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Introduction

Take control of your career,
do work that you want to do,
and get a bigger payoff.

You are at a crossroads, NOW. You have a choice.

Early on in your career you pay dues. We all do. You take the best job available, you roll up your sleeves, and you work really hard. You work long hours on sometimes stupid and thankless projects. And you tend to be consumed by the work. Your career "strategy" is more about reacting to opportunities that come along than planning what job you are going to do next, and why. If you react successfully, you get ahead. You get some wins, some promotions and some higher pay.

But then you reach a point where you decide that life