1. The name Jacob is a pseudonym. To ensure anonymity, I used pseudonyms for all participants in my research studies. In addition, particular details of their lives, such as where they live or where they worked before the career change, have been altered somewhat. I use real names when I am citing from public sources.

2. Some examples of this approach include Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths (New York: Free Press, 2001); James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012); Bill George, Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

3. The “do good, be good” idea comes from Aristotle’s statement “These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions” (The Nicomachean Ethics), summarized as “We are what we repeatedly do,” in Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926).

4. Thinking follows action: self-perception theory posits that people infer their attributes by observing their freely chosen actions. See Daryl J. Bem, “Self-Perception: An Alternative Interpretation of Cognitive Dissonance Phenomena,” Psychological Review 74, no. 3 (1967): 183–200.

5. Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja, “Changing the Way We Change,” Harvard Business Review 75, no. 6 (1997): 126–139. Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja, Surfing the Edgeof Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business (New York: Crown Business, 2001).

6. David A. Jopling, Self-Knowledge and the Self (New York: Routledge, 2000).

7. D. Scott DeRue and Susan J. Ashford, “Who Will Lead and Who Will Follow? A Social Process of Leadership Identity Construction in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review 35, no. 4 (2010): 627–647; Herminia Ibarra, Sarah Wittman, Gianpiero Petriglieri, and David V. Day, “Leadership and Identity: An Examination of Three Theories and New Research Directions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Leadership and Organizations, ed. David V. Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

8. Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995).

9. Survey of 173 INSEAD executive students conducted in October 2013. Of the 173 participants, 80 percent were men and 20 percent were women; this matches the gender split of the population. The average age of the participants was 42.1 years. Of the participants, 46 percent were employed in general management functions with profit-and-loss responsibility, 31 percent were in functional management (e.g., marketing), and 12 percent were in project or team management. See Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hyperion, 2007).

10. Some of my early work on authenticity dilemmas is Herminia Ibarra, “Making Partner: A Mentor’s Guide to the Psychological Journey,” Harvard Business Review 78, no. 2 (2000): 146–155; Herminia Ibarra, “Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1999): 764–791. For my research on career change, see Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2003); and Herminia Ibarra, “How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career,” Harvard Business Review 80, no. 12 (2002): 40–48. For a discussion of leader development as identity change, see Herminia Ibarra, Scott A. Snook, and Laura Guillén Ramo, “Identity-Based Leader Development,” in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, ed. Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010).

11. Some of my early research on networks includes Herminia Ibarra and Steven B. Andrews, “Power, Social Influence and Sense Making: Effects of Network Centrality and Proximity on Employee Perceptions,” Administrative Science Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1993): 277–303; and Herminia Ibarra, “Network Centrality, Power and Innovation Involvement: Determinants of Technical and Administrative Roles,” Academy of Management Journal 36, no. 3 (1993): 471–501. A more recent discussion for a managerial audience is Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter, “How Leaders Create and Use Networks,” Harvard Business Review 85, no. 1 (2007): 40–47.

12. See, for example, Jon R. Katzenbach and Zia Khan, Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010); Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason, Boundary Spanning Leadership: Six Practices for Solving Problems, Driving Innovation, and Transforming Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010); and Herminia Ibarra and Morten T. Hansen, “Are You a Collaborative Leader?” Harvard Business Review 89, nos. 7–8 (2011): 68–74.

13. For a comprehensive treatment of each of the transitions managers encounter as they move up the leadership pipeline, see Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011); Markus Hazel and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41, no. 9 (1986): 954–969; and Linda A. Hill, Becoming a Manager (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2003).

14. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2000); David H. Maister, Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What’s Obvious but Not Easy (Boston: The Spangle Press, 2008).

15. Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994).

16. Joel M. Podolny, Rakesh Khurana, and Marya Hill-Popper, “Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership,” in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, ed. Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010).

17. John P. Kotter, Power and Influence (New York: Free Press, 2008).

18. Jack Welch quoted in Inc. (March 1995): 13.

1. For the classic study of how companies fall into competency traps, see Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing: 1997). For how people fall into competency traps, see Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hyperion, 2007); and Mark E. Van Buren and Todd Safferstone, “The Quick Wins Paradox,” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 1 (2009): 54–61.

