by Jenny Blake
Julie Clow, author of The Work Revolution, was a senior vice president in HR at a hedge fund while writing and publishing her book. As her growth within the company began to wane, she received a message through LinkedIn asking her if she wanted to interview for a job that exceeded her wildest dreams: senior vice president of global people development for Chanel. She now splits her time between Paris and New York, with great perks to boot.
Julie was perfectly positioned to be poached for a new role because of the platform building she had done: continually achieving great results at her company, writing a book based on her expertise in organizational behavior and company culture, taking on a board position with a prestigious global learning and development organization, and cohosting a Work Revolution conference. Julie developed a strong reputation in her field and a platform that she could leverage into an even better-fit job.
Julie does not maintain a public-facing platform for the purposes of running her own business; she loves working within large, innovative companies and transforming their people and leadership programs. She enjoys writing, and applies that skill to publishing high-quality content just often enough to keep her engaged in conversations within her industry. In addition to bringing her career fulfillment, contributing to large media platforms helps her expand her leadership influence and remain discoverable.
Photographer Daniel Kelleghan also has a platform that makes him discoverable to others, allowing him to seize opportunity when it shows up. After six months photographing products for Groupon in Chicago, Dan quit to pursue his own photography business full time, traveling to shoot fashion and architecture, while bridging his income with corporate clients. He worked diligently at posting high-quality, artistic photos on Instagram to build a following.
Over the first three years of building his Instagram platform, Dan amassed a little over 7,000 followers. Then, because of the unique quality of his photographs, Instagram featured him on its suggested user list for two weeks, showcasing Dan’s account to new users worldwide. By the end of the second week, his following skyrocketed to over 100,000 people. Hotels and clothing brands started reaching out to offer goods in exchange for Dan’s sharing photos of their products with his audience.
Now Dan stays for free in many places by proactively offering sponsorship opportunities to companies in cities he will be traveling to. New clients such as Audi and Warby Parker are finding him rather than the other way around. Dan became the fifth-highest-followed Chicago Instagrammer after his initial boost, propelling his platform even further. On one hand, this may seem like a random lucky break. But Dan has been committed to producing high-quality work for years, knowing that if something like this were to happen, he would be ready to capitalize on that luck.
Platform Options: Ways to Leverage Expertise
Unlike Julie and Dan, you may not want to build a platform on a foundation of ideas or creative expression. You might want to teach, interpret others’ data, or build software that replaces you altogether. Below is a wide range of high-leverage platform ideas to consider. Just for kicks, brainstorm three avenues you could pursue within each, no matter how far-fetched:
Expert as teacher: Teaching large groups of people, either in person or through online channels. For example: creating software tutorials or teaching guitar by posting videos on YouTube or online course platforms.
Coach or consultant: You or a team you teach use your expertise to guide others. For example: running time management workshops like David Allen, creator of the classic productivity system Getting Things Done, or working as a professional organizer like Marie Kondo, author of the runaway hit The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Subject matter expert (SME): Sharing ideas, solutions, and best practices on what you know about a specific area; forecasting or interpreting trends in your industry; disseminating knowledge and projections beyond the classroom. For example: in addition to teaching computer science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport shares “study hacks” for career success in his blog and books.
Software as a service (SaaS): Create software or systems that improve efficiency or automate a specific market need. For example: online scheduling tools like Calendly and ScheduleOnce make booking meetings a snap; an accountability tracking service like AskMeEvery.com sends a question you have written, such as “Did you work out today?” to your inbox at a specified time, while tracking your yes or no responses in a dashboard to show progress.
Combinatorial innovation and curating: Make sense of the massive amounts of information across several interest areas by curating and consolidating content. For example: NextDraft.com creator Dave Pell opens over a hundred browser tabs each morning and synthesizes the ten most important news themes for the day, with articles neatly (and humorously) summarized in a NextDraft mobile app.
Specialized community building and connecting people: Bring like-minded people together to enhance your network and theirs, connect in an interesting setting, and align around a mission or big idea. For example: Nick Grey founded Museum Hack “for people who don’t like museums.” Nick and his team lead groups through New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., museums in “highly interactive, subversive, fun, non-traditional museum tours.”
Brokering between buyers and sellers by creating a marketplace, facilitating comparison shopping: Systematizing the buying and selling process, or finding ways to reduce fees in traditional industries by connecting buyers and sellers. For example: Airbnb for finding a place to stay, or Upwork for finding creative freelancers.
Aggregating and analyzing data, conducting original research: With increasingly more data available on everything from how many steps we take, to our heart rate, to mapping our genome, people will need help making sense of this data, “separating the signal from the noise,” as political pollster Nate Silver does. Some say that “data is the new oil” in our digital economy, and must be refined in order to add value.
