3.1 The patterns behind successful careers

For more than five years, Gillian Zoe Segal, a New York author, has interviewed many successful celebrities in the USA, among them the financial investor Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest people, as well as Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg financial data services and former mayor of New York City. In her interviews with them, she was particularly interested in what lay behind the facade of their success stories, what pitfalls had to be avoided, what hurdles overcome. In her intriguing book Getting There, she points to seven critical factors which her 30 interview partners had in common.

They know and take into consideration their “circle of competence”. They know their strengths and weaknesses and take these into account when choosing a profession and shaping their career. So, apart from a healthy amount of self-confidence, self-reflection and a small amount of modesty we need to recognise that we are not equally good at all things. Segal’s interviewees had recognised the skills that set them apart from others. At times this was a very wearisome process. They also compensated for their own weaknesses or the qualities they were missing through a good team.

They make use of their passion and have stamina. According to Segal’s interviewees, being successful has a lot to do with dedicating yourself completely to one thing, inspiring people, overcoming obstacles, swallowing rejections and failures, and dealing with your own fears and insecurities. To have the energy to keep this going for many years, you need stamina and you have to be dedicated to what you are doing. Seen from the outside, this might look like an obsession because it means always doing your best, not just going by the book. Striving for money alone or trying to fulfil social conventions or other people’s wishes is not a good source of motivation for long-term success.

Their career paths are flexible. Success has less to do with unwaveringly pursuing some internal master plan, than with taking advantage of the more or less subtle opportunities life has to offer. Having too rigid ideas about your own career path might lead you to miss unique opportunities. In hindsight, Michael Bloomberg only founded his financial data company because he was sacked from the investment bank Salomon Brothers.

They create their own opportunities. None of the interviewees hung around waiting to be discovered by someone. They did not pursue conventional career paths, but forged their own. They sometimes even adopted rather unconventional methods to create opportunities by taking conscious risks and by being willing to make large sacrifices in order to be seen by superiors, business partners and customers, so that they could get into business.

They call everything into question. Segal’s interviewees all shared the quality of not sticking to conventions and established structures, but ignoring them. Just because something has always been done that way does not mean that it is the best way to do things. Thus, Gary Hirshberg, the inventor of the first organic food shops in the 1970s, took a total of nine years to be successful with his concept. Initially, the market simply was not ready for organic food. So, he first had to spend a lot of time preparing the ground for what was later to become a huge industrial sector.

They don’t let themselves be deterred by fear of failure. Many of the interviewees were raised in rather poor or difficult circumstances. This resulted in them becoming independent early on and recognising that you can’t do anything without money. So, early on in their lives, they started doing vacation and evening jobs and worked hard to support their families. Many sold products or services door-to-door and had to face rejection and resistance at a young age. Others were subjected to traumatic experiences, such as the Vietnam war, in their youth. Experiences such as these shaped their lives. They gave them another perspective on life. They instilled in them a more relaxed attitude towards taking risks and accepting their vulnerability, and took away the fear of failing in their professional lives.

They are resilient. This seems to be the most important quality of all. All the successful people Segal interviewed over the years had had to deal with a number of severe setbacks. They had lost their jobs, gone bankrupt, been dropped last-minute by investors etc. And yet they had somehow always managed to get back on their feet. The interviews showed clearly that, to a large extent, success is about getting up more often than you are knocked down by life.

This list of characteristics of successful people and their careers is, of course, not complete, and rather US-influenced, but it is a good starting point to question your own motivation and mindset. As we have seen, luck plays a key role too, of course, in other words the state of being “in the right place at the right time”. However, an individual must also be able to grasp an opportunity when it arises. The emotional support people get from their partner and family also plays an important role when it comes to dealing with setbacks. The more a manager has advanced in his or her career, the more the whole family has to carry this commitment too, as the price to be paid is considerable.

3.2 Becoming comfortable with the unknown

Sir Ken Robinson, a British art professor and author, has aptly described the importance of mental agility for success in life in a highly acclaimed 2007 TED talk. He claims that children who enrol into school today, will, after completing schooling, education and studies, encounter a professional world that will have changed numerous times before they will retire in about 65 years.

The background is the ever-increasing speed of fundamental changes due to technology and other factors, and the associated increase in uncertainty, complexity and unclear situations. Concealed behind all the dynamic and sometimes rather chaotic developments in society and the economy, many people still hope to find a predictable order that can help them to cope. After all, human beings are always seeking to understand and handle the environment. But it is precisely this which is becoming increasingly difficult to do, as a glance at the last 70 years shows. Following the end of World War II, the world was divided into a two-front system, known as the “Cold War”. There were two main geopolitical camps: the USA and the USSR, with their respective allies, who aligned themselves – politically, militarily and economically – towards their respective hegemonic power. The enemy images on both sides were clear, making it relatively easy to predict future developments. Following the collapse of the USSR, the two-front system has developed into a four-front system.