2. Goldsmith and Reiter, What Got You Here.

3. For the classic work on self-efficacy, see Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy:The Exercise of Control (New York: Worth Publishers, 1997).

4. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology described in Abraham H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–396.

5. The difference between exploiting current competencies and exploring to gain new competencies is a classic trade-off in corporate strategy and individual learning. See James G. March, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” Organization Science 2, no. 1 (1991): 71–87.

6. The classic distinction was first developed by Abraham Zaleznik and popularized by John P. Kotter. Abraham Zaleznik, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” Harvard Business Review 55 (May–June 1977): 67–78; and John P. Kotter, A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management (New York: Free Press, 1990).

7. Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman, X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2007). The original research leading to this insight is Deborah Ancona and David F Caldwell, “Bridging the Boundary: External Activity and Performance in Organizational Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1992): 634–665.

8. Although BP eventually took a turn away from alternative energy under Tony Hayward’s tenure as CEO, the organization Cox built remains and continues to develop energy alternatives for BP. Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter, “Vivienne Cox at BP Alternative Energy”, Case 5473 (Fontainebleau: INSEAD, October 2007).

9. Ibid.

10. Herminia Ibarra and Cristina Escallon, “Jack Klues: Managing Partner VivaKi (C)”, Case 5643 (Fontainebleau: INSEAD, December 2009).

11. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, “To Lead, Create a Shared Vision,” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 1 (2009).

12. James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012); Burt Nanus, Visionary Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).

13. Roger L. Martin, “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning?” Harvard Business Review 92, nos. 1–2 (2014): 78–84; Roger L. Martin, “Are You Confusing Strategy with Planning?” Harvard Business Review Blog, May 2, 2014; Roger L. Martin, “Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy,” Harvard Business Review Blog, June 12, 2014.

14. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, Pierre Vrignaud, Elizabeth Florent-Treacy and Konstantin Korotov, “360-degree feedback instrument: An overview,” INSEAD Working Paper, 2007. My research indicates that while everyone falls short on envisioning, women are more likely than men to rate a shortfall on this dimension. See Herminia Ibarra and Otilia Obodaru, “Women and the Vision Thing,” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 1 (2009): 62–70.

15. Amy J. C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinger, “Connect, Then Lead,” Harvard Business Review 91, nos. 7–8 (2013): 54–61.

16. Jay A. Conger and Rabindra N. Kanungo, Charismatic Leadership in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1998).

17. James R. Meindl, “The Romance of Leadership as a Follower-Centric Theory: A Social Constructionist Approach,” Leadership Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1995): 329–341; and Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? What It Takes to Be an Authentic Leader (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2006).

18. Herminia Ibarra and Jennifer M. Suesse, “Margaret Thatcher,” Case 497018 (Boston: Harvard Business School, revised May 13, 1998).

19. Herminia Ibarra and Cristina Escallon, “David Kenny: Managing Partner VivaKi (B),” Case 5643 (Fontainebleau: INSEAD, December 2009).

20. Melba Duncan, “The Case for Executive Assistants,” Harvard Business Review, 89, no. 5 (2011).

21. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013), ch. 4. For the last few years, the research organization Catalyst has been surveying MBA graduates from top business schools to understand what career pathways lead to greater success. They found that 62 percent of the people they surveyed described obtaining stretch and high-profile assignments as having the greatest impact on their careers.

22. TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas under the slogan “Ideas Worth Spreading.” The format is usually short (eighteen minutes or shorter) talks. For an explanation of the TED format, see Chris Anderson, “How to Give a Killer Presentation,” Harvard Business Review 91, no. 6 (2013): 121–125; and Jeremey Donovan, How to Deliver a TED Talk: Secrets of the World’s Most Inspiring Presentations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).

23. Joseph L. Badaracco, Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 1997), 58–61; Herminia Ibarra and R. Barbulescu, “Identity as Narrative: A Process Model of Narrative Identity Work in Macro Work Role Transition,” Academy of Management Review 35, no. 1 (2010): 135–154.

24. See, for example, Annette Simmons, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins: How to Use Your Own Stories to Communicate with Power and Impact (New York: AMACOM, 2007).

