 1975 34. Runco&Richards; Eminent Creativity Everyday Creativity&Health; Ablex1997 35. Young and Collin; Interpreting Career; Praeger, London, 1992 36. Young&Burgen; Methodological Approaches to the Study of Career; Praeger; 1990 37. Egan, Gerard; Working the Shadow Side; Jossey Bass, San Francisco, 1994 38. Eikleberry, Carol; The Career Guide for Creative and Unconventional People, Ten Speed Press; Berkeley, 1999