Executive Portfolio Life: Strategies to Maximize and Leverage Your Career Equity

Most executives do a terrible job of career planning. If this is you, welcome to the club. This book will enable you to solve that problem and help you gain a clear vision for your future, all the way through to the place where you are no longer working a full-time role. I call this Executive Portfolio Life™, or EPL for short.Executives are unique when it comes to career planning. I learned that in 1987 with my first client, John Paget. He was the CEO of Intelogic Trace, a 4,000-employee company providing electronic equipment installation and support services, with IBM as one of its biggest customers.At that time, I was CEO of MAI, a boutique organizational design and development consultancy that I would later sell to Organizational Design and Development. We were in the process of exploring this brand-new industry called executive coaching, but none of us had heard of executive career coaching before. We had been hired by Intelogic Trace only to do team building and change management.Intelogic Trace was struggling, and John needed to do a reduction in force (RIF). One day, as I met with John to discuss our engagement, he informed me that he was about to RIF almost half of his employees. That was a shock, but what happened next was amazing. As soon as the RIF was executed, John called me up and told me that he had put himself on the list. He was now unemployed.“You RIFed yourself? Why?” I thought, Don’t you know that you need a job to get a job?“I could not fire 2,000 employees and keep my job,” was his answer.Wow. “So, what are you going to do?”John’s answer changed my life. “I know you are a writer. Can you help me write my résumé?”“Sure,” I said.And so, the journey began. I not only worked on his résumé, but helped him with every aspect of his career transition, culminating in him landing a CEO role for Access. Access was bought by Jack Welsh, then CEO of General Electric, who renamed it GE Access. Later, I helped John go to work for Jack. John kept me as his coach for the next twenty years, and the rest is history.The point—executives don’t treat their careers the same way as non-executives. It was a very bold move to leave a job not having one. But had John stayed, he would have taken Intelogic Trace through bankruptcy and would have never met Jack, never worked for GE, and never become the president of Synnex. A bunch of dominos all fell in the right way to open up John’s career. I had no clue what I was doing back then, and so take no credit for this brilliant set of career moves. What I do take credit for is following the advice of an early mentor, John Casey, who told me to “stick with the winners.” I did follow Casey’s advice and stuck with John for the rest of his career.What I learned from sticking with winners like Paget is that a great executive career must be intentionally created. This is unique to the executive world. In lower-level positions, you can rely on others more. As an executive, you cannot allow others to manage your career. Companies always have a career plan for you: Invest yourself fully in helping the company grow. Do all it takes. Make it happen. Get results. That is a great plan for the company. But what about you, the executive? Does this get you where you want to go? Most times, that question is just not asked.Executives spend most of their time driving results. Either they are focused on hitting the numbers—OKRs, MBOs, KPIs and the alphabet soup of performance metrics—or they are scrambling to get the next job. Very rarely do they take time to reflect on and contemplate their careers, design where they are going, and develop a roadmap for getting there. If this describes you, then this book will be the perfect quick read. Written by a CEO, this direct, no-fluff style will give you what you need to better manager your career in a short, easy to consume executive briefing. Highly actionable, it will immediately help your career.