25. Annette Simmons, “The Six Stories You Need to Know How to Tell,” in The Story Factor (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

26. John P. Kotter, “What Effective General Managers Really Do,” Harvard Business Review 77, no. 2 (1999): 145–159.

27. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013).

28. The classic text on how to make room for what is important but not urgent is Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (New York: Free Press, 2004).

1. For a review of the research on how networks affect careers, see Herminia Ibarra and Prashant H. Deshpande, “Networks and Identities: Reciprocal Influences on Career Processes and Outcomes,” in The Handbook of Career Studies, ed. Maury Peiperl and Hugh Gunz (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2007), 268–283.

2. Herminia Ibarra, “Network Assessment Exercise: Executive Version,” Case 497003 (Boston: Harvard Business School, revised July 31, 2008).

3. This research is summarized in Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (2001): 415–444. In research jargon, the narcissism principle is called homophily, the tendency for discretionary relationships to form among people who share a common status or social identity. Research on the prevalence of homophily in social relationships also shows why it can be so hard to network professionally across race and gender lines. See, for example, Herminia Ibarra, “Homophily and Differential Returns: Sex Differences in Network Structure and Access in an Advertising Firm,” Administrative Science Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1992): 422–447.

4. See, for example, Nigel Nicholson, Executive Instinct: Managing the Human Animal in the Information Age (New York: Crown Business, 2000). Nicholson says that only by acknowledging that our brains are “hardwired” for survival can we understand behavior and “manage” our instincts.

5. Monica J. Harris and Christopher P. Garris, in First Impressions, ed. Nalini Ambady and John J. Skowronski (New York, NY: Guilford Publications), 147–168.

6. The propinquity effect is a concept proposed by psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back to explain that the more frequently we interact with people, the more likely we are to form friendships and romantic relationships with them. In a 1950 study carried out in the Westgate student apartments on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology the authors tracked friendship formation among couples in graduate housing; the closer together people lived, even within a building, the more likely they were to become close friends. Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back, “The Spatial Ecology of Group Formation,” in Social Pressure in Informal Groups: A Study of Human Factors in Housing, ed. Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963).

7. Ibid. The propinquity effect works due to mere exposure, i. e., the more exposure we have to a stimulus, the more apt we are to like it, provided the stimulus is not noxious.

8. Stanley Milgram, “The Small-World Problem,” Psychology Today 1, no. 1 (1967): 61–67.

9. Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine 357, no. 4 (2007): 370–379. See also their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009).

10. This number comes from Morten Hansen, “The Search Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge Across Organization Subunits,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1999).

11. Individuals’ mobility is enhanced when they have a large, sparse network of informal ties for acquiring information and resources. But since stakeholder expectations may diverge, they also benefit from a consistency of messages they get from a dense core of key people who agree on what they should be doing. Joel M. Podolny and James N. Baron “Resources and Relationships: Social Networks and Mobility in the Workplace,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (1997): 673–693.

12. Boris Groysberg and Deborah Bell, “Case Study: Should a Female Director ‘Tone It Down’?” Harvard Business Review Blog, July 29, 2014.

13. James D. Westphal and Laurie P. Milton, “How Experience and Network Ties Affect the Influence of Demographic Minorities on Corporate Boards,” Administrative Science Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2000): 366–398.

14. Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

15. Joel M. Podolny and James N. Baron, “Resources and Relationships: Social Networks and Mobility in the Workplace,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 5 (1997): 673–693.

16. Sociologist Mark Granovetter examined the importance of weak ties in his classic 1974 book Getting a Job, in which he found that most people obtained their jobs through acquaintances, not close friends. Mark S. Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–1380.

17. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Wenger coined the phrase communities of practice to describe groups that share a common body of professional expertise and identify as members of that community.

18. Using a Facebook database that included 950 million people, Eman Yasser Daraghmi and Shyan-Ming Yuan showed that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people, even those who work in rare jobs, is not 6 but 3.9. “We are so close, less than 4 degrees separating you and me!” Computers in Human Behavior 30 (January 2014): 273–285.

19. Patrick Reynolds, “The Oracle of Bacon,” website, accessed August 27, 2014, http://oracleofbacon.org/.

20. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman makes this point well. See Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (New York: Crown Business, 2012): 110–115.

21. Kathleen L. McGinn and Nicole Tempest, “Heidi Roizen,” Case 800228 (Boston: Harvard Business School, January 2000; revised April 2010); Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?” The New Yorker, July 11, 2011.

22. Chris’s story is told in more detail in Peter Killing, “Nestle’s Globe Program,” Cases IMD-3-1334, IMD-3-1334, IMD-3-1336 (Lausanne, Switzerland: IMD, January 1, 2003).

23. Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press; updated edition, 2009), explains how and why the tendency of children to take cues from their peers (and not their parents) works to their evolutionary advantage.

24. David Brooks, “Bill Wilson’s Gospel,” New York Times, June 28, 2010. See also David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (New York: Random House, 2011), 270–271.

25. For an accessible review of research on the power of reference groups, see Harris, The Nurture Assumption.

26. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead Trade; reprint 2011).

1. To use the phrase popularized by Harvard Business School professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George, in Bill George and Peter Sims, True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).

2. There are more than twenty thousand books with the word authentic in the title on Amazon.com.

3. People born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11.3 jobs between age eighteen and forty-six (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth Among the Youngest Baby Boomers, July 25, 2012). On the “protean career,” see Douglas T. Hall, “Self-Awareness, Identity, and Leader Development,” in Leader Development for Transforming Organizations: Growing Leaders for Tomorrow, ed. David V. Day, Stephen J. Zaccaro, and Stanley M. Halpin (Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2004): 153–176.

4. Mark Snyder, Public Appearances, Private Realities: The Psychology of Self-Monitoring (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1987).

5. Martin Kilduff and David V. Day, “Do Chameleons Get Ahead? The Effects of Self-Monitoring on Managerial Careers,” Academy of Management Journal 37, no. 4 (1994): 1047–1060.

6. For how tacit knowledge is shared, see Ikujiro Nonaka, “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation,” Organization Science 5, no. 1 (1994): 14–37.

7. E. Tory Higgins, “Promotion and Prevention: Regulatory Focus as a Motivational Principle” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, ed. Mark P. Zanna (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998): 1–46.

8. “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind … [W]e may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups.” William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 294.

9. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41, no. 9 (1986): 954–969.

10. I’m grateful to Claudio Fernández-Aráoz for passing on this insight, which he got from Egon Zehnder’s chairman, Damien O’Brien.

11. In this usage, authenticity conveys moral meaning about one’s values and choices. A person, for instance, is said to be authentic if he is sincere, assumes responsibility for his actions, and makes explicit value-based choices concerning those actions and appearances rather than accepting pre-programmed or socially imposed values and actions.

12. See Bruce J. Avolio and William L. Gardner, “Authentic Leadership Development: Getting to the Root of Positive Forms of Leadership,” Leadership Quarterly 16, no. 3 (2005): 315–333; and George and Sims, True North.

13. Robert G. Lord and Rosalie J. Hall, “Identity, Deep Structure and the Development of Leadership Skill,” Leadership Quarterly 16, no. 4 (2005): 591–615, argue that a new leader’s central concern is emulating leadership behaviors to project an image of himself or herself as a leader that others will validate and reward. Expert leaders develop an increasing capacity to pursue internally held values and personalized strategies in service of goals that include others.

14. In light of her research in psychology, Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), explains how introverts are capable of behaving like extroverts when it is in the service of a purpose that matters to them.

15. A person’s identity is partly defined by how a person’s social entourage views him or her. Roy F. Baumeister, “The Self” in The Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th ed., ed. Daniel T. Gilbert, Susan T. Fiske, and Gardner Lindzey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 680–740.

16. Amy Cuddy, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” TED talk, 2012, www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are.

17. Jennifer Petriglieri, “Under Threat: Responses to and the Consequences of Threats to Individual’s Identities,” Academy of Management Review 36, no. 4 (2011): 641–662.

18. Based on my interview with Cynthia Danaher after reading Carol Hymowitz, “How Cynthia Danaher Learned to Stop Sharing and Start Leading,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 1999.

