Customer Reviews

The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction (Crown Business Briefings)

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, by James M. Citrin and Richard A. Smith was an easy read, and a worthwhile one. Given that I am at a juncture in my career where I need to be making some rather important strategic decisions about going back for the MBA, or staying in the full-time workforce. In reality, my further education will likely be a compromise of those two disciplines, but nonetheless, I need to be strategic.

The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers held no breakthrough insights for me, but it did serve to hone my focus on a few key elements of my career management, and shed some light on how I'm currently doing things that I wasn't aware of.

There were five basic 'patterns' that the book detaiuled are as follows:

1. Understand the Value of You. People with extrordinary careers understand how value is created in the organization and manage their careers according to the value chain. There are three phases of your value, the Potential phase, where employers hire your what you will be able to do, the Experiential phase, where employers hire you to put your previous successes to the test, and Harvest phase, where you are reaping the seads of knowledge sewn in the years of past experience.

2. Practice Benevolent Leadership. Behind every great managers are great employees and great mentors. Use your friends wisely!

3. Overcome the Permission Paradox. Bottom line - successful careers are built on those things that were weren't told you couldn't do, not those things you were givent perimission to do. Understand explicit permission versus implicit permission, and use that to your advantage!

4. Use the 20/80 Principle of Performance. Get out of your defined job and create some real value against the 20% that really matters!

5. Find the Right Fit. No passion, move on to the next gig. This is a major part of the battle. Don't be too successful at something you don't like!

So, what am I doing differently now? Not much really. I've always been an 'implicit permission' kind of guy, I'm quite aware of my current value and am always testing it, and I'm very passionate about what I do. Are you?

Don't forget to check out the book's official website http://www.5patterns.com/

I read a short article about "The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers" on the Internet and decided it might be worth reading. Most of the career "guides" I had read up to this time were of the, `choose your ideal career through completing a series of tests to identify your strengths' variety. But what intrigued me about this book was that rather than selecting the "right" career it was more about making the most of the career of you have. Still, Citrin and Smith do acknowledge the importance of being in a career that plays to your, "strengths, passions, and people" by making it one of the "patterns" of extraordinary careers; oddly, though, it is the last of the five rather the first. Perhaps one of my favorite quotes comes from this pattern, "...many people find, partway up the ascent, that their ladders were leaning against the wrong wall." Again, though, this book is more about what to do with the your career once you have found the "right" one. And therein lies perhaps the most important maxim of this book, successful careers are managed, sometimes unconsciously, rather than driven by fate or luck; a corollary is that opportunities are created and actively sought after rather than passively waited for. Even the authors acknowledge that these ideas aren't new. But the patterns represent a distillation of the interviews and surveys of extraordinary executives conducted across Industry boundaries and they, perhaps, are new, or are at least fresh.

The core of the book is chapters 2 - 6, one for each of the patterns: Understanding the Value of You, Practice Benevolent Leadership, Overcome the Permission Paradox, Differentiate Using the 20/80 Principle, and Find the Right Fit. Citrin and Smith go on to extend the patterns to extraordinary organizations in chapter 7. They use specific examples gleaned from their interviews to illustrate each of the patterns. And while these examples are certainly condensed, in order to fit within the scope of a single volume, they generally, if not specifically and in detail, prove the point. What is less clear though, are how technical careers fall into these patterns. All of the chosen examples are CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, presidents, vice-presidents, and perhaps a Director or two. Though they try to generalize these success patterns you are still left with the impression that extraordinary careers are, at least in part, defined by having entered the executive ranks. I am sure that Citrin and Smith would disagree, but I am still struggling with how to apply these patterns to my rather technical career of Software Engineering without becoming a manager.

Overall this has been a valuable book - if for no other reason than that it has caused me to think about my career in concrete terms and how I can actively manage it rather than waiting for it to happen. The book isn't overly long and can be read in a week during your lunch breaks. Thinking about your career and how to apply the patterns is where the hard work begins.

The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction by James M. Citrin and Richard A. Smith. This is a refreshing look at the Self-Help Career book genre. Job seekers, employers, and human resource professionals - in short, anyone that's interested in enriching their career - will benefit from this book.

THE FIVE PATTERNS OF EXTRAORDINARY CAREERS

1. Understand the Value of You. People with extraordinary careers understand how value is created in the workplace, and translate that knowledge into action, building their personal value over each phase of their careers.

2. Practice Benevolent Leadership. People with extraordinary careers do not claw their way to the top, they are carried there.

3. Overcome the Permission Paradox. People with extraordinary careers overcome one of the great Catch-22s of business: You can't get the job without experience and you can't get the experience without the job.

