A couple of my readers have
asked what I'm going to do 'for a living' next. They're curious how a
guy who's written a book on how to start your own business could be
mostly still looking for his next career a year after leaving the last
one.
It's a fair question, and one that has a simple answer: I'm deliberately not following my own advice.
If I were 25, just starting out, I'd have decided to set up my own
business, and I'd be deep into the research needed to 'find a need and
fill it'. Having advised over a hundred entrepreneurs, I've got a
pretty good nose for what the 'market' says it needs and can afford --
these days that's things like cost and risk management programs, help
with outsourcing, assistance with regulatory compliance, exceptional
salespeople, and some nose-to-the-grindstone specialists -- but at age
53 these business-as-usual 'opportunities' don't interest me in the
least.
There's also a need for the opportunities that do
interest me, but the people who need what I wish to offer can't, for
the most part, afford to pay me. This article is an explanation of that
quandary, hopefully with some lessons for those who have abandoned, or
are thinking of fleeing, a job you hate.
At least until my pension starts (2009), my career choices will be a
matter of trade-offs -- what I want to do versus what people are
willing to pay me to do. I represent these trade-offs on the chart
shown above. The position of each of my 'second career ambitions' on
the X (heart) axis reflects my passion for them, while the position on
the Y (dollar) axis reflects how much they are likely to pay, and the
colour (green for high, yellow for moderate, red for low) indicates my
current competencies to do each of them. I recognize that most people
have neither the luxury of time nor the option of trade-offs between
what they want to do and what they have to do. I've been exceedingly
fortunate, and if you're currently struggling to find a job -- any job, or to make ends meet in a position in which you're under-employed, I feel for you -- I've been there, and it's hell.
If any of these alternatives were in the upper right corner of this
chart, I would have pursued them first, and neither the chart nor the
hours of work I have put into thinking about my next career would have
been necessary. Almost all my energies thus far have been spent on
projects #1-6, the ones I already have the credentials to do:
- Writing: My book Natural Enterprise, my second non-fiction book The Cost of Not Knowing, my novel The Only Life We Know, and also, perhaps, a new magazine and a newspaper column.
- Creative Solutions / Critical Skills Centre: Directing a think-tank, solution and training centre that facilitates these offerings
for businesses and public sector organizations (including innovation
and collaboration services and a mechanism to tap The Wisdom of Crowds)
and uses some of the proceeds to extend these same offerings to
non-profit organizations to enable them to solve some of the world's
most critical problems, and to school-children to equip them for the
enormous challenges they will face in this century.
- Innovation Director:
A one-to-two-year full-time secondment to an organization to provide
its management and employees with, and implement, innovative ideas,
training, facilitation and processes that make it a more innovative organization.
- Personal Knowledge Management:
Working as a full-time consultant to one of the five major players in
desktop productivity software, to help them capitalize on the enormous opportunity
to provide comprehensive, integrated, simple personal knowledge
management software, and hence breach the digital divide and 'capture
the desktop'.
- Personal Productivity Improvement and Working Smarter: A one-year full-time secondment to an organization to implement personal productivity improvement,
bottom-up, one-on-one, for managers and front-line workers; or,
alternatively, setting up an educational organization to offer these
services to many organizations, or even to individuals.
- Knowledge, Learning & Technology Assessment and Strategy Services
I've made some progress on all six of these alternatives, but not
enough on any of them to set the others aside and charge full-speed on
just the one. Whereas my advice to others is to identify a known, unmet
need and develop a product or service that addresses it, I'm taking the
much harder tack of trying to persuade the buyers of these six leading
edge services that there is a need for them, even though it hasn't been
articulated.
And if that wasn't hard enough, I'm trying to 'sell' executives on
services that primarily benefit their front-line workers, rather than
the executives personally. Nothing tougher than trying to sell into a
market where the direct recipients of the value aren't the ones paying
the tab.
The strategy I'm using for these is to work on all six in parallel,
since it takes time to articulate the message and value proposition,
identify the customers and make the pitches. And in each case what I'm
selling is a novelty, so I need to ensure my audience is either
thinking ahead of the curve, or sufficiently motivated by
organizational crisis to entertain novel solutions. Without executive
sponsorship and/or a sense of urgency, both of which are hard to find,
selling an untested service, or creating a job for yourself, is
virtually impossible. So I spend a bit of time moving each of the six
forward a step or two each week, and I'm confident one of them will
eventually 'catch'. Status:
- Some of my author contacts have been kind enough to
recommend agents to me (and vice versa) for which I am very grateful.
I'm just kicking myself for not thinking of this approach to #1 long
ago.
- I have pitched #2 to three organizations that have the
wherewithal to pilot the Centre, but they're hesitant to do so until
there is proof of concept, which of course I can't get until I get some
resources -- not all that different from the quandary of the first-time
job-seeker (do I remember that anguish!) So now I'm looking for
Champions -- 'name brand' people who will vouch for the logic and
viability of the process, to push the intrigued but hesitant investors
to at least fund the pilot stage.
- I'm using the Selling to VITO Headline Statementapproach
to get the attention of CEOs of my ten targets for #3, using a
very creative twist that I'll tell you about soon -- if it
works.Meanwhile I'm doing a couple of innovation consulting assignments
with a great partner.
- My PKM approach for #4 is kicking around the intranets of
three of the big five productivity software companies, and I've had
some discussions with all three, but it's tough. Despite the fact that
my article on the subject was nominated as 'best business blog post of
the year', it's really tough leveraging that into a meeting with the
powers that be in these huge organizations, but I'm still nagging them.
If it happens, it happens.
- I have a meeting tomorrow with some colleagues who I've
been brainstorming #5 with. I've been astonished at the amount of
interest there is on Getting Things Done
and similar approaches to the 'workflow management' aspect of personal
productivity improvement, and that employees are undertaking
self-improvement on their own time and on their own dime
-- not waiting for their employer to invest. This is encouraging and
we're now exploring individual front-line workers as a second target
customer group for PPI & Working Smarter services and resources.
This is still in its early stages and I'll talk more about it soon.
- My fall-back is 'KLT' services -- integrated assessments of
organizations' knowledge, learning and technology infrastructure and
processes, and advice on related strategy. This is closest to what I
was doing in my last job, and I'm good at it and have all the right
credentials, but it doesn't turn my crank as much as the other options.
I'm doing a bit of this work now.
- At one stage there was a #7 -- teaching Natural Enterprise
in universities. The prospective students and fellow profs I spoke to
were both very keen, but my model (visiting entrepreneurial businesses
with on-site Q&A, instead of lectures in class) was just too
radical for the higher-ups in academia, who also said my lack of a PhD
is also an obstacle. No point banging your head against the wall. This
might conceivably still be part of #2 if the Centre wants to get into
post-secondary education, perhaps in association with a private
educational group like the Waldorf schools, but I've pretty much ruled
out teaching at 'established' educational institutions. And, for now,
community colleges don't pay enough to support me, or this kind of a
program.
Most of the advice online about second careers is old-line thinking,
unimaginative, and demeaning or depressing. If you've found a second
career, or made the decision to seek one, what has your experience, or
your approach, been? Do you have any advice for others? We're all
taught to be dependent on the system, to participate in humiliating and
nerve-wracking beauty contests for jobs where the odds are stacked
against us -- what methods have you found that help stave off the quiet
desperation that is inherent in this loathsome and ego-destroying
process? And if that's not enough to prompt you to start your own
business, what's holding you back?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
I'm delighted to report that two of my business articles have recently appeared in print in two very fine journals:
