Your Career: Plan B

In her six years at the YES Network, a New York cable television channel, Melissa Picheny won an Emmy award for excellence in programming and was nominated for two more. But despite her success, Picheny, 31, will soon leave the television world to start a business organizing people's homes, called Declutter & Design. "I felt I was getting dumber and dumber," Picheny said of her TV job. "I wanted to do something that would fulfill me, and make a difference in other people's lives." She also saw signs that investors were cutting costs to prepare the company for sale. And she wanted more control in her life.

Employees stressed by the threat of mergers, buyouts and industry disasters, as well as personal dissatisfaction, are increasingly formulating a Plan B for their lives. That means not merely keeping a resume handy for the next opportunity. It often means reinventing themselves -- planning a total switch in professional, and often personal, orientation. Role models abound. There is Meg Whitman, who in 1998 quit an old-economy toy company, Hasbro, to head the online auction house eBay; or Michael Bloomberg, who became mayor of New York and plunged headlong into the city's rough-and-tumble political world after building a hugely successful financial media company; or Bernard Tapie, the French businessman who managed to shake off bankruptcy and a fall from grace as a Socialist politician to become a French television star.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor at the Insead business school in Fontainebleau, France, and author of "Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career,  (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), began studying the phenomenon in the late 1990s, when she believes it began to gain traction after Whitman left for eBay. "We started to see it every day," Ibarra said. "People were saying, 'What am I waiting for? I am not thrilled here.' If you are in a company and you see person after person leaving whom you respect, you start wondering whether you should look into it." The operative phrase is "look into it." In the 1990s, many people leaped before they looked. Middle managers became day traders. George Shaheen, chief executive of Arthur Andersen, became head of Webvan, an Internet grocery start-up. When the Internet bubble burst, often their dreams did, too.

Ibarra found that there was a wide gap between spotting a promising new career and successfully making the transition -- an accomplishment that takes as much as three years to prepare. Searching one's psyche is only part of it; more important, she said, is engaging in the new activity, to find out whether it is feasible and as appealing as it seemed.

Without such reality testing, she said, "we can stay in fantasy for a long time." Dipping your toe in new waters while keeping one foot in your old life is difficult, but not impossible. You could help a friend in the new field, or try to do a side project, a freelance assignment or volunteer project. The feedback can open your eyes to the skills required, and whether you want to develop them. It can also reveal the negatives, and it makes it easier to decide on the trade-offs. A former investment banker and consultant that Ibarra profiled in her book had fantasized about doing something more unconventional. But after exploring options like running a scuba diving business, he realized he would get bored and be making too great a financial sacrifice. He wound up staying in finance, but switching to a more unconventional company: Richard Branson's Virgin Group, where he manages a portfolio of acquisitions. Even billionaires who seem able to buy their way into new fields know to test the waters if they want to be successful. Before running for mayor, Bloomberg sat on the boards of 20 New York cultural and educational organizations, learning the needs and values of various constituencies and changing his image from street-wise entrepreneur to civic benefactor. By contrast, Ross Perot, the billionaire founder of the technology company EDS, ran for president in 1992, but despite spending $65.4 million of his own fortune, Perot's campaign foundered.

Engaging in new activities also helps build a network of people who share your new self-image and can help reinforce it. "You can compare yourselves to others who have moved into different fields and are not crazy or failures," Ibarra said.

Of course, different professional, corporate and national cultures may make changing careers easier or more difficult. Asia, with its bubbling economies, is offering more career fluidity these days, although traditional conventions may still require formal, third-party introductions rather than casual networking. Making big changes in some Continental European countries can be harder than in the United States, Britain or Australia, in part because of labor laws, but also because professional networks are smaller and more exclusive. But while networking may be a hackneyed word and an overemphasized activity, understanding the dynamics of networking can help make it more valuable. In their book, "Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters,"  (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a dean at the Yale University School of Management, and Andrew Ward, a professor at the Terry College of Business at University of Georgia, explain that people, and top managers in particular, "find positions more often by weak acquaintance ties than by strong friendship ties."

According to a study cited in the book, only 16.7 percent of people who found their jobs through a contact would describe that contact as a close friend -- someone they saw twice a week or more; 55.6 percent found a job through acquaintances they saw on occasion, but at least once a year, and 27.8 percent were found through distant acquaintances they saw less than once a year.

The support of acquaintances and industry contacts can be vital when a job loss or impending job loss threaten one's reputation or status. In the highly publicized dismissal of Jeffrey Katzenberg from Walt Disney in 1994, Sonnenfeld and Ward argue that public support from actors, directors, executives and even rivals not only reassured Katzenberg of his industry stature, but also enhanced his value in the marketplace. Katzenberg won a big settlement from Disney and is now chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, which he founded with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen.

By contrast, family and close friends may give emotional support, but they also may have pigeonholed you. "They can't quite see you in things as you see yourself," Ibarra said, and they may have a vested interest in the status quo.

That is one reason that career coaching has become more popular over the past few years. Once used mostly by large corporations like International Business Machines to help top executives and promising managers upgrade their skills, career coaching has filtered down to anyone who contemplates major change and needs to develop new skills or attitudes. Coaches can help provide some insight and an accelerated action plan, but it pays to be careful. Ibarra cautioned that coaches who emphasize personality tests rather than practical skills may be a waste of time.

It is also important to remember that even after a successful change, things can be less than rosy. "The first three months are optimistic -- there is a lot of goodwill," said Dai Williams, a British occupational psychologist and former human resources executive at Shell. But somewhere between the third and sixth month, he said, there is often a "conflict between the new culture and the environment where a person has been previously. There is a different set of values."

The lesson, he said, is that "it will take longer to settle into the new environment than you think."

Source: International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. Powered by Yellowbrix.