4. Differentiate Using the 20/80 Principle of Performance. People with extraordinary careers do their defined jobs exceptionally well but don't stop there. They storm past pre-determined objectives to create breakthrough ideas and deliver unexpected impact.

5. Find the Right Fit (Strengths, Passions & People). People with extraordinary careers make decisions with the long-term in mind. They willfully migrate toward positions that fit their natural strengths and passions and where they can work with people they like and respect.

The authors have developed a razor-sharp vocabulary that brings welcome dialogue about careers into the new age of business. The executives in this book are all focused on their career, this is one aspect of those with successful careers. The authors have proven that ignoring one's career can greatly supress chances at success.

Is it the best book I ever read? No, but it did help me to focus my attention on skills I was utilizing, just not to my best advantage.

The Five patterns described in this book combined with the case studies, provide worthy guidelines for an extraordinary career. I was impressed with the specific information about each pattern, and used my highlighter pen several times (a great sign!)

I also recommend integration of Optimal Thinking into this equation as the mental tool to bring out the best in people - yourself, employees, affiliates and customers -- and to optimize your productivity and profitability. Today's competitive optimized marketplace is creating and supporting optimizers and is no longer hanging on to the old paradigm of managers and employees. I feel compelled to recommend Optimal Thinking: How to Be Your Best Self in addition to this great book.

The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers is the best book about you that you'll read this year. Written by James Critin and Richard Smith, both veterans of high-powered executive searches at Spencer Stuart, the book is a down-to-earth look at what separates the ordinary from the extraordinary in the business world. Critin and Smith have analyzed years of professional observations and over a thousand surveys from proven extraordinary executives and distilled their findings into five common denominators: The Five Patterns.

The great thing about the patterns is that they're not attributes. They're behaviors. The book wouldn't be worth too much, after all, if it simply said "extraordinary executives are all really smart." In fact, Critin and Smith argue the opposite: that intelligence isn't a great predictor of success. Instead, they isolate key behaviors common to most of the men and women they studied. One of my favorite patterns is "Overcoming the Permission Paradox." Critin and Smith note that truly great people take advantage of (or create) opportunities to empower themselves; you won't hear Lou Gerstner say "I was never given an opportunity to succeed."

Another key pattern is "Practice Benevolent Leadership." They note that extraordinary people don't climb to the top; they're carried there by the people who work for them (I've paraphrased). You're probably recognizing wisdom you already knew, here. The interesting thing about this book is that you'll see yourself in its pages: in some places you'll say "I do that!" and in others "I don't!" I found the fact that this book reached me so effectively to be very compelling. I found many lessons I could use in this book, and it made me look critically at a number of my behaviors, or lack of behaviors.

The fact that The Five Patterns comes with a lot of credibility helps it reach the reader. Critin and Smith have laced this book with examples, research, personal observations, interview excerpts and references. When they use an example, they show it as from an executive who's not only successful, but often a household name, and they credit him by name. I was excited by the fact that they had so much material directly from these "extraordinary executives" that came from interviews that were conducted specifically and exclusively for this book.

The Five Patterns is concise, credible, prescriptive and specific. And gratefully, it was very different from the same old reprocessed career advice you can get in a thousand other places. Page for page it's the most valuable book I've read this year, at the very least. I'm rating it five stars and I'd recommend it unconditionally to anyone in business that wants to spend some time nurturing his or her career.

Pros: The book is very well researched and has a lot of examples

Cons: Lacking in the 'how to' stuff The Bottom Line For those that are really on the verge of reaching their potential, it could boost you over the top. For the rest, go to the website at .....

James Citrin and Richard Smith have put together a 'guide for achieving success and satisfaction'. The book is 230 pages and each chapter provides one of the five 'patterns' recognized in the exhaustive research done for the book. Within each chapter, there are examples from successful executives, and some sub-points to further explain the pattern.

However, there is little explaining how to make yourself follow the pattern. For instance, the first pattern 'Understand the Value of You' sounds simplistic enough, and is supported by stories of executives that discovered their worth after having overlooked it before, but what if you think that you know the value of you, but really don't? That is, how is it that you are to know how valuable you really are in comparison to how valuable you think you are?

Obviously, the book must generalize to fit all the successful people into the model that successful careers follow five patterns, and not 156 patterns -- and the patterns are pretty general, such as 'Find the Right Fit'. The one useful pattern (and description is 'Overcoming the Permission Paradox', where the author does a good job of showing how we can limit ourselves by waiting for someone to say it's okay to do our jobs or something outside of our jobs.)

Mostly, though, the level of detail in the examples are distracting and I lost interest. With all that said, the most valuable part of the book is actually the appendices called the 'Stuart Spencer Job Survival Guide' and the 'Understanding Executive Searches...', which give insightful information on how to be successful in job interviews or moving forward in your current position. These actually provide the tools on getting ahead (or your foot in the door), and are probably worth the price of the book to keep around. Overall, I found the book to have a few nuggets of wisdom, but you had to mine for them.