19. See Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? What It Takes to Be an Authentic Leader (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2006), for a great discussion about managing distance and dilemmas of authenticity in general.

20. See Deborah H. Gruenfeld, “Power & Influence,” video presentation, Lean In website, accessed August 27, 2014, http://leanin.org/education/power-influence/.

21. Charlotte Beers, I’d Rather Be in Charge: A Legendary Business Leader’s Roadmap for Achieving Pride, Power, and Joy at Work (New York: Vanguard Press, 2012).

22. Charlotte Beers, “Charlotte Beers at 2012 MA Conference for Women,” video, posted April 16, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxjH0zYswzM/ The speech is based on her book, I’d Rather Be in Charge: A Legendary Leader’s Roadmap for Achieving Pride, Power and Joy at Work (New York: Vanguard Press, 2012).

23. Susan M. Weinschenk, How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the Art and Science of Persuasion and Motivation (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2013).

24. Bernhard M. Bass, The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications (New York: Free Press, 2008); Gary A. Yukl, Leadership in Organizations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2010).

25. See Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

26. The Lake Wobegon effect is the human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others. It is named for the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, where, according to Garrison Keillor, “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all children are above average.”

27. Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: Free Press, 1991): 77.

28. Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux, The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2002).

29. Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenhauer, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5, no. 4 (2001): 323–370.

30. People faced with unfamiliar role demands may have a harder time benefitting from negative feedback because they may lack the ability to assess independently the validly of the feedback they receive. As well, when people are insecure about their status, as neophytes are apt to be, they often adopt a defensive stance that reduces their ability to objectively assess negative information. Pino G. Audia and Edwin A. Locke, “Benefitting from negative feedback,” Human Resource Management Review 13, (2003): 631–646.

31. Edgar H. Schein, “Kurt Lewin’s Change Theory in the Field and in the Classroom: Notes Toward a Model of Managed Learning,” Systems Practice 9, no. 1 (1996): 27–48.

32. Laura A. Liswood, The Loudest Duck: Moving Beyond Diversity While Embracing Differences to Achieve Success at Work (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2009).

33. Erin Meyer, The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014); Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 83–86.

34. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Leadership in a Globalizing World,” Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, ed. Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010).

35. For recent reviews of research on gender and behavioral expectations, see Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely, and Deborah Kolb, “Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers,” Harvard Business Review 91, no. 9 (2013): 60–66; and Robin Ely, Herminia Ibarra, and Deborah Kolb, “Taking Gender into Account: Theory and Design for Women’s Leadership Development Programs,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 10, no. 3 (2011): 474–493.

36. Anna Fels, Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives (New York: Pantheon, 2004).

37. Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (New York: Crown Business, 2012).

38. The original definition of the term identity work comes from David A. Snow and Leon Anderson, “Identity Work Among the Homeless: The Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities,” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 6 (1987): 1336–1371.

39. See Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2004), for a discussion of the difference between “plan and implement” and “experiment and learn.”

40. Herminia Ibarra and Jennifer Petriglieri, “Identity Work and Play,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 23, no. 1 (2010): 10–25.

41. Ibid.

42. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); James G. March, “The Technology of Foolishness,” in Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, ed. James G. March and J. P. Olsen (Oslo, Norway: Universitetsforlaget, 1976).

43. Mary Ann Glynn, “Effects of Work and Play Task Labels on Information Processing, Judgments, and Motivation,” Journal of Applied Psychology 79, no. 1 (1994): 34–45; and Leon Neyfakh, “What Playfulness Can Do for You,” Boston Globe, July 20, 2014, www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/07/19/whatplayfulness-can-for-you/Cxd7Et4igTLkwpkUXSr3cO/story.html.

44. Researchers argue that work and play represent different ways of approaching, or frames for, activities rather than differences in the activities themselves. See, for example, Gregory Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” American Psychiatric Association, Psychiatric Research Reports 2 (1955): 177–178; Stephen Miller, “Ends, Means, and Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 1 (1973): 87–98.

45. Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2012).

