Winning - Jack Welch [96]
So if you really want to find a great job, choose something you love to do, make sure you’re with people you like, and then give it your all.
If you do that, you’re sure to have a great job—and you’ll never really work another day in your life.
17
Getting Promoted
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SORRY, NO SHORTCUTS
THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER of this book was about finding your right job. This chapter is about getting your next one.
Now, not everyone in business wants to get a bigger and better job, but a lot of people do. If you’re among them, this chapter is for you, whether you are hungry for your first promotion or your fifth.
I was there once. When I started my career at age twenty-four, I had no idea where I was going or how I was going to get there, but I was filled with ambition.
The drive to make something of myself had started pretty young. I had my first job at age ten, as a caddy at a country club near my hometown of Salem, Massachusetts. Through high school and college, I held one job after another, from bartender to teaching assistant. By the time I graduated from the University of Illinois with a PhD in chemical engineering in 1961, I was eager for the real thing.
The job GE offered me seemed like a good deal. I would be working in the lab developing a new plastic, and if it succeeded, I saw a chance to get out in the field and sell it. Best of all, the job was in Massachusetts, and it paid the most of any offer—$10,500.*
Believe me, I wasn’t thinking about a career at that point. If I had, I would have surely taken the offer I had received from Exxon, where a chemical engineering degree really meant something. But forget it—Exxon was in Texas! At that point in my life, the fact that I had gone to school in Illinois already made me feel like I had traveled halfway around the world.
Over the next thirteen years at GE, I got four promotions. Each one felt terrific. I liked having more responsibility, making bigger deals, building bigger plants, and managing more people. It was really only in 1973 that it dawned on me that I had a shot at the company’s top job—and that I wanted it too. In an act of complete cockiness, I put that down on my performance evaluation under the question about career goals.
Eight years later, I got my wish.
So, how did that happen? How does a person get promoted?
The first answer is luck. All careers, no matter how scripted they appear, are shaped by some element of pure chance.
Sometimes a person just happens to be in the right place at the right time, and he meets someone—at an airport or a party, for instance—and a career door swings open. We’ve all heard stories like that.
Sometimes we don’t even know luck is good until well after the fact.
An old golfing friend of mine, Perry Ruddick, remembers being sorely disappointed when he was passed over for a promotion that was in France early in his career at the investment bank Smith Barney. He thought he had missed out on his best shot at making a name for himself in the company, not to mention the glamour of Paris in 1966.
As luck would have it, two years after Perry would have left for the assignment abroad, another position at the company came open in New York, and he got it. In his new role, Perry, then thirty-two, got to run the company’s investment banking operations, and with a team of forward-thinking young bankers, he helped guide the company successfully through a challenging period of consolidation in the industry.
To make a long story short, Perry was vice-chairman of Smith Barney from 1985 until his retirement in 1991.
But luck can also break the other way. Sometimes careers stall for no reason at all except bad timing. At the very least, careers can zig and zag for reasons beyond your control, like an acquisition or divestiture, or a new boss with very different ideas about your future. Occasionally, you miss out on a promotion because of office politics or nepotism. Such setbacks can be terribly disheartening—enough to make you ask yourself, “Why the heck should I even try?”
Don’t go there.
In the long run,