This phenomenon is often described in the literature by the acronym VUCA (see Table 3.2.1). Where does this term come from? At the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, future generals are trained in strategy and warfare. There, at the end of the 1990s, an acronym was coined to reflect an increasingly complex geopolitical world order: VUCA. The abbreviation stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and was initially used mainly by the college lecturers there. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the new term was ultimately also adopted by management pioneers, who recognised the increasing complexity, not only in the military and power-political realm, but also in the development of the globalised economy.

Table 3.2.1 The meaning of VUCA

The VUCA phenomenon did in fact have a considerable impact on how companies are managed today. Through the rise of new business models, mega-trends such as globalisation and digitalisation are increasingly leading to fundamental changes in the market environment that have the potential to marginalise established companies within no time at all. Figure 3.2.1 illustrates this by means of the time span needed by groundbreaking innovations to spread in the Western industrialised nations. Whilst the spread of the telephone took 120 years, the television only needed 35 years in order to achieve the same level of market penetration. Mobile telephones achieved the same in less than 20 years.

This development leads to a reduced focus on long-term strategies and to a short-sighted management approach, where the next crisis is already seen to be lurking around the next corner. In such a volatile and insecure environment, marked by increasing restructuring and market adjustments, managing employees takes on a new meaning for a company’s competitiveness. In future, those managers will be most successful who secure the trust of their employees and bind them emotionally to themselves and to the company’s goals.

Richard Sennett is an American professor of sociology who today teaches at the London School of Economics. In his book The Culture of the New Capitalism Sennett describes how, over a long period of time, companies initially appear to be stable, predictable systems that are both an iron cage and a home to their employees. Security and a livelihood have been provided for many decades in exchange for discipline, subordination to hierarchies and the provision of services. Since the end of the last century, this rigid order has given way to a growing flexibility, marked by a decline in stability and predictability.

The reason for this, in Sennett’s view, is the altered role of the capital market. After World War II, the world economy was governed by the Bretton Woods system, which coupled the exchange rates of the world’s leading economies via a band of exchange rates to the US dollar, which in turn had a fixed exchange rate to the gold standard. This system gave the participating economies stability, but it ultimately failed in 1973 as a consequence of the USA’s current account surpluses. The dollar could no longer be sufficiently safeguarded by the gold standard. After the collapse of the global monetary system, vast amounts of capital became available worldwide, which sought short-term interest rates. As a result of progressive globalisation and the new possibilities offered by the emerging communication technologies, this ‘impatient’ capital flowed worldwide into corporate bonds, with the aim of making short-term profits from the rising share prices. The consequence was a more intense global networking of financial interests. Revenues were now hardly expected to come from dividends, which meant that it was no longer the stability of companies that seemed desirable, but maximising their share prices to generate greater financial returns. Since this development, the capital market system, along with the associated evaluation by financial analysts, determines the quarterly performance of listed companies. This short-term competition for the favour of investors and analysts leads to widespread irrational behaviour on the markets, allowing a company’s share prices to rise, for example, if it cuts back on R&D staff or restructures for no apparent reason. This type of behaviour, which is incomprehensible from an entrepreneurial point of view, allows the share price, and thus the market value of a company, to rise, which effectively prevents a company from being taken over.

Companies that do not bow to this logic are undervalued in this new financial system and consequently end up being bought up by other companies that stick to the rules of the game. Therefore, in order for a company to retain its share price and ensure its long-term attractiveness as an investment object, the company must undergo constant change by the management. A change of strategy, restructuring, acquisitions, portfolio adjustments and downsizing, coupled with a good story for the market, have thus become an end in itself and a key feature of good corporate management. Long-term changes, such as the restructuring of a company as a result of a major change of strategy, are hardly possible anymore. The consequences of these worldwide developments, coupled with ongoing globalisation and the increasing spread of modern communications technologies, shape the everyday work of managers today. High time and performance pressure, unconditional mobility, long working hours, permanent reachability, a constant feeling of uncertainty and a neglect of private life are the consequences of this.

But the VUCA phenomenon also affects the way careers are shaped. Our entire education system is geared to conveying knowledge. During the 12 to 13 years we spend in school, plus about 5 years of university studies and initial training, we mainly learn detailed knowledge which can, if necessary, be easily looked up or which will, in any case, be completely obsolete in 5 to 10 years’ time. What are missing are the practice-based transmission of relevant experiences, and the ability to learn independently and to understand complex relationships. It is this ability, in particular, which is of central long-term importance when it comes to adapting to an ever more frequently changing market and leadership environment.

If you compare the post-war generation with current teenagers, it can indeed be found that the half-life of knowledge has decreased dramatically over the last 70 years. One reason for this is the fact that growth in technology works on the basis of network laws and thus exponentially, while people tend to postulate mostly linear relationships when predicting future developments. Against this background, it would be much more important to foster the joy of learning itself as opposed to the mere learning of facts.

