”Stop looking for the right job,” career couselors now tell us. ”Start thinking of yourself as the head of a small business called ’You & Co.,’ and view employers as potential customers. That’s the key to a successful career.” That all very well, but how?No one is better at explaining the new world of work better than William Bridges, inventor of the term ”You & Co.” In Creating You & Co., he provides workers with a practical guide to overcoming the employment trends illuminated in his bestsellers Managing Transitions and JobShift. By seeing beyond outdated notions of the job and learning to think as a business leader, you can find work that over the years will be both more fulfilling and more secure.Creating You & Co. provides self-assessment tests that help you to identify your Desires, Abilities, Temperament, and Assets. This ”D.A.T.A.” is more than a window to what you like doing; it reveals your unique advantges in the work market. Other exercises lead you through the process of defining your ”product” and spotting your ”market.” By the end of this book, you’ll think about your work in a new way—you’ll think like the CEO of You & Co.As Bridges shows, true security comes not from clinging to a job, but from doing the work you’re best at for the employers who need it. By learning that approach you can cement your value to your current employer, shape a new job for yourself, actually start a small company, or blaze your own path. No matter what shape your You & Co. takes, we will all need to learn the Creating You & Co. approach to prosper in the years ahead.
William Bridges is an internationally known speaker, author, and consultant who advises individuals and organizations in how to deal productively with change. His ten books include an expanded third edition of his best-seller, Managing Transitions (2009), and the updated second edition of Transitions (2004), which together have sold over one million copies. Before that he published The Way of Transition (2000), a partly autobiographical study of coming to terms with profound changes in his own life and transforming them into times of self-renewal. He published Creating You & Co., a handbook for creating a work-life that capitalizes on today's frequent and disruptive changes, and the ground-breaking Jobshift.
For three decades, he has guided thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations through the maze of the transitions that accompany change. He focuses on the Transition, or psychological reorientation, people must go through to come to terms with changes in their lives. His three-phase model of Endings, Neutral Zone and New Beginnings is widely known. The professional seminars that he launched in 1988 have now certified more than 5,000 managers, trainers and consultants worldwide to conduct Transition Management programs. His later work has focused on bringing the principles of Transition Management into the non-profit world. He has been a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and corporate meetings in the United States and abroad.
Educated originally in the humanities at Harvard, Columbia, and Brown Universities, he was (until his own career change in 1974) a professor of American Literature at Mills College, Oakland, CA. He is a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. The Wall Street Journal listed him as one of the top ten independent executive development presenters in America.
