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Preparing for Change Despite Current Success April 12, 2009

Posted by randydeutsch in career, change, survival, transition.
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The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival, said Aristotle. Emerson would have us believe that we are always getting ready to live but never living. And Woodrow Wilson?  That we are not here merely to make a living, we are here to enrich the world.

 

So what would Aristotle have made of the suggestion that the good life involved not awareness and contemplation but the ability to ride out successive sigmoid curves? You read that right – sigmoid curves. Kind of glorified sine curves, but on their side. Upon recommendation from designintelligence‘s  James Cramer, I just finished reading Charles Handy’s intimate and wise autobiography Myself and Other More Important Matters when I came across his own depiction of the successive sigmoid. The book is filled with other important and growth-promoting diagrams of note – but this one contains its own powerful draw. In essence – Handy’s the one who started it, for it was after all Charles Handy, in The Age of Paradox, who stated that “A good life is probably a succession of sigmoid curves, each new curve started before the first curve fades.” Who knew? Though you could also find this critical diagram in the appendix of the paperback version of Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive – where he referred to it as “your personal inflection point” – it doesn’t matter where you first saw it now that you have. For you should be assured that, to paraphrase Aristotle, that the ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation of successive sigmoid curves.Where these curves are linked one after the other, your career, in fact, your life a succession of curves, stepping at each inflection point, to new heights. Where you go on to new heights. Or decline. The million dollar question is inevitably: How do you know when an inflection point occurs? Unless you knew when to inflect, you won’t know when to move on, to change, to climb and could risk personal and professional decline. Here’s a hint: Just when you feel limited, put in a box, pigeon-holed by your employer, locked-in to some direction not of your own choosing perhaps from some need to pay the mortgage or get responsible or fill a need in your company. Or when you no longer feel passionate about what you are doing or no longer learning.

If you want to take this further – and pick up a tip or two on career strategy see this Personal_Inflection_Points  

That is unless you happen upon another telling graph that diagrams your life or career. Take one that has been floating around LinkedIn for the past couple days. The Gort_Cloud is a book by Richard Seireeni – but here it is the Gort Cloud diagram I am most interested in. If the Gort Cloud is an invisible force powering the most visible green brands where millions of people [connect] to green information through a vast, interconnected community, what then – like Grove’s personal infection point – about a personal Gort Cloud?

Instead of the green community – What about your community? A community no doubt made up – like the Gort Cloud – of social networks, trendspotters, blogs, magazines, foundations, groups and organizations, media, special interest authorities, news outlets, certifying organizations, alliances, as well as family, friends, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, etc.        

[=] View The Gort Cloud in pdf. 

In your matrix, in your community, in your social network: Who are your trendspotters? What are your most powerful sources of information and intelligence? What are your organizations and what former colleagues are in your cloud?

So OK, your community might be made up of green products. But it is probably much richer and far-reaching. In branding yourself – identifying and developing your own personal brand – imagine a version of this cloud but instead of diagramming sustainability – you diagram something altogether different. You diagram you. You, the Diagram. Imagine a kind of Mind map of yourself. Go on, diagram yourself and see yourself in context of so many others. Try it – the process is hopeful, empowering and enriching.

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