In the management literature, this continuous learning skill is also known as mental agility. In our work with managers we repeatedly encounter situations in which the manager’s previously acquired tools are no longer sufficient or suitable to tackle the new challenges that come with the new career step. Instead, these previous strengths sometimes even end up being a weakness. While specialist expertise and the capacity to act might previously have been important to underpin a manager’s credibility, they might well be a hindrance in the next step up the ladder where more empowerment – i.e. the delegation of responsibility – and fewer details are required to be able to tackle the dramatic rise in responsibility. The further a manager progresses up the hierarchy, the more his performance depends on others – a further complexity which needs to be learned. Figure 3.2.2 gives further examples of new skills which need to be acquired and mastered when progressing up the hierarchy.

Learning new things or skills entails leaving the comfort zone, and thereby questioning one’s own experience. It means making mistakes due to lack of experience, feeling incompetent for a while – and, of course, it also includes the possibility of failure. Anyone who has ever tried to learn Mandarin or Tango Argentino surely knows what that means.

3.3 Characteristics of successful managers

In preparation for their acclaimed book Great by Choice, Jim Collins – an American management expert and former professor for entrepreneurship at Stanford University – and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen – professor for management at the business schools Berkeley, Harvard and INSEAD – investigated a number of companies which performed outstandingly, that is, at least 10 times better than comparable companies in the same sector. They asked themselves: Are these companies managed differently? Which leadership factors increase companies’ efficiency, thus enabling them to be more adaptable and competitive in a globalised economy, with dynamics that are progressively harder to predict? What distinguishes the top management of companies that are outstandingly successful from others that have developed less favourably? The following criteria were set up to identify the relevant companies:

• newly founded companies that have not yet had time to establish themselves on the market;

• companies that were successful, even though their framework conditions were volatile, unstable and complex, and could not be influenced by them;

• companies that, over a period of at least 15 years, showed a more positive development than the stock market as a whole and their respective sectors.

Table 3.3.1 Successful companies examined within the scope of a study conducted by Collins and Hansen

From an initial list of over 20,000 companies, Collins and Hansen finally selected seven companies according to these criteria. These companies were then compared with the whole market and with companies in the same industry. This study involved examining innumerable documents from the respective corporate histories as well as conducting interviews in order to identify common patterns relating to management style, decision-making, risk tolerance, innovation etc. from a total of 6000 years of corporate history (see Table 3.3.1).

Collins and Hansen’s study found that the company bosses of the most successful companies were by no means particularly courageous and venturesome visionaries. In actual fact, they were no more venturesome, bold or visionary, nor any more creative, than their comparable counterparts. And it wasn’t that they were just more fortunate than their less successful colleagues either. In fact, fortune and misfortune tended to be pretty much on a par among all the companies investigated.

However, the most successful company bosses were more disciplined in the pursuit of their goals and tended to take a more empirical and cautious approach. Both researchers found that the top managers of the analysed companies that were the most successful stood out from the others because of the following characteristics (see Figure 3.3.1).

Accepting the circumstances: Successful managers are aware that they are exposed to permanent uncertainty and that they are neither able to control nor precisely predict major incidents happening in the world around them.

Locus of control: The thought that coincidental occurrences and other factors beyond their control could have an impact on the achievement of their goals never crossed the minds of the most successful managers. They always saw the responsibility for both the fate of the company and their own destiny as being in their own hands.

Solution orientation: The toughest managers were prepared, in spite of all the adversities, to put all their strengths into focussing on their goals. They had an unbending will to achieve this, which − in the majority of cases − also led to success.

Anticipating difficulties: The managers of the top seven companies had one attribute in common: they continued to grow in both economically bad and also economically favourable times, and to see sudden, unexpected changes, crises and threats as normal or even probable. Due to their almost paranoid alertness, they were better prepared to deal with sudden changes in their environment than other managers.

Value-orientation & discipline: The managers with the best company performance distinguished themselves by a strong set of values and the intention to bring their own actions into balance with their values. This discipline served them as an inner compass, ensuring that they did not drift off course, even in the face of very uncertain surrounding factors.

Inner autonomy: The top seven managers all had a high level of inner autonomy when it came to assessing the present situation and deriving possible solutions from it. In doing so they neither based themselves on predominant opinions, nor did they primarily orient themselves to what other people did or didn’t do. By relying on their own fact- and experience-based assessment of the situation, they were able to make bold, creative decisions. They were also willing to completely call these unconventional solution strategies into question if their assessment of the situation required this. This often rather non-conformist approach, which deviated considerably from the conventional course of action, frequently earned them harsh criticism, yet this did not make them change their minds.

Meaning: The most successful managers felt themselves to be committed to a higher purpose, and they invested all their energy and ambition into accomplishing a mission or into benefitting the company or society, with this never being solely for their own benefit. Their conviction that their efforts also served a higher purpose shielded them against the consequences of difficulties they had to face.

The long-term success of top managers is, therefore, not merely an accident, but can very frequently be attributed to certain factors. Of course, a company’s success does not solely depend on the people running it at the top. After all, the actual work is performed by the hundreds or even thousands of executives and employees within the company’s hierarchy. However, in top management, far-reaching directional courses are charted and decisions taken, whose soundness is frequently only recognised years later. Avoiding serious mistakes in decision-making and getting employees on board are, therefore, in themselves already major steps towards success. This is confirmed by the insights of a number of well-known managerial personalities.

