Mark D’Arcy is a man without a plan.
He just wings it. And it’s worked out pretty well for him. If he had taken the time to do a resume, which he has proudly never done, it would have read: Award-winning agency creative director; President and chief creative officer of the Time Warner Global Media Group. Head of the Global Creative Services team at Facebook. Mark is the Bono of my ad world. And he got there without ever applying for a job. So when Mark told me Wednesday at the Facebook Creative Council meeting that he has never had a plan in life, I started to think hard about plans, and whether they help or hurt. Most of the people I spoke to about the topic had a go-to analogy. I urge you to read some of the responses here and post your own below. Mark’s colleague at Facebook, Patrick Harris, recommended that you navigate your career like it’s a jungle gym, not a ladder. “Flexibly and agility are keys to progress,” Patrick said. “I focus on consistent improvement versus a destination. What skills, experiences or competencies will help you take a bigger swing on the jungle gym?” My good friend Babs Rangaiah, Unilever's vice president, global media innovation and ventures, tells me that you need to have a vision. In one of the great mash ups of football and baseball analogies, Babs says you should be prepared “to call audibles, as life will inevitably throw you curveballs.” Christian Hernandez, the only person I know who has worked at Microsoft, Google and Facebook, has a poster in his office that reads Navigare Necesse Est. “[I] use it to remind me to keep a steady hand on the rudder pointing in a desired direction, but be sure to enjoy the ride along the way,” Christian says. More than any other concept, “enjoying the ride” came up again and again. Laura Thompson, whose journey has taken her through the halls of P&G, Abercrombie and Fitch and EMC, prefers the bus ride analogy to the boat. “You want to know what bus to get on to head the right way but not be afraid to get off at a lot of cool stops along the way,” the Boston College grad said. “Things present themselves in surprising ways. If you are too focused on the destination you don't enjoy the ride and take the interesting and often rewarding detours.” Enjoying the ride may just be the difference between success and failure, happiness and misery, in life and in work. Sounds great. But easier said than done, right? The most “successful” (however you want to define that) AND content people I know have found a way to operate almost exclusively inside the intersection of the Venn diagram of their professional and personal lives. These lucky few focus their life’s work on their passion. They are people who identify WHAT gets them going in the morning. What drives them. What they are interested in. What is important to them. They are people who identify HOW they want to live their life, and not just what they want to do during their lifetime. They focus on being true to themselves, not an arbitrary plan with assumptions driven by fear, shame and expectations. Robert Weitz, partner and creative director at Fahrenheit Studio could not have said it more succinctly when he told me, “I have never met a person who ‘planned’ greatness.” Plans may not be necessary. But putting yourself on the right path to get there definitely is. And the only way to do that is to understand who you are and who you want to be. To this day, I have never written a classic business plan. But I did write a 2-page executive summary for each of my businesses -- and for several others that never made it out of the gate! Spending the time to put together a detailed business plan would have slowed me down. And I would have botched all my major assumptions. But putting together a high-level executive summary was critical to guiding my thinking that set Buddy Media on a path toward our destination. These documents are powerful guides. My original Buddy Media executive summary from 2007 states, “Like the software companies in the 1980s that built on the dominant operating system platform, Buddy Media aims to build software to make Facebook and the other social network sites more useful, entertaining and productive for a growing base of users who rely on the sites to stay connect with friends, family and colleagues.” I urge you to use the executive summary model in your career planning. Table the plan and embrace your own personal executive summary, which I call the Executive Life Summary. An Executive Life Summary is the guiding document for your life. I use the term “life” deliberately, as understanding who you want to be needs to drive each decision about what you want to do. This document is a living, breathing document. You will continue to come back to it and refine it. Your Executive Life Summary should be no longer than 2 pages and each section should be no longer than 2 paragraphs, or a few bullet points. And it should address the following areas.
The ESL doesn’t tell you where you will end up but does make sure you are moving in the right direction. The ESL isn’t your step-by-step plan to move up the career ladder but is the filter through which you will view all opportunities that come your way. The ESL doesn’t guarantee success. But I assure you that it will help keep you out of trouble. Some of the best things in life are messy and smelly and dirty. Success, however you choose to define it, is no different. Enjoy the mess. Enjoy the chaos. And commit to a compass that will keep you on the path to reach your full potential.
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I came across this article for "J.T. O'Donnell" and I thought of sharing it with the public. It is very useful.
The writer of the article said: It’s the list of ten things I try to do every workday. Yes, there are days when I don’t get them all done, but I do my best to deliver. It has proven very effective for me. They are:
If it was longer, I wouldn’t be as good at getting them all done. This list is manageable to me. Of course, I do more than these ten things every day. But, these are the ten I choose to do with consistency. Why? Over the years, they’ve proven the best way for me to grow my career and my business. The collective results have made completing these tasks consistently; even when I don’t feel like it, well worth it. |