Decide what your passion is, because as long as you have passion for something, you'll come up with all the energy, motivation, and opportunities to go and make things happen. As long as I'm aware of my values and my passion and they're aligned with a need in the marketplace, I'm going to be highly successful.
Though Gill's words may sound to some like a pipe dream-or an ideal that cannot be achieved by most-one look at the changed nature of work in the 1990s and beyond should point to the vastly increased odds of being able to do exactly that. The outsourcing of America that we are witnessing in the wake of recent downsizings has, as one of its most salient features, a tremendous demand for highly specialized executive talent, and portable executives, freed from the overarching political concerns and frustrations that were an inevitable part of the lifetime-employment commitment, are increasingly able to couple their passions with their core skills and sell them on the open market. And as portability increases the emphasis on individual performance, passion for what one is doing drives that performance. "It's very simple," says one individual management consultant. "If you don't like what you are doing, you won't drive yourself to do it."
Not all executives, however, can readily identify where their passion lies. In recent decades, the premium placed on finding one organization to stay with for life often obscured the wants and needs of the individual. In trying to identify the next step on his career path, John Peterson, who left DuPont after twenty-one years, illustrates that the questions are the same for all executives:
The way I've been dealing with it is by doing a lot of personal work-in terms of my own logical and non-logical processes. I'm getting down on paper what my skills are, what I have done best, and what things I have a passion for, to see if there's a common thread there.
If there is an aspect of acquiring a portable-executive mind-set that is as compelling as the necessity to be independently successful in today's global economy, it is the way in which adopting these attributes brings an individual's entire life into a more balanced and even holistic mode, where passion and action become one motion.
An End to Bashfulness
As the attributes of portability bring executives' values and passion into line with what they can do best, and they begin to identify market niches where their unique talents can best be utilized, the process of marketing becomes less and less a "sales job" and more a confident statement of ability, accomplishments, and purpose. A critical shift takes place in the focus of marketing efforts: a shift from political marketing to substantive marketing, a direct result of alignment of passion and expertise.
Pushed by a number of his colleagues to employ telemarketing in his business, executive Manny Elkind initially resisted the idea out of sheer disgust:
I always had a vision of sales people as being slimy. Most of them would sell you half a chicken if they could, and there I was in this position of trying to be what I abhorred. But then I started to think about what I was doing ... what my purpose in life was and what my role should be ... and suddenly it became very clear: What I do when I talk to people, is literally make available to them some very important information and give them some opportunities to learn. It's a shift from "I want your business" to "I can help you," which is less selfish. And if you don't need what I've got, other people you know probably do.
In chapter one, we heard Mike Robertson say, "Before, I gave credit to others and I took the hits." For, taking credit is essential, for without effective self-marketing, his or her career would be nonexistent. Another executive explained, "If I don't kick the eagle off the limb, nothing happens." That concept applies as much to self-marketing as it does to accomplishing an assignment. Given's alignment of personal goals, passion, and self-confidence with the needs of the marketplace, there is no longer a place for modesty.
A successful portable executive must let the world know what he's doing-through networking, affiliation with professional organizations, and targeted marketing strategies that run the gamut from giving media interviews, distributing newsletters, and giving lectures and speeches to launching direct-mail campaigns, making sales calls to corporations, and buying advertising. For many executives who spent the majority of their careers within corporations whose marketing departments customarily handled this type of work, developing the ability to market does not come easily. If, however, self-marketing springs from a solid and passionate commitment to what an executive is doing-as it clearly does for David Moore and Manny Elkind - then the skill of self-marketing becomes yet another integrated attribute of being portable.