3.4 The magic recipe

What evidence, if any, is there supporting the existence of a magic recipe for long-lasting career success? What career choices contribute to success and which are detrimental? In 2016, the social media platform LinkedIn, today the most influential online network in the business world, used a big-data approach to answer this question. A research team around Guy Berger looked at the careers of 459,000 members globally in the time from 1990 to 2010. Of these about 64,000, roughly 14%, made it to the top of organisations. The team was looking for factors which contributed to this impressive career success. What they found is surprising. The classical factors educational background, gender, work experience and career transitions only correlated about 14% with career success.

Here are some other factors that actually play an even greater role.

Generalist over expert: Working across several job functions, such as manufacturing, marketing or finance, provides a well-rounded understanding of business operations that is needed to become successful as an executive. In the LinkedIn study, each additional job function was found to be worth the equivalent of three years of work experience.

Stay in your industry: While working across functions correlates positively with career success, changing industries has a slightly negative impact upon moving up the corporate ladder. This is most probably due to time lost by climbing up the learning curve yet another time and in establishing new relationships and networks.

Education matters but it has to come from the right school: Conventional wisdom would suggest that formal education is important. While this was found to be true by the study, other aspects like the brand strength of a university played an important role, too. To illustrate this: while completing an MBA at a normal university yielded an equivalent of five years of relevant work experience, the same MBA degree coming from one of the top schools was found to boost careers with the equivalent of thirteen years of work experience.

Location matters: The study found that for those who work internationally, being in New York City increased the chances of becoming an executive, while being employed in Houston or Washington, D.C., decreased them. Globally, Mumbai and Singapore served as career accelerators, while São Paulo and Madrid had the most negative effects. Most probably this is due to the higher concentration of company headquarters in those regions. Another important factor is the nature of the industries that are prevalent in these cities, e.g. the financial services industry tends to be more hierarchical than the high-tech industry, which is why it is very important to be in New York when you want to make a career in the financial sector.

Gender (still) matters: As I described in Section 2.4, The gender gap, it is not to our total surprise that the LinkedIn research team found that men still have a slight advantage in making it to the top of the house. Men with the same qualifications and who were similar in terms of the other factors mentioned here needed an average of 3.5 years of work experience less than comparable women to reach the executive level.

To illustrate the study findings, imagine a person who is male, has an undergraduate degree from a top international school and a non-MBA Master’s, lives in London, and has worked in two different job functions for two companies in two industries. According to the research team his probability of becoming an executive is 15% (see Table 3.4.1).

Table 3.4.1 Career decisions

Had this person made all of the choices highlighted in Table 3.4.1, his probability of becoming an executive would have increased from 15% to a total of 81%. Figure 3.4.1 illustrates the findings.

3.5 Four aspects for the right path to the top

One professional who is particularly well-acquainted with the careers of successful managers is a headhunter. It is not uncommon for this type of consultant to accompany managers over several decades in their careers. If you ask representatives of this profession for universal advice, you will usually be given the rather vague response: “It all depends…” This vagueness is not a result of their unwillingness to offer advice, but rather because it really does depend on a number of factors. Each person and their career just function differently. But, as it is so often the case, here too there are universally applicable insights which will help you to rethink your own career plans. These are part of our career coaching methodology. The basic underlying questions are what you want for yourself, what you are able to do, what gives you meaning and what is needed by the market. Long-term professional success is most likely to be achieved if as many as possible of the following four aspects are addressed (illustrated in Figure 3.5.1).

3.6 Choosing your environment: manager or entrepreneur?

Whether senior vice president, managing director or executive board member, part of the salary you obtain in a company, irrespective of its size, is paid as a result of associating your own name and title with a more or less well-known brand, and thus with its social significance as well as its associated role authority. This is also known as status.

And yet another particularity of having a permanent position is that, for many, it comes with the advantages a large company can offer: a certain degree of consistency, plannability and, by extension, security. What is the price of this? You have to abide by the company’s rules, which always entails a certain amount of external control and thus also of arbitrariness. Furthermore, the path up the different rungs on the career ladder is long, tough and very uncertain.