REVEL IN THE WORK OTHERS REJECT
After four years at her PR firm, Amy Schoenberger, who you met in the introduction, started feeling uninspired. She knew that it was time to make a change; however, she loved her company, the culture, and the people, and she did not want to leave. Amy ended up creating a new role for herself at the firm by finding opportunity in a strange place: by seeking out, taking on, and excelling at the work that no one else wanted to do.
In 2009, PR strategy recommendations increasingly included social media and blogger outreach. While many of her coworkers saw social media as annoying and beneath them, Amy decided to dig into the field. She learned everything she could, following the industry as it was evolving, and quickly became the firm’s in-house social media expert. Soon she was consulting with most of the firm’s clients. She parlayed this work into a new role as director of digital entertainment, a position she created from scratch by demonstrating the impact of her work on the organization.
While I was working on this book, Amy was approached by a former manager and mentor to join her at a new company. This opportunity developed because of her excellent results and reputation. Amy became vice president of social strategy at M Booth.
Amy’s advice is to follow a counterintuitive approach to opportunity. “If you don’t know what you want to do next and you are feeling stuck, do the work no one else wants to do,” she advises. “It may lead you to a surprising and rewarding answer about what you like, what you are good at, and where you can differentiate from everyone else in your industry, especially in a cluttered field.”
LEAPFROG: WORK BACKWARD FROM TWO MOVES AHEAD
If you are still having trouble culling opportunities or clarifying a project-based purpose that is aligned with your vision, consider the leapfrog approach.
Many people actually do have an idea of what they want two “moves” from now, even if they do not have a clear understanding of what they want in the moment. Imagine a frog hopping on lily pad
s. Oftentimes people can identify the lily pad that is two leaps away; they just can’t see the one right in front of them that should come next in order to reach their further goal. The leapfrog approach will help you scan for opportunity two moves out, then work backward to find a transitional in-between pivot.
When I applied to Google for a role on the AdWords training team in 2005, part of what attracted me to the position was that I knew deep down I wanted to be an author and professional speaker someday. At the time, public speaking was so nerve-racking that I wore turtlenecks when giving big presentations to cover the splotchy red marks that would show up on my neck and chest. I knew that taking a job where speaking in front of others was a daily requirement would serve as good immersion therapy—and it did. In this case, my desired role to be an author and professional speaker was two leaps ahead, and the job I took at Google helped me progress toward my longer-term lily pad.
Graduate school is another example of an intermediate pivot that narrows the gap between the current state and the desired leapfrog move, one that is two steps ahead. Although it does require a significant investment of time, money, and opportunity cost, graduate school can provide many benefits, including networking, skill building, time to explore in a structured environment, expertise in your desired field, and in some cases, required professional licenses.
Adam Chaloeicheep, who you met in the introduction, climbed up the ranks quickly as a creative director in a branding agency. But at twenty-six years old, he felt completely burned out. So he sold all his belongings and moved to Thailand to study in a Buddhist monastery, wiping the slate clean. When he returned home, Adam knew he wanted to expand beyond just graphic design. He envisioned himself in high-level brand strategy roles as a chief experience officer, or CXO, the translator between CEOs’ business goals and their product design teams.
However, Adam hit wall after wall when he applied for these types of jobs. Even when his résumé and pitch book made it to executives’ desks and he interviewed, no job offer materialized. This was a sign that he was shooting too far ahead of his experience, at least in terms of what was visible to others from his résumé and public-facing platform. The latter didn’t exist at the time, as he did not have a website or professional online presence beyond his LinkedIn profile.
In parallel to this search, Adam started exploring options for graduate school. He knew that he was a good graphic designer, but would never be “the best.” Adam asked himself, “How am I going to grow into something I want to be, in a CXO-type role, if I don’t feel completely confident in being able to apply those ideas to add value to companies?”
After debating whether to attend graduate school for a few years, Adam decided that it would indeed be his best next step. It would improve his business acumen, bolster his résumé and network, and buy time to pivot his own fledgling freelance business. Adam applied to Parsons Business of Design program, accepted a scholarship, and moved to New York City with just $5,000 of his savings remaining. Within one year, thanks to the structure, connections, and mentoring he received in graduate school, Adam started his own brand strategy firm, hired a team of fellow students, and quickly surpassed mid-six-figure revenue—all prior to graduation.
Adam made the business school trade-offs worth it by tying school projects directly to his business, experimenting in practice, not just in the classroom.
“It was hard to swallow moving all the way from California to New York with barely any money in the bank and taking on the expense of two years of tuition,” he said. “So I just told myself that if I am going to do this, I am going to do it so that I can apply things in the real world as soon as possible.” Throughout school, and in his wider life, he maintains an impacter mindset for experiments like these: “Care deeply, but have no expectations.”