A good book overall, I still would rate it only 3/5 because I felt it was mostly oriented towards the white collar professional and big money. It's 5 main concepts were broad enough to cover the important dimensions in career strategy without clouding them in details. This book reveals what the authors have concluded from their research in working with thousands of successful upper management types. Nonetheless, I felt like I got more out of "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership" because my weakness is in the area of leadership skills, but 5 Patterns also emphasises the importance of leadership skills. Both are worth reading.

THE BEST FIRST: This book did cover some core principles that I believe equate to success in multiple arenas of business, including non-profit or small business, that are well worth the time invested in reading it. Even though most of the 5 Patterns espoused have been discussed to death, the particular description of the 20/80 Principle of Performance was illuminating. That one gem, taken together with an overview perspective of equating your "value" to the organization (again - any organization) in real, bottom-line business terms (and numbers) I believe poses some tremendous insight for ANYONE, whether or not they aspire to the top rungs of standard Fortune 1000 business success. It was also of value to have seen these 5 core patterns connected together as an indicator of success - thus reiterating the credibility to each of them as something beyond "touchy-feely self-improvement."
NOW THE NOT-SO-GOOD: That having been said, I would have to say that for the most part, the whole direction of "5 Patterns" is very tilted toward a small percentage of the American workforce: those aspiring to the top executive levels in major corporations. Having been involved in a rather small (under 2 million per year in revenue), non-profit company for almost 20 years, I did not find much in common with the perceived aspirations of the intended reading audience. It did not really inspire me to focus upon the implementation of the 5 patterns, at least not from this particular angle. The various stories used as examples only magnified the differences in my path (or even my aspirations) and this elite echelon of executives. This seems to stem from the authors' perspectives of life. If you will take that with a grain of salt, or if you indeed fall into the intended audience parameters, there is meat in here for you!

Historically, have modern-day executives with extraordinary careers clawed their way to the top? As a group, have they manifested a pattern of ingratiating themselves to their superiors through sycophancy and obsequiousness?

The very fortunate answer for those of us seeking truly satisfying, inspiring careers is a resounding "no"!

Whether you're a job seeker or a company veteran, you will gain concise, practical insights about seemingly paradoxical behaviors and thinking that have fueled the upward trajectory of extraordinary executives. The five patterns are: (1) understanding one's worth and value in business; (2) practicing benevolent leadership with one's subordinates; (3) overcoming the permission paradox or overt restrictions set forth by the organization; (4) differentiating oneself using the "20/80 principle of performance"; and (5) finding the right long-term fit, in terms of one's career strengths, passion, and cultural affinities.

At first glance, it's easy for one to be cynical about any book that claims to understand and outline "success". This is particularly true of business books written with well-honed, self-congratulatory hindsight, such as the once-popular "Mean Business" by "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. (I'll assume you know what happened to him.)

In contrast, "5 Patterns" summarizes observations from over 2000 completed surveys, and profiles numerous superstar executives from widely varying business spectrums. The end result is that "5 Patterns" concisely identifies behaviors and thinking that all of us can strive to achieve--get this--without compromising who we are. In fact, the book's profiled executives must frequently overcome their organizations' conventional wisdom (and risk professional hara-kiri) to succeed.

Sure, we could all take risks and hope for the best. But what makes this book unique is that the authors profile executives who know how to adeptly balance all five patterns simultaneously and therefore achieve extraordinary success.

This is the most hopeful career book I have ever read. Mr. Citrin and Mr. Smith are recuiters for Spencer Stuart, and when I first started reading I thought the book might turn into a printed infomercial like many management books. Not so! This book presents the facts about how virtuous women and men move up in the world.

The book takes a very upbeat tone about your potential for success. If there is any infomercial quality about it, it is the obvious interest the authors have of working with great talent like you--but I think they really are looking for good people. They are anxious to encourage the nice guys and nice gals to aspire to greatness.

The best chapter in my opinion is about practicing benevolent leadership. With me they are preaching to the choir as I have drawn the same conclusions about promoting other people's best interests in a leadership role. They point out practical examples of those who succeed by this rule as well as the sad fate of those who violate it.

The other principles are excellent too, and they have a good combination of research and anecdotal evidence to back them up. I would not consider this to be a theory or opinion book, but more of a case study book. The authors have long experience observing executives first-hand, and in this book they distill their knowledge of how a large number of outstanding people moved up in the world. And the great thing is--all their advice is positive and edifying!

This is the one book that I have given to other people to help them in their careers. You ought to order a case and hand one out to everyone in your organization.