If you choose to be self-employed, things are different, but there are risks here too. Entrepreneurs choose between the risk of failure or remaining meaningless their whole life long. They also choose to work around the clock for many years in order to build something out of nothing. The prize beckoning them is the small chance of achieving great financial success and popularity, like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ralph Dommermuth (United internet) or the Samwer brothers (Rocket internet), and a large degree of self-determination and influence. There is no magic formula when it comes to this fundamental decision either. Not everyone has the same degree of willingness to take risks and put up with stress or the same capacity to manage a complex organisation and orchestrate it as they see fit. According to the logic of risk and reward, risky investments generate higher profits than their low-risk counterparts. The same evidently also goes for long-term successful careers. Here, too, taking higher risks is rewarded with greater monetary gains. The American business magazine Forbes published a list of the most successful people since 1987. It is no coincidence that among the top 10, only entrepreneurs are to be found with estimated assets between 47.5 billion dollars (tenth place) and 86 billion dollars (first place):

• Bill Gates, USA: Microsoft

• Warren Buffett, USA: Berkshire Hathaway

• Jeff Bezos, USA: amazon

• Amancio Ortega, Spain: Inditex, Zara

• Mark Zuckerberg, USA: Facebook

• Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico: Telmex, América Móvil

• Larry Ellison, USA: Oracle

• Charles G. Koch, USA: Koch Industries

• David H. Koch, USA: Koch Industries

• Michael Bloomberg, USA: Bloomberg.

The situation is no different in Germany. However, the list of the 500 richest Germans, listed annually in Manager Magazin, is largely dominated by entrepreneurial dynasties with an estimated family fortune of between 9.2 billion euros (tenth place) and 33 billion euros (first place):

• Family Reimann: Reckitt Benckiser, Coty, JAB Holding, Jacobs Douwe Egberts

• Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten: BMW, Altana, Delton, SGL Carbon

• Dieter Schwarz: Lidl, Kaufland

• Georg and Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler: INA Schaeffler, Continental

• Families Albrecht and Heister: Aldi Sued, Muelheim

• Family Theo Albrecht Jr. and Babette Albrecht: Aldi Nord, Essen

• Family Otto: Otto Versand, ECE

• Klaus-Michael Kuehne: Kuehne+Nagel, Hapag-Lloyd

• Heinz Hermann Thiele: Knorr-Bremse, Vossloh

• Family Wuerth: Wuerth Group.

By comparison, the wages of executive board members of the listed companies appear rather modest. According to the DSW study, the average annual salary of executive board members of the 30 DAX companies in 2017 was 3.4 million euros. Their US colleagues earn significantly more – 17.1 million euros. With an average of around six years in their position as executive board members, this time at the pinnacle of their careers is not sufficient to earn anything close to the wealth accumulated by the most successful entrepreneurs.

But money, or wealth to be more precise, is not everything as they say. Power, creative freedom and popularity are not to be underestimated either and there is every hope of finding this in start-up companies. Reflecting the idea of being mystical creatures that stand for what is pure and good, successful start-ups these days are known as unicorns. Not profits, but the share value is taken as an evaluation criterion, as many of these companies do not make a profit, but are nevertheless seen as being very promising by the market and the media.

Here are some of the best-known and highest-valuated start-ups which currently make the hearts of investors beat faster:

• Uber (CEO: Dara Khosrowshahi): transportation services

• Didi Chuxing (CEO: Chéng Wéi): transportation services

• Xiaomi (CEO: Lei Jun): consumer electronics

• AirBnB (CEO: Brian Chesky): apartment rentals

• Palantir (CEO: Peter Thiel): enterprise software

• WeWork (CEO: Adam Neumann): workspace sharing

• Lufax (CEO: Greg Gibb): finance marketplace

• Meituan-Dianping (CEO: Wang Xing): group buying portal

• Pinterest (CEO: Ben Silbermann): image-based social network

• SpaceX (CEO: Elon Musk): space transport services company.

The crunch question is not, therefore, easy to answer. Last but not least, personality traits such as the need for stability also play a central role. But the influence of role models and the values lived and conveyed by them should not be underestimated either. Hence, a whole generation of managers was influenced by icons like Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. Today, the idols of many budding managers are instead called Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. The understanding of success also differs between managers and entrepreneurs. The research I carried out for this book showed that the self-employed and entrepreneurs define success via criteria such as

• doing something meaningful, or

• creating something that is lasting,

while employed managers tend to see aspects such as

• financial independence and

• economic security

as success factors.

Yet, in addition to the basic career decisions discussed above, there is also another aspect which defines professional success today.

3.7 The role of good leadership

What is the role of good leadership, something which is considered rather a soft skill? There is evidence that good leadership and getting employees emotionally on board lead to success for a company and its leader in the long term. It was for this reason, too, that the Bertelsmann media group, one of the world’s biggest media corporations based in Gueterloh, Germany, assessed its 220 subsidiaries according to the performance and quality of their managers. Its main focus was to determine the extent to which the employees were able to identify with their company’s goals and with their management. The results were set against the company’s profits. This clearly showed that good leadership is closely linked to high workforce identification and a good corporate result (see Figure 3.7.1). Obviously, long-term success can, in fact, be attributed to the managers’ inner stance and conviction, and to their leadership style.

Another piece of recent research surfaced even more striking insights. In 2017, Michael Frese and Mona Mensmann from the University of Lueneburg, Germany, published a study which was conducted together with the World Bank, headquartered in Washington D.C. In 2013, the research team started studying 1500 small entrepreneurs in Togo, Western Africa. Their companies averaged a payroll of about three employees with annual earnings of a little over $2000. About one-third of them did something like accounting and only 5% had a budget for any given year.