Now Adam does serve as a chief experience officer, his vision two moves out, by running his own brand strategy company. Graduate school was the lever that enabled him to achieve his goal.
The leapfrog approach has three key benefits: it helps build transitional skills and experience, allows you to explore what you enjoy more deeply, and enables you to form key relationships in the area you want to pivot to, even before you have your following steps lined up.
LET OTHERS KNOW YOU ARE LOOKING
Until this point, much of the Pivot prep work is solitary—identifying your values, vision, strengths, interests, and allies. Although you identified people to connect with earlier in the Scan stage, you have not yet applied the full reach of your network’s resources.
Now it is time to clearly state what you are scanning for and how people you know can help. Even if people you contact do not have an open opportunity right away, they can put their feelers up in case something related to your desired direction surfaces.
Casey Pennington started to feel stuck two years after graduating college, despite having “done everything right her whole life.” She said, “I made straight A’s in school, got into a top business university, snagged an internship and subsequently a full-time offer from a large corporation. I thought I was set for life. Fast-forward two years and the thought of spending my entire career navigating bureaucracy and politics was causing me increasing dread each day. I knew something needed to change.”
Casey first identified what she wanted, the known variables of her one-year vision, as a work environment that provided learning, challenge, autonomy, flexibility, relationship building, and the time and money to have the life she wanted outside of her career. Working for herself was appealing, but Casey knew she was not ready to venture out on her own just yet. When she decided to pivot within her company from accounting to IT, she first let her managers know. Then she leaned on her strengths by transitioning to an accounting role on another team with an upcoming software implementation project.
She scanned further by talking to anyone she could find with experience in software development and learning as much as she could about current systems to prepare herself for a future role. When the first software project she landed was delayed, an unexpected opportunity came up to help on a related temporary assignment.
“Because I had laid the groundwork to let my managers know I was interested, they recommended me for the project and I got it,” Casey said. “I had been making my interest in moving to IT known for a while, even though this offer seemed to come out of the blue.”
I have heard many stories like Casey’s. Once people get clear on what type of opportunity they are looking for and make it known to their network, prospects materialize in surprising ways. Although they may not have actively sought out those exact opportunities, spreading the word generated momentum behind the scenes, even when they did not realize it was happening.
I call this the universe rolling out the red carpet. When you are heading in a direction that resonates, every step you take prompts another fortuitous rolling out in front of your feet. Each courageous move uncovers new people and opportunities, encouraging you to keep going and reminding you that you are on the right track.
When you are ready to put the word out, send an e-mail to your closest friends, family, and trusted professional contacts with the following sections:
An introduction succinctly stating the pivot you hope to make: what you are doing now and where you want to go (one to two sentences max).
Your background: three to five brief bullet points on your strengths and experiences.
The ideal company or clients you are looking for: a few bullets on types of work, location, and how you can make an impact.
Call to action: how recipients can be most helpful; for example, by forwarding the e-mail, and keeping their eyes and ears open as opportunities come up.
Even if you do not know exactly what you are looking for, opening the process up to your trusted contacts can generate fruitful next steps. When Carlos Miceli made the difficult decision to step away from the three-year-old company h
e cofounded in Argentina, he sent an e-mail to his network with a Google Doc linked at the bottom called “Carlos’s State of Affairs,” which he described as a “private and more vulnerable LinkedIn profile.”
In the note, he expressed his knowns and unknowns. He stated what he was looking for, and how his network could help or collaborate with him. “This is looking like a bridge year for my long-term vision,” Carlos wrote. “I’m not worried about what the next big project will be, or if I should join someone else’s ‘rocket’ instead of launching my own—I am more interested in figuring out with whom, and where.”
The document outlined Carlos’s preferences and current ideas on potential directions for his next career move, skills he wanted to improve, content he was interested in, and ways his network could help. At the end of his e-mail, he also made it clear that he was happy to provide advice, ideas, connections, and resources in return.
Pivot Paradox: When the Grass Really Is Greener
“The grass is always greener on the other side.” Too often this is used as a phrase to keep people in line. “Don’t bother being upset! The grass is always greener!” The message is to settle, to be happy with what you’ve got. If you have a job, don’t bother looking elsewhere. Don’t listen to your gut; take it on blind faith that no matter what you do or where you go, you will always have this itchy, unsettled feeling. Let the wave of peeking through the fence come and go, then sit back down and stay put.
It is important to be present in our own lives, to be grateful for what we do have, and to understand that any next move will have drawbacks and rough days. We should resist chasing what is shiny or seems easy, or basing our happiness on impermanent things. Relationships, jobs, and daily life inevitably become challenging at times, but we find our most rewarding growth experiences on the other side of discomfort.
