On Strategize to Win

This book is probably more interesting to people far more involved in the professional world than I am, especially in large companies. Carla A. Harris offers a guide to developing a career, with an eye to promotion and climbing the corporate ladder, and her anecdotes give the distinct sense that her own experience is in big workplaces with many departments — should I go into sales, finance, marketing; what roles did most C-suite executives hold before their current one? Coming from an education and nonprofit background, I found it genuinely illuminating. In mainstream education, career progression tends to be fairly linear: in higher ed you start, if you’re lucky, as an assistant professor on the tenure track, rise to associate after tenure, then to full professor, and the more ambitious move on to dean and other administrative posts. K–12 is similar — a teacher is hired, gains tenure, and can rise to dean, assistant principal, principal, and, for the most fortunate, district superintendent.

The professional world is far messier. Titles change from company to company, and Harris urges us to think about progression before taking a job: if marketing hits a hard ceiling somewhere, steer clear, or prepare an exit by watching competing firms. She stresses, too, that it’s crucial to keep pace on compensation, since salary is an easy-to-read code for your worth — more true of the private sector than the public or nonprofit worlds, though refusing to push for a higher salary in a nonprofit can be read badly elsewhere. She frames it around two kinds of currency, performance and relationship. We build performance currency by doing our jobs well, limiting mistakes, and making up for errors with fresh effort, and it’s most valuable when we routinely go above and beyond; when people say they want their work to speak for itself, they’re banking on performance currency. But it isn’t enough — you can do outstanding work and never be noticed. Relationship currency is about your network, your willingness to play workplace politics, your connection to the movers and shakers; work is competitive, and a worker without allies falls behind those who have them. The two together — relationship currency seeming the more important — are what let us advance, whether by calling in favors or making the sort of claim Harris jokingly renders as, “I deserve a promotion because I effortlessly managed a portfolio of $10 pentillion. If you don’t believe me, ask the CEO of Google and the CFO of Blue Cross Blue Shield.”

Harris rightly notes that we can’t work well in jobs at odds with who we are, and she sketches a few profiles — “the good soldier,” “the yes man,” “the arguer” — so we can lean on our strengths. All of them matter to a functioning workplace, though some fare worse in changing circumstances: the arguer is invaluable in an organization building cutting-edge projects, since they can point out the flaws, but much less so under an insecure manager who fears competition and criticism. I learned a lot here, precisely because so much of it was foreign to me; it was a good way of making sense of systems and networks in an unfamiliar world, and I expect it’ll be a useful tool as I enter the next chapter of my life.