02/28/2018

Career Advice: Go Where You Can Add Unique Value

If things don't work out, do what you were going to do in the first place

When Stanford MBA's graduate, many of them want to stay in Northern California, and a lot of them do. Who can blame them? The weather is great, the area is booming economically, and there is lots of technological innovation going on. Most importantly, there are numerous other Stanford graduates in the area--so they can hang out with people much like themselves. Other graduates go into consulting, returning to firms that sometimes will pay for their (expensive) tuition if they stay for two years. Once again, they will be among people like themselves, with degrees from major business schools who often have similar life experiences. Research shows that similarity is an important basis of interpersonal attraction. Moreover, successful graduates have often achieved that success by following the rules. So they continue to follow the rules and pursue well-trod paths.

Simply put, Stanford MBA graduates, like many people from all over the world, find themselves doing a) what is sort of expected of them and b) following the crowd--succumbing to the enormous social pressure to do what everyone else is doing. Often following the crowd is wise. But for career success, it almost always is not.

As I teach in my Paths to Power class, people do better if they go to a place where they are not surrounded by numerous competitors who are quite similar to them. Much as a company would do in plotting its strategy, they need to go to places where they are relatively unique and where they can, therefore, add value that others can't.

Please select this link to read the complete article from LinkedIn.