Using a classical set-up, the 1500 companies were evenly divided into three randomly defined groups. The first group served as a control group. 500 entrepreneurs continued muddling along as usual; another group of 500 company owners received a traditional business administration training like they would get in any MBA. The third group of people received a psychologically based training that taught them basic leadership skills like setting goals, how to deal with criticism and setbacks, and how to develop more resilience.

Two and a half years later, the leaders who had received the leadership and resilience training had increased their sales by 17% and their profits by a roaring 30% compared to the control group, which had not been trained. Also, they had developed and launched more products than their two peer groups.

Even more interesting, however, was the fact that the group of entrepreneurs who had gone through the MBA-like business training barely showed any progress over the control group. While business knowledge did not hurt their progress, learning about leadership and resilience proved to be the true clincher when it comes to economic success.

3.8 The helping hand: a mentor

Do you have a mentor? Many successful people we work with report that they have been fortunate enough to have had great mentors who were willing to take a bet on them, providing them with meaningful opportunities for growth. However, even if a senior person is willing to support you, these relationships don’t just work by themselves. A lot of factors have to fit like the chemistry, for example. It starts with having the courage to reach out to a senior executive and daring to ask them. Don’t expect them to ask you. However, even if this is accomplished, it also requires the willingness of a more junior person to be open to the advice, support and new opportunities a more senior person is offering, and that they do not just see this opportunistically as a shortcut to advancement in one’s career. It requires investing energy and commitment into such a relationship, making it interesting, for both sides to make time for it in their ever-busy schedules.

In our experience, having a mentor can be essential in many ways:

• Expertise: Ideally, you can consider your mentor as your role model and get inspired by his or her success. Knowing what professional skills are required for advancing in your career is one of the major benefits that you receive. You can then focus on the skills you are lacking, develop them over time and enhance your career.

• Networking: A mentor may have more professional and social contacts that may help in establishing your career. However, it requires a lot of trust in the mentee before these doors open up because it is always the reputation of the more senior person which is at stake.

• Feedback: By providing supportive and constructive feedback in areas like interpersonal skills, communication, technical knowledge, leadership skills and social relationships, a mentor can bring about drastic change in a mentee’s career, helping him or her to avoid career traps based on some dysfunctional behaviour patterns or even career derailers.

• Orientation: A mentor can give you a better idea about the culture of your organisation and the unspoken and implied rules that often are more important than the official ones.

• Balance: Sometimes mentors develop into a kind of friend over time. As a result, they may also guide their protégées in their personal life. As we will see later in this book, it is really important to maintain a reasonable balance between your professional and personal life, and a good mentor will help you do that.

• Emotional support: If you are lucky, you can also share the frustrations and issues you are facing inside or outside your organisation. Often, a trusted person listening to you attentively is all that is needed. However, it is important to also share your successes with your mentor.

3.9 Your approach to networking makes a difference

While mentors clearly play an important role for sustainable success in your professional life, what role, if any, does your network, i.e. the amount of personal relationships in general that you have, play for your success? Back in 2001, Hans-Georg Wolff and Klaus Moser, from the University of Erlangen in Germany, launched the first longitudinal study, with about 200 participants over a period of three consecutive years, to measure the link between the nature of your network and success measures like salary and career satisfaction. They showed that a larger personal network correlates with a higher salary, a higher growth rate of a person’s salary over time as well as increased career satisfaction. Furthermore, the findings suggested that maintaining a strong network inside the organisation where you are employed is more effective for professional success than a network outside of the organisation.

The work of Ronald Burt from the University of Chicago Booth confirms these findings and adds another dimension to them: the structure of your personal network. For many years, Burt has studied the ways that personal networks create competitive advantages in careers. His findings even go a step further. He claims that no other factor is more important in predicting a person’s career success than the nature of her network. However, he concludes that simply having a large network of people you know is not enough. The research team around him found evidence that the most effective networking strategy, in terms of professional success, is on the one hand to be an interface between different networking clusters that are not naturally related to one another. On the other hand, it seems to be advisable to leverage this interface position to actively foster the exchange of ideas and creation of new links between people within these otherwise unrelated network clusters. According to Burt, the ability to be a hub for this cross-pollination of ideas and the connection of different people increases the social value of an individual and his likelihood for success (see Figure 3.9.1). Hence, Burt differentiates between open and closed relationship networks.

If you are part of a closed network, you are exposed to people who already know each other, whereas in an open one, you serve as the link between people from different companies, societal groups or nationalities who do not know each other (see Figure 3.9.2). The more your network has an open structure, the more you are exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking and seeing the world. And the more you leverage these contacts by means of mutual introductions and the creation of synergies between members of different clusters, the better it is for your professional success over time. In contrast, people who are part of a closed network like a clique, according to Burt, are exposed to the same ideas and mindset over and over again and so no synergies or cross-pollination can materialise.

Unarguably, the ability to network effectively is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to advance in your career and attain sustainable success in life. How about your network?

