Make Sure You Get Lucky
How to succeed in Corporate America
At the start of my career I was fortunate to be a part of a three year leadership training program in a large US corporation. Each year of the program we were able to go to a national conference where we would meet people from other sites, take training classes, and listen to speeches by leaders from the corporation.
The national conference that occurred during the second year of my program was very focused on the speeches from the corporate leaders. The overall theme of the talks was how they got to their current leadership role. I can summarize every single one like this: “I just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. I was put on this big and important program and we ended up being very successful / a complete failure. This success / failure brought me lots of attention by upper management, which eventually lead to more opportunities.”
Towards the end of the conference I was at the bar with one of my buddies and he made the comment that from these speeches it was pretty clear how to be successful at our current job. I did not see any pattern in them, so I asked how. “Make sure you get lucky,” was the reply. We all had a good laugh. Yet in every good joke there is some element of truth to it. Success in corporate America requires two things — skill and luck.
The skill part is easy to understand. People tend to view, or at least want to view, their job and employer as a giant meritocracy where success in their job correlates with success in their career. I think for a large part it does — but only at a limited level. Skill alone will not make you a corporate executive.
So how do some rise up to the C-suite? There are two major “luck” factors at play — name recognition and job opportunities. Name recognition means that the corporate executives know who you are. That can ironically come two ways — either by a major success or a major failure. How you react to a major failure can be as important to your career as a major success.
Job opportunities mean you are at a successful company with many opportunities to both move around and move up. You are either in a market that is growing, a company that happens to be well run, happen to be at a company that is just hot right now, or any variety of factors. It could just as easily be the opposite — you could be a rock star employee, but if you are in the middle of a recession or in a market that is dying — there will be limited opportunities. All of these are essentially lucky — many market swings are difficult to predict.
I think the one redeeming factor of this “luck” is that you need to be good at your job. You cannot just be in the right place at the right time, but you need to be the right person in the right place at the right time. So remember kids when starting at your first job — make sure you get lucky.
