Don't Get Caught Working Too Hard, Too Fast
I saw it materialize before my very eyes. On an atypically sunny and warm morning in March, I sat on my front porch absorbing the sun, letting its heat revitalize after the long winter. Out of no where comes a dump truck speeding through my quiet, slow-paced neighborhood a couple miles south of downtown Milwaukee. I heard the behemoth trash transporter slow a touch, which forced my head to swivel to the left to catch a glimpse of the intersection where the truck would soon be turning. At the corner, on the street perpendicular to they truck's course was a carpenter's cargo van. 30 seconds earlier I saw the driver scurry out of Groppi's with a sandwich in hand, obviously in a rush to get back to the job site. Instantaneously, the reverse lights came on and the van leapt backward.
This is how most of us live our careers. We're so determined to get where we're going, where we are supposed to be, that we don't pay close attention to what is happening around us. Before we know it, there's a merger speeding through the neighborhood or a downsizing backing into the intersection.
Resounding a thunderous bang and the shrieks of a steel ton being played like an accordion, the dump truck had made that brisk right turn right into the back end of the reversing cargo van. And if we're not careful, we're bound to be struck just as quickly and affectingly by the consequences of reshuffling or restructuring of corporate jobs. Don't be the dump truck driver or the hurried carpenter, read I Didn't See It Coming to secure your job, and your future.
The authors of this book are three big-time mucky muck former executives from major corporations who have been confronted by the corporate firing line but managed to not only re-emerge with their jobs, but became even more knowledgeable and successful. Their goal is to teach us how to not get so engulfed by our work that we forget to do things that ensure we keep that work.
Corporate reality, unfortunately, is a political terrain. If we can't navigate this terrain, chances are that we'll find a pink slip on our lockers when mergers happen, when downsizing persists, when restructuring looms. These authors use their experience, plus knowledge gained by interviewing hundreds of executives that know the ins and outs of all the reasons people get blindsided, to help us learn how to correctly assess what is happening around us.
Do you know how to read a room? Do you know the importance of an exit strategy? Do you have any idea how to differentiate between colleagues? Have you learned how to use office politics to your advantage? These are all questions that nobody really wants to answer, but Corporations can be monsters, and office politics are part of the nature of the beast, so they absolutely must be answered.
This isn't a primer on how to pucker up to the bloated executive tooshies that hold the reigns to your future, it's a book that simply helps us do some little things that will give you advantages when it comes time for heads to roll.
If the dump truck driver had been driving a bit slower, a speed that would have allowed him more visibility and time to react at a partially blind corner, and if the carpenter realized that an extra 30 seconds away from the job site didn't make or break the job - his job - that sunny March morning could have been without accident. We could all benefit from slowing down to gain more visibility - more time and tools to properly react.
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