3.10 The formula of success

As we have seen so far, there are different ways of defining success. All in all, it is a combination of objective factors such as money and status, as well as subjective factors like time for family and personal growth. However, the exact proportions differ from person to person. It is this right mix which allows the individual to define his or her current position in life as successful. Furthermore, we have seen that the ingredients for achieving this equilibrium change over time.

We have also seen that there are certain factors that correlate with the likelihood of a person being successful in their life. Some of them are hard or impossible to influence. In Section 2.5, The role of warm relationships, we have seen the importance of being given loving attention by your parents during childhood for your future success. Just like the social class you happen to be born into and your gender, this happens to be outside of your control but it has powerful implications, as I showed in Section 2.2, The importance of your upbringing. As we have also seen in Section 2.6, The old question: nature or nurture? certain personality traits like sociability, stress-resistance, assertiveness, perseverance and impulse control play an important role, too. However, by definition your personality set-up, which is a function of your genetic code and your experiences during the first couple of years in life, is outside of your sphere of influence, too. As I showed in Section 2.8, The role of your IQ, your level of intelligence also plays a certain role for career success but the correlation is not strong. As long as a certain threshold value is given, more is not necessarily better, unless you want to excel in academia. However, also your IQ can’t be changed just like that. Most certainly, also luck plays a major role as I have laid out in Section 2.9, Is it only luck? Being at the right place at the right place, doing the right thing is key for success as we have seen in the example of Alex Atzberger. As we all know, luck can – fortunately or unfortunately – not be forced. What can be influenced though, is the degree of preparation and mental readiness enabling the optimal response to lucky coincidences.

We then looked at the factors which correlate with sustainable success and which can in fact be influenced by you. Through Gillian Zoe Segal’s interviews with highly successful people we have seen in Section 3.1, The patterns behind successful careers, that dedication, passion and stamina are important to create opportunities where others see none. However, it is at least as crucial to be aware of your circle of competence and to be ready to complement your weak spots by teaming up with others, which is a key leadership competence. Other aspects focused more on resilience. A high degree of agility was amongst these, combined with a tendency to question conventional wisdom and to think independently instead. According to Segal, key resilience aspects like high levels of frustration tolerance and perseverance were amongst the highest-ranking factors in order to master the inevitable critical career situations. More evidence regarding the importance of mental agility for professional well-being in a VUCA world was discussed in Section 3.2, Becoming comfortable with the unknown.

In Section 3.3, Characteristics of successful managers, I showed that the findings of Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen confirm the importance of key resilience aspects as a condition for success. This also includes the acceptance of circumstances, focusing on solutions rather than on problems, and taking full responsibility for your own destiny. Of equal importance are the ability to anticipate difficulties, having a strong focus on values and meaning, and inner autonomy and self-discipline.

The LinkedIn research discussed in Section 3.4, The magic recipe, revealed that successful careers are also shaped by the choices we make, for instance regarding the type of education, career steps and locations we choose. The choices we make also contribute to the skills and experiences we acquire which are essential, too. Another type of choice we make are our relationships. It takes effort, focus and time to build these, a special kind of relationship being the one with a mentor, as I described in Section 3.8, The helping hand: a mentor. Also, the size and nature of your network play an important role for success as we have seen in Section 3.9, Your approach to networking makes a difference. Building and maintaining your personal contacts and capitalising on these relationships belong to the career choices we make.

The importance of a good set of individual competencies, values, meaning and market demands was discussed in Section 3.5, Four aspects of the right path to the top. Part of this cultural set is also about choosing the right type of career as we have seen in Section 3.6, Choosing your environment: manager or entrepreneur?

Finally, as we have seen in Section 3.7, The role of good leadership, long-term professional success correlates strongly with good leadership skills and a high degree of resilience.

However, there is also a dark side. If we want to understand professional success we must not forget to analyse what makes managers stumble. Different factors bring the career trajectories of high-potential managers to a grinding halt, especially when amplified by critical career situations. In Chapter 5, The most dangerous career traps, I will discuss these career derailers, which have the potential to cause some spectacular career fatalities.

These are the factors contributing to sustainable professional success, which everyone can actively influence, but how are they linked? Well, formulas might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they do at least get to the crux of the matter. When setting up such a formula it makes sense to focus only on the factors that are based on actual behaviour, i.e. on aspects that can be influenced. Based on the foregoing summarised findings of this book, I would like to contend that long-term professional success behaves in line with the following formula:

Let’s recap the exact meaning of the individual terms.

Dedication: Being passionate about a cause is of fundamental importance. This is more than just motivation. What I mean is rigour, persistence and relentlessness in pursuing a project or business idea, for instance. It is the crazy amount of time and effort which you put into your work that eventually creates opportunities where others do not see any. Let’s use a car as a metaphor. In this case the equivalent of dedication would be the engine.

Skills: Interpersonal and leadership skills are of crucial importance as are professional skills, and having the relevant experience and specialist knowledge. In the case of a car this would be the gearbox.

