Reinvent yourself: Why an era of disruption calls for self-renewal

The days when you could expect to spend your working life in one company or even one career are over. Today people must prepare themselves for a series of changes of career, and probably country too, as the labor market becomes globalized at every level. We talk to IESE professors and alumni about how reinventing yourself is both necessary and fun.

A century after he said it, Bertolt Brecht’s comment that “because things are as they are, they will not stay the way they are” is truer than ever. The rate of change is accelerating, driven by new technologies that send many of yesterday’s bright ideas straight to the industrial history museum as brighter ones take their place. What Henry Ford did for the horse and email did for the fax, someone else could be about to do to your business. It might be a new product, a new process or a revolutionary approach to an age-old business. Sometimes a single innovation can wreak havoc across an entire industry. The iPod not only consigned the portable CD player to the junkyard, it has all but wiped out the CD itself, along with the music industry’s 100-year-old business model.

Necessity is the mother of invention and reinvention, and it was necessity that drove Apple to reinvent itself from a struggling computer concern to become the world’s coolest brand. The companies that have successfully reinvented themselves – Dell, Apple, Cisco, IBM, 3M, Philips – have done so because they haven’t let the grass grow beneath their feet, whereas the tens of thousands of businesses that failed to read the writing on the wall are both gone and forgotten. Revolutions tend to be led by visionary individuals, and the same is true in when it comes to innovative companies, witness Steve Jobs at Apple and John Chambers at Cisco, for example.

TOMORROW NEVER COMES

“Companies need to systematically think about the future,” says IESE’s Mike Rosenberg. “Too many of them are pretending that tomorrow is going to be the same as today. But we know that tomorrow will be different. The fact that we can’t predict it doesn’t give us an excuse not to try. Not thinking about the future guarantees that you will be in the wrong place.” 

Good ideas come from free thinking but for that you need the freedom to think, which is why companies such as Google and 3M give their employees time away from their day-to-day tasks so that they have an opportunity to dream up new products or new ways of doing things. Reinvention is a process and a way of being, not something that comes out of the blue. For that Damascene moment to come, first you have to set off down the road to somewhere new.

The pace of change means that individuals, too, have to be prepared to make a radical shift at least once in their career. Career makeovers are commonplace among politicians. Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger both started out as actors; Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, trained as a physicist while Margaret Thatcher was a chemist. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, studied architecture before going on to a course in political science. It is hardly surprising that the United States, where individualism and the idea of starting anew is built into the national DNA, is the cradle of reinvention.

The lawyer John Grisham became a best-selling novelist, disgraced junk-bond dealer Michael Milken remade himself as a respected philanthropist, and when HIV forced Magic Johnson to quit basketball he went on to become an even more successful entrepreneur. F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives – but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

AN APPETITE FOR CHANGE

Some people relish change, others are unsettled by it, but increasingly we all have to deal with it. “Companies change and change their strategies, and when they do, people have to change, or else you’ll need new people,” says IESE Prof. Bruno Cassiman.

“This means that people who are in that particular job will either not be in that job or will have to change or move on to new opportunities. The idea that you could start a career and retire in that career is not true anymore. There are certain people who like changing and keep changing throughout their career. These are the more entrepreneurial types that might keep on going and changing until they retire, or they might never retire.”

Evgeny Kaganer, who trained as a doctor but teaches technology to MBA students, says he has changed his career path several times. “The question is, did I do it because I’m that kind of person or because of the circumstances I found myself in?” he says. “I finished medical school but I started working in financial services in my third year. I knew I would not become a practising physician. A large number of people in the Soviet Union suddenly found they could no longer do what they’d been doing, and a lot were unable to make the transition.”

He says it is difficult to prepare people for change. “Our approach at IESE is to point out different options. We try to make people understand that uncertainty exists. When you come to a business school where there are people from many different cultures and no single culture dominates, that forces you to reassess the norms you carry with you from home. We can’t teach this but we can create an environment where people learn that diversity and uncertainty exist and about the different ways in which they can handle issues. I think business schools are doing a better job on this front than medical or law schools, maybe because we don’t have such specialized content to teach, so we focus more on soft skills.”

Prof. Christoph Zott believes we all need to be prepared for significant career changes. “Radical functional changes such as R&D experts turning into finance specialists will remain rare, but changes of employers, changes of geographies, moves into adjacent areas, etc. will probably be the rule rather than the exception given the pace of change in today’s business landscape,” he says.  “Also, statistics tell us that many IESE alumni become entrepreneurs a few years after graduation, and this represents a fairly drastic change of direction. All of this implies the need for lifelong learning and development.”

Rosenberg cautions against changing too many things at once. “If you’re going to do a job that you’ve never done before in a business you’ve never worked in before, do it in the town you live in, or the company you work in, because you know people.” He adds that change should be about fulfillment, not money.

“Very often people in the business world think that as they were making $80,000 now they need to make $100,000. They will only look at options where they will do better, which is ridiculous. We’re talking about being happy and having a sustainable future. It’s not about the score, it’s about the journey.”

THE NEED TO SPECIALIZE AND ALSO HAVE A BROAD OUTLOOK

Knowledge is becoming ever more specialized but, while expertise is essential, it is equally important to have a broad outlook and develop general skills. “The problem with specialization is the world changes,” Rosenberg comments. “Let’s say you’re the guy who knows everything there is to know about dealing with the Libyan government and getting oil services contracts from Gaddafi. Then suddenly all your contacts are gone and everything you know is wrong. This doesn’t just happen in politics, it happens in technology.”

Cassiman believes that the good managers are the ones who are able to make the transition from a specialized to a broader view. “I would advise against starting out your career with a generalist perspective,” Cassiman  says. “I’d advise you to become a specialist in a particular issue and then broaden your outlook, and that’s where management education can be extremely useful because you get together with all sorts of different people.”

Zott comments that it’s also a question of knowing when to train broadly, and when to specialize. “Everybody will have a distinct career trajectory, and sometimes broader training will help and create options for career choices, sometimes specialization will advance your career and further your personal development,” he says.

As well as specialized skills, you need more general ones such as how to talk to people and how to analyze information. These are generic skills but can only be built up once you’ve specialized in something. “You need to choose something you’re interested in and that you feel passionate about, but I would always choose something that allowed me as many options as possible,” comments Kaganer.

“However, keeping a lot of options open and at the same time achieving a reasonable level of performance on this broad front is difficult.”

Immigrants have always been in the business of reinvention, frequently changing their name, job, religion and life history in order to adapt to their new reality. To an extent, globalization is making immigrants of us all, both literally, as we follow work around the world, and more generally, as cultural diversity becomes the norm everywhere. Immigrants learn to adapt, and the more you adapt, the easier it becomes.

CITIZENS OF THE WORLD

“I find it easier to find a common language with people who have lived in different countries around the world than with people in my own country,” says Kaganer, who is Russian and lived in the United States before moving to Barcelona.

“When you go to live in another country and you have to assimilate or find ways to be able to function there, you have to re-examine and reassess a lot of the norms that exist in your home country. Many people don’t realize that these are simply norms, not facts, until they leave their country and discover other norms. Once you understand that, changing yourself becomes easier because you see the relativity of how people interact.”