Archive for June, 2007
Looking outward, not inward, to change careers
Working Identity, by Herminia Ibarra (Harvard Business School Press, 2004, 199 pages, $16.95)
Countless self-help guides to switching jobs or careers assume you’ve got just one true identity in life, and therefore, just one true purpose. Your task is to look so deep inside yourself that you discover this purpose. It’s a little like the old notion of a soulmate - that out of all the billions of people on this planet, only one can be our true love. You plow through these sorts of books doing endless exercises, ranging from the conventional (Briggs-Meyers) to the unconventional (list your top 10 most enjoyable memories). Once you nail your personality type, or your “genius,” or whatever it is that supposedly makes you unique, you’re home free - or so the books assert.
“Working Identity” is refreshingly different; one might even say refreshingly adult. Ibarra, formerly on the faculty of the Harvard Business School and now a professor at INSEAD, a business school in France, notes that the real way most of us change careers isn’t through introspection, but experimentation: going back to school part-time, for example, or slowly building a freelance practice on the side, or hanging out with people in the line of work we’re interested in to see what it feels like. This sort of dabbling and detouring, says Ibarra, is a healthy reaction to our possessing not a single “true” self, but many selves, among which we’re constantly choosing:
