指尖阅读—你的生涯你做主（四）

WHY THE START – UP OF YOU

With change come new opportunities as well as challenges. What’s required now is an entrepreneurial mind-set. Whether you work for a ten-person company, a giant multinational corporation, a non-for-profit, a government agency, or any type of organization in between-if you want to seize the new opportunities and meet the challenges of today’s fractured career landscape, you need to think and act like you’re running a start-up your career.

Why the start-up of you? When you start a company, you make decisions in an information-poor , time-compressed, resource-constrained environment. There are no guarantees or safety nets, so you take on a certain amount of risk. The competition is changing; the market is changing. The life cycle of the company is fairly short. The conditions in which entrepreneurs start and grow companies are the conditions we all now live in when fashioning a career. You never know what’s going to happen next. Information is limited. Resources are tight. Competition is fierce. The world is changing. And the amount of time you spend at any one job is shrinking. This means you need to be adapting all the time. And if you fail to adapt, no one – not your employer, not the government – is going to catch you when you fail.

Entrepreneurs deal with these uncertainties, changes, and constraints head-in. They take stock of their assets, aspirations, and the market realities to develop a competitive advantage. They craft flexible, iterative plans. They build a network of relationships throughout their industry that outlives their start-up. The aggressively seek and create breakout opportunities that involve focused risk. They tap their network for the business intelligence to navigate tough challenges. And, they do these things from the moment they hatch that nascent idea to every day after that – even as the companies go from being run out of a garage to occupying floors of office space. To succeed professionally in today’s world, you need to adopt these same entrepreneurial strategies.

They are valuable no matter your career stage. They are urgent whether you’re just out of college, a decade into the workforce and angling for that next big move, or launching a brand-new career later in life. Companies act small to retain an innovative edge no matter how large they grow. Steve Jobs called Apple the “biggest start – up on the planet”. In the same way, you need to stay young and agile; you need to forever be a start – up.