Rules of the Game: Discover, Learn, Invent The Art of Speeding Up Your Career

By Sumit D Chowdhury

How do you succeed in creating a fast-tracked career? How do you make it an enjoyable journey?
Approach your career as if it is a game and you are its star player. Rules of the Game helps you take control of your career by being aware and continuously prepared for changes and opportunities. This book will also help you to discover, learn, and invent your own rules for managing your career.

Rules of the Game empowers you to have an enjoyable career journey without trudging through life fearing change, failures, politics and uncertainty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9789384052973

Book preview

Author

Preface

Ever since I saw the Oscar-winning movie, Life Is Beautiful, by Roberto Benigni, I have come to appreciate how everything we do in life is akin to a game. I have also realized that anything in life can be made interesting and enjoyable if we consider it a game, while making an attempt to comprehend and learn the rules that govern the game. While we are going about our daily activities, we sometimes fail to notice a pattern in the steps, which we take over a period of time. Someone who is avidly watching us, can understand this pattern and deduce a set of rules that could explain the pattern in our moves. Most of our learning comes from understanding of such patterns and internalizing those.

This method of systematic studying of any concept, over the time or over a number of subjects while aiming to find a pattern, is used in all scientific experiments which have led to acclaimed discoveries. In this book, I have applied this method to understand the importance of early development of certain concepts to help propel long-term career acceleration.

Once you realize that career management is a game, you have to go about accustoming yourself to the rules of that game. Unfortunately, most people do not think that managing careers is a game and therefore, do not invest in learning the rules. There lies the first issue of people trudging through their daily existence fearing life, fearing change, fearing politics, fearing competition, fearing failure and all the while underestimating themselves and not investing enough in overcoming each of these fears. If they chose to see the larger picture, they would envision the rules that create a pattern and rules that govern the change in these patterns.

The second issue is that sometimes these rules are learnt after their due date. For example, you learn what it means to be a cool teenager, when you are already 20 something. You learn how to be a successful youth, after your early 30’s have set in. You realize how much you ‘could have’ done in your 20’s and 30’s, upon entering the threshold of your 40’s. This book is an attempt to bring forth the career experiences and regrets of those in their 30’s, 40’s and so on, in a bid to help the youth, who are currently joining the workforce to anticipate the patterns and use that knowledge to fast-track their careers without making the commonly made mistakes and stand prepared for the foreseen hurdles. Once you have learnt the rules of the game, you can go about mastering it to conquer your innate fears pertaining to your career and subsequently help others understand those rules as well.

The third issue is that most people are not aware of the rules of their ‘own’ game. They have read many books and articles about what it takes to succeed but have spent very little quality time, introspecting about their own self, to know how to apply the acquired wisdom in any given situation. Even if they learn how to act in certain situations, they are devoid of the understanding to anticipate the reactions from the immediate environ that surrounds them. There are no short-cuts. You have to seek the internal truth about yourself. However, you can reduce the learning time, by being prepared.

There is no definite age of any career commencing. For some it begins immediately after high school while for others, it begins after graduation. After successfully finding a job, you either go through a rigorous training module or are directed to perform some tasks which enable hands-on learning. Unless you are an entrepreneur, you are tempted to assume that someone else has a master-plan, which you are part of and that you shall be taken care of, eventually. Over the time, you realize that everyone undoubtedly has a plan which is centered around them and definitely, has no place for you to be in the center. It may take many years to realize this or rather accept this. My definition of mid-life crisis is, when you finally realize the above parable and you decide to dissect yourself in a bid of self-discovery. You then try cleaning your muddy vision to ensure that you spend the rest of your life on your own terms. The purpose of this book is to guide you to clear your vision while finding and defining yourself faster.

In the early years of thinking about one’s career, people either make a dash to complete their educational formalities or plan to acquire some extra relevant degrees. Very few people at that age, are level headed to steer their boat towards their destination with a sense of furious dedication and relentless passion. The majority, as is observed, is clueless and usually without a planned strategy. You can plan and anticipate one quick career move but you cannot plan your career graph with certainty. Doing so, would be extremely sub-optimal and similar to living a life with blinders on. However, having a general strategy and direction is essential. Rigorous planning serves as a distraction and restricts you from creating and seizing the opportunities, which might cross your path.

Conscious planning and effective harnessing of spare time in the pursuit of achieving long-term post-career goals is rather indispensable. The delay in attaining this goal is directly proportional to the amount of time wasted. Most people fail to realize that they can actively work for only 30–40 years of their life and the remaining 30 plus years are that of retirement from your main career. If proper investment of finances, time, skill sets and activity patterns are not done, you will find living independently with dignity, to be an uphill task. It is therefore, essential to take up a leisure pursuit or a cause, which can become a career or serve a passion in your latter years.

This book communicates some simple concepts that will help formulate your ‘own’ rules of the game of career management. The concepts discussed here are my experiences and insights and those gleaned from spending quality time with certain successful professionals, possessing stellar careers. The research also included speaking to scores of executives who are mid-career professionals. Their regrets of early career experiences also provide incredible insights. These are captured in the anecdotal; ‘I wish I knew’ boxes, interspersed through the book. Each chapter addresses a particular issue and the need to manage it. The chapters will take you through some very simple yet, powerful set of the concepts and ways to internalize these in your own unique manner to create your own rules. Not everything that you read would be applicable to you. But whatever you choose shall get retained as an integral part of your subconscious mind. As you juxtapose this learning into your active game of career management, you will definitely see yourself scaling to newer heights in your endeavors, alongside leading a content life. This self-awareness will set you truly free.

The Renaissance Man

Foreword

By Prof. Dipak C. Jain

Ex-Dean INSEAD—France, The INSEAD Chaired Professor of Marketing

Ex-Dean of Kellogg School of Management, USA

Today’s education system, offers students a structured program, focused on gaining skills that are economically relevant. There is value to this approach, certainly. Yet, this academic experience rarely prepares a person for assuming leadership roles. Most of the schools, do not teach the ‘rules of the game’; knowledge that can help you rise to positions of leadership and impact more quickly within an organization.

Sumit Chowdhury’s book aims to help by offering a framework for greater self-reflection and professional success.

After you join a new organization and become familiar with the day-to-day challenges, there is still another hurdle to confront—this is the divide between the excellent and the average. As you learn to manage the daily challenges, by using the knowledge gained at school, you may slow down and find that your circumstances have ‘plateaued’. It’s at these times, that one can discover that success is not always about getting to know the organization or how skilled you are. The leadership journey requires more. You also have to know yourself. Such insight isn’t found in standard textbooks or school examinations, yet this understanding is a crucial element for fulfilling your potential.

Managing one’s career was once considered mostly an art and an opportunity only for the select few, who were born with the proper skills and luck. As our understanding of success has improved, we realize that there is some science in this journey as well. There is a way to understand the patterns of our lives and application of that science repeatedly and consciously can help us advance and reduce some of the uncertainty which life poses. We cannot leave life and career to chance and be ‘accidentally’ impactful. Success comes when you work with discipline and passion; doing what you love with complete awareness and authenticity.

How do we fill the gaps in the divide between what formal education offers and what the professional world requires? There is no one answer. Schools have integrated industry practitioners into the classroom as professors and allowed professors to consult with organizations to address practitioner challenges. This approach has exposed students to many different strategic possibilities, but usually at a general level. To strengthen one’s understanding and prospects for success on an individual level, the Rules of the Game is a useful resource. The book offers a frame that is beneficial for the transition from school to professional life, providing insights through the author’s informed, accessible style and by drawing from his personal leadership experiences. Sumit brings together a wealth of diverse knowledge about learning, leadership, success, spirituality and self-awareness.

The original idea that animates The Rules of the Game is one that goes to the heart of personal passion and leadership. It documents insights from both extremely successful people who are actively pursuing their life’s work and from those, who are still finding the ‘what or why’s’ of their life.

Hundreds of interviews with ordinary people and detailed interviews with CEO’s are opportunities for you to see how the most accomplished experts learned the rules of the game. This book explores the untaught beliefs that determine early career success. In this way, it is a refreshing and unique addition that promises to advance one’s personal and professional success.

This book serves as an excellent supplement for anyone about to begin a corporate career. It is a valuable text for those who start that journey intent on achieving goals more quickly. The text will enable more leaders to create meaning for their life and value for the world at large. The book does not tell you how to achieve fame or fortune. Nor does it focus merely on professional ambition or the supposed power of positive thinking. Because it focuses on you, it will provide you with the tools to align your expectations with your values and unique capabilities.

It will encourage you to search inside yourself and answer some difficult questions about what you truly want and why. In the end, you will be that much closer to your authentic, successful self.

Professor Dipak C. Jain

Introduction

As I commence with this book, allow me to state a simple yet emphatic line; one must learn to unlearn; in order to learn some more. For learning, unlearning and amassing knowledge continues as long as one breathes. By the time you complete this book, you will be some hours older and I believe, you will gain by the insights in this book. You will definitely find ways to find and orient yourself, towards the plan that life has laid out for you. This book is being written to help grow and evolve the soul, while you go through your daily work chores regardless of if you are a fresh graduate or knowledge-worker already working for a few years. It will help your career wander less and travel ahead faster in the early formative years, which define you.

As a fresh graduate in the working world, when you enter the work arena or change jobs, you have to unlearn almost everything you have learnt in school, college and sometimes, at a previous job. Maybe even everything you have learnt in life. You may be absolutely unprepared for the demands of your new corporate life and have to figure out this new-fangled world all by yourself.

Often, you start learning the difficult way—by experiencing everything first hand. The specific task that you are allotted at the job might have had a training course, thereby making you functionally and technically confident. But maneuvering through the intricacies of the real world and work ecosystem (people and situations you have to interact with) unfortunately, comes without a handbook. You soon realize that what our parents taught us, our friends practiced and the education that our teachers and textbooks imparted; are definitely essential ingredients, but either incomplete, idealistic, too standardized or too theoretical. Learning from those teachings, you will at most become an average or just-above-average performer, since many others also learnt the same or similar things, giving you no clear added advantage. This process of learning and self-discovery takes a long time. Only a few; a select few, consciously realize or accidently discover the secret recipe that helps them eke out a successful career ensuring a happy comfortable life. You will wonder why some people are getting ahead while you seem to be standing still in time? You will wonder what’s got you stuck in the rat race.

Ironically, by the time you figure out the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the events transpiring in your life and begin comprehending the essential rules of a ‘corporate life’ game; others would have figured it too and once again, you would constitute being a part of the herd that competes for a job, role or promotion. Your chances of success now stand no better than your colleagues or other employees. You move at the speed of the economy or society and yet, you wonder why your pace of progress isn’t good enough. You wonder why some of your friends; coming from the same social and educational background as you, move swiftly ahead.

How do you then, grow faster than others? How do you speed-up the process of finding or understanding yourself? What are the essential ingredients? Are there rules that could be followed? How does one learn the rules? How does one break the rules? Will following the rules render the added advantage or would breaking the rules work better? Can your career be actively managed or does it have to be lived through a hit-and-miss experiential methodology? Are the ‘Rules of the Game’ unanimous and applicable across all organizations? Or does one have to learn new rules for each organization that one works for? Are there ways to learn how to learn the rules quickly? Finally, is there a secret recipe?

In the words of Confucius: ‘By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest and third by experience, which is the bitterest.’

Through this book, I bring to you, a set of ideas that have been gathered from the bitter-sweet experiences of many successful persons and imitated by many others. Each idea is not unique. The uniqueness comes from their collection and application in corporate life and the examples that bind them together. Furthermore, one fundamental concept of the book is that it’s not the uniqueness of the idea that matters, but rather, the uniqueness of your ability to implement it. The fundamental concept is, that there are no ‘Rules of the Game’ that can be articulated, which is applicable for everyone. There are no universal truths. Each person starts with some rules and then through experiencing the world, is able to build a unique set of rules that will propel them forward. This book is aimed to get you to contemplate. It is meant to create an awareness about yourself that will help you discover those particular nuances that could help shape your life. It is designed to give you a head start in your professional life by helping you understand how to orchestrate your own path. The interviews alongside, are portals through which you could perceive how the masters of the game learnt the rules and diligently practiced them as early as they could, to make their careers a resonating success.

It is not a book of definitive answers; instead it is a book of questions and ideas. The definition of the book is not that ‘one formula fits all’. Each of you will be able to find your own identity and create your own secret recipe—the application of which, if practiced daily through your everyday actions, would lead you to be a master of your career in whatever game you play and improve your odds of becoming wiser, faster as compared to others.

This book largely addresses the untaught beliefs that determine early career success. There are no courses that address this learning. These lessons are learnt by word-of-mouth from friends, mentors, seniors and watching their successes and failures. The book summarizes these pearls of wisdom, coming from organizing the experiences of others.

Realizing Your Impact

on the World

Develop Your Self-Confidence

‘Success means having the

courage, the determination and the

will to become the person you believe

you were meant to be.’

—George Sheehan (American Physician,

Author and Running Enthusiast)

J.K. Rowling; Author of the Harry Potter series, spoke at the Harvard University on the occasion of the graduation ceremony. Her key message was; ‘We do not need magic to change the world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.’ All you ought to do, is to believe in yourself and imagine the great impact you could have on the world.

We are conditioned right from our childhood, to believe that wisdom and the resultant ability to create an impact on the world, comes with experience and maturity. So we go about experiencing life, assuming wisdom will come along the way, which will magically or accidentally create the desired impact on the world. We stand ignorant and oblivious, to the countless little things we have done that have left an indelible mark (positive or negative) on many lives. This concept has had an enormous influence on me.

‘People are designed for accomplishment, engineered for success and endowed with the seeds of greatness.’

—Zig Ziglar (Author, Salesman, and Motivational Speaker)

Every time that I interact with students about to graduate or recent graduates who have entered the workforce; I notice two distinct groups. There are a select few, who have an immense awareness about themselves and the direction in which they are headed; to the point of being arrogant about it. The second, larger category comprises of those, who have not yet, crossed the barrier of assessing their self-worth. Such people sport a mindset that their job and the task allotted to them, is not important as they are low level trainees. They believe it to be someone else’s task, who would work upon the output to make it consequential. Such people are afraid on the inside. They suffer from a sense of low self-esteem, which manifests itself by an outward show of negligence and callousness. Their deep seated psychology rebukes their receptiveness by dismissing their own ideas as unworthy in the eyes of their colleagues and superiors. It is ok in the first few weeks of your entering the work-force but many people never get over this for many years.

‘To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you’re not, pretend you are.’

—Muhammad Ali (Boxing legend)

YOUR WORK IS IMPORTANT

While speaking to a group of young people who had joined a software development organization, I was citing an example of the magnitude of the impact that a developer has. A single line of incorrect coding or a defect introduced owing to carelessness, lack of skill or proper understanding, can change the course of someone’s history. Almost everything runs on software these days and the impact of this defect; if undetected and corrected timely (It is highly probable that a defect will remain undetected or corrected)— can lead to shutting down of systems, telecom networks, traffic, trains, aircraft, satellites and even cause a war! If any of these happen often or together, it could lead to a major catastrophe, resulting in many lives lost alongside economic losses beyond comprehension and even paralyzing the Government.

The impact of shutting down of a small system belonging to a retailer, can lead to loss of sales thereby, resulting in people getting fired because of being unable to achieve their targets. Shutting down of a manufacturing unit due to an improper software can have a more severe and unanticipated impact on the economy as a whole. The Mars Orbiter crashed in September 1999 because of a ridiculous mistake of wrong units in a program. Aircrafts have crashed, air traffic control systems have failed and medical equipment have malfunctioned due to software bugs; that were all seemingly simple and therefore considered low-level mistakes. In other walks of life like construction, medicine, accounting and so on, the assumptions and inputs provided to a software can lead to an extraordinary impact on lives and society.

On the positive side, there are several examples where ideas generated by newbies and freshers have created great product innovations globally. From cutting down production losses, catching major bugs in code, writing great software, designing amazing buildings and really getting plugged into the creative arena, young fresh minds have changed the course of history.

Take any other industry or situation and you will discover the same story that everyone has a significant role to play in this world. Each one has an individual opportunity to create an impact by discharging their duties well. People who are hard-working and sincere, achieve manifold results which further sharpen their sense of recognizing opportunities. When you are confident of your skill-sets, you know for sure that you are appreciated at your work and that your team-members, co-workers, organization, customers, economy and even humanity depend upon you in an indescribable manner. Even if you are unaware of the grand plan that destiny has, you should always start taking your first step by saying that your immediate team, your boss and the project itself depends upon you. With this, comes the feeling of power and responsibility which goes hand in hand. The faster you internalize this, the quicker the sense of responsibility is introduced into every conversation, correspondence, communication, interaction, action, reaction and every singular piece of output. This goes on to become not only a part of your subconscious but also your persona and shines as the guiding force, enabling you to be a better decision taker. It finally serves as the lens, through which you view the reactions of the world at large.

Your educational institutions and family pillars are entrusted to prepare you to deal with life. In the conventional education systems, most opportunities are structurally presented to you and the crucial decisions are taken by others on your behalf. However, as you graduate out of college, when reality beckons, you wake up to being on your own. You are not accustomed to taking and owning up to your decisions or sporting a sense of responsibility. This transformation of inculcating a sense of responsibility and the preparedness for the corresponding impact, has to happen in the first few weeks or months of joining the workforce.

LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

Through