Choices: The type of education you have had and your career decisions, i.e. how long you stay in a particular function, company or industry, play an important role. Another aspect is the relationships you entertain. Going back to the car metaphor, this would be the steering.

Dedication + Skills + Choices: This term combines everything that pushes you forward and gives you direction.

Cultural fit: A Formula 1 race car will not be successful when it comes to a race through the desert like the rally Paris–Dakar. However, on a high-speed track, it is hard to beat. With the right team, a charismatic visionary might be a very successful entrepreneur. However, if he is employed as a manager in a large corporation, in which he has to try to work his way up through the career echelons, he is likely to fail. It is also important to find a match for your own values and for what your environment (e.g. the market or the company) needs.

Derailers: Certain destructive personality traits that surface under great pressure have the potential to bring careers to a grinding halt if they are not kept in check through adequate self-management. These derailers include excessive arrogance and distrust towards others. The more these derailers determine visible behaviour, the more likely they are to impede long-term success. It is a bit like a car with a huge engine and rear drive. If you are not careful in certain situations like on winding, slippery roads and do not slow down, you are most likely to find yourself in the ditch sooner or later.

Resilience: If you are not able to embrace change and withstand setbacks, failures and periods of crises, then your dedication, skills and choices won’t get you very far. As we have seen in Section 1.2, Success means overcoming critical career situations, crises and critics will inevitably surface on the path to success. These hostile encounters have to be dealt with constructively. The more resilient you are, the more buffer capacity you have to absorb setbacks and the more likely you are to succeed. Staying with the car metaphor, think of resilience as the chassis which gives stability and as the suspension which buffers away the impacts of adverse road conditions.

Bibliography

Anonymous; Startup Companies Valued at One Billion U.S. Dollars or More by Venture-Capital Firms Worldwide, as of October 2017, by Valuation (in Billion U.S. Dollars); Statista, New York, USA, 2017.

Bennett, Nathan; Lemoine, G. James; What VUCA Really Means for You; Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, USA, 2014.

Berger, Guy; How to Become an Executive; LinkedIn, Mountain View, USA, 2016.

Burt, R. S.; Structural Holes; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, USA, 1992.

Collins, Jim; Hansen, Morten T.; Great by Choice; Harper Business, New York City, USA, 2011.

Drath, Karsten; Resilient Leadership: Beyond Myths and Misunderstandings; Taylor & Francis, Abingdon-on-Thames, UK, 2016.

Goldsmith, Marshall; What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful; Profile Books, London, UK, 2008.

Jobs, Steve; Stanford Commencement Address; Stanford, USA, 2005.

Kail, Eric G.; Leading in a VUCA Environment; Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, USA, 2010.

Kroll, Luisa; Dolan, Kerry A.; Forbes 2017 Billionaires List: Meet The Richest People On The Planet; Forbes, New York, USA, 2017.

Lewis, Michael; Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game; W. W. Norton, New York City, USA, 2003.

McCall, Morgan W.; Lombardo, Michael M.; Morrison, Ann M.; The Lessons of Experience, How Successful Executives Develop on the Job; Free Press, New York, USA, 1988.

Nesshoever, Christoph; Die reichsten Deutschen – Familie Reimann verdraengt BMW-Erben; Manager Magazin, Hamburg, Germany, 2017.

Netta, Franz; Partizipation, Gesundheit und wirtschaftlicher Erfolg, Neue Analysen und Erkenntnisse zum Gesundheitsmanagement; Helm Stirlin Institut, Heidelberg, 2007.

O’Connor, Roisin; People Who Read Books Live Longer Lives, Study Says; The Independent, London, UK, 2016.

Robinson, Ken; Do Schools Kill Creativity?; TED, www.ted.com, USA, 2007.

Schoenherr, Katja; Erfolg ist eine Frage der Energie, Unternehmen meistern Krisen, wenn die Mitarbeiter mitziehen. Nur wie?; Zeitverlag: Die Zeit, Hamburg, Germany, 2011.

Segal, Gillian Zoe; Getting There; Abrams, New York, USA, 2015.

Sennett, Richard; The Culture of the New Capitalism; Yale University Press, New Haven, USA, 2006.

Sonnenfeld, Jeffrey A.; Ward, Andrew J.; Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound after Career Disasters; Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, USA, 2007.

Thorborg, Heiner; Kann man Unternehmertum trainieren? Ja, aber nicht mit BWL-Wissen; Manager Magazin, Hamburg, Germany, 2017.

Various; Studie zur Vergütung der Vorstände in den DAX- und MDAX-Unternehmen im Geschäftsjahr 2016; Deutsche Schutzvereinigung für Wertpapierbesitz e.V., Duesseldorf, Germany, 2017.

Verfuerth, Claus; Debnar-Daumler, Sebastian; Auf der Überholspur ausgebremst; Rundstedt, Duesseldorf, Germany, 2015.

Wolff, Hans-Georg; Moser, Klaus; Effects of Networking on Career Success: A Longitudinal Study; University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, 2008.