46. As cited in ibid.

47. Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey and Andy Fleming, “Making Business Personal,” Harvard Business Review 92, no. 4 (2004): 45–52. Christ Argyris further argued that executive’s ability to learn shuts down precisely when they need it most due to their defensive reactions to avoid embarrassment or threat and avoid feeling vulnerable or incompetent. Chris Argyris, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn,” Harvard Business Review 69, no. 3 (1991): 99–109.

48. Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007).

49. Salman Rushdie, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991, ed. Salman Rushdie (New York/London: Penguin, 1992), 430–439. Psychologist Tim Wilson’s research shows how much our narratives shape the ways in which we interpret what happens to us; changing the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives, even in small ways, is one of the most powerful tools for personal change; Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2011).

50. Robert J. Thomas, Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn from Experience to Become a Great Leader (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2008); Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose between Right and Right (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 1997).

51. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1991).

52. Charlotte Beers, “Charlotte Beers at 2012 MA Conference for Women,” video, posted April 16, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxjH0zYswzM.

53. Dan McAdams, “Personality, Modernity, and the Storied Self: A Contemporary Framework for Studying Persons,” Psychological Inquiry 7, no. 4 (1996): 295–321.

54. Herminia Ibarra and Kent Lineback, “What Is Your Story?” Harvard Business Review 83, no. 1 (2005): 64–71.

55. Hetain Patel and Yuyu Rau, “Who Am I? Think Again,” TED talk, TEDGlobal 2013, June 2013, www.ted.com/talks/hetain_patel_who_am_i_think_again.

56. Bruce Lee, quoted in Bruce Thomas, Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit (Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books, 1994), 44.

57. Bruce Lee’s “Be like water” quote is as follows: “Be like water making its way through cracks … [A]djust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves … be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend” (Bruce Lee, “Be Water [Longstreet],” video, posted December 26, 2012, http://youtu.be/bsavc5l9QR4?t=19s).

58. Kleon, Steal Like an Artist.

1. “Lost enough to find yourself” (Robert Frost, “Directive”).

2. George’s story comes from Ruthanne Huising, “Becoming (and Being) a Change Agent: Personal Transformation and Organizational Change,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, August 10, 2006.

3. Beginning with the end in mind was one of the seven habits in Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (New York: Free Press, 2004). The bestseller Primal Leadership also tells people to begin their change journey by identifying their “ideal self”; Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, Primal Leadership (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2002).

4. See Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2004), for a description of the transition process. See also William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change (Philadelphia: Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2009).

5. Laurence B. Mohr, Explaining Organizational Behavior (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982).

6. Edgar H. Schein, Career Dynamics: Matching Individual and Organizational Needs (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

7. Alex Williams, “New Year, New You? Nice Try,” The New York Times, January 1, 2009.

8. We only break a habit when we react to old cues with new routines that get us rewards similar to those we got with the old routines. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012).

9. For a great discussion of how this works with entrepreneurs, including himself, see Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, “Plan to Adapt,” in The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (New York: Crown Business, 2012), 47–76.

10. For a great review of the latest thinking on goal setting, see Susan David, David Clutterbuck, and David Megginson, Beyond Goals: Effective Strategies for Coaching and Mentoring (Aldershot, UK: Gower Pub Co., 2013).

11. For more on the know-do-be of leadership development, see Scott Snook, Herminia Ibarra, and Laura Ramo, “Identity-Based Leader Development,” in Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, ed. Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2010), 657–678.

12. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between leader development and adult development, see David V. Day, Michelle M. Harrison, and Stanley M. Halpin, An Integrative Approach to Leader Development: Connecting Adult Development, Identity, and Expertise (New York: Routledge, 2008).

13. Most studies and people interviewed cited five to seven career changes in professional life. See, for example, “Seven Careers in a Lifetime? Think Twice, Researchers Say,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2010.

14. See, for example, Gail Sheehy, New Passages (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).

15. J. E. Marcia, “Development and Validation of Ego Identity Status,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 3 (1966): 551–558.

16. Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). For a more accessible version of his theory, see Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009).

1. “Life … is really a search for our own identity,” Charles B. Handy, Myself and Other More Important Matters (New York: Amacom Books, 2008).

2. Steve Jobs, Commencement address at Stanford University, June 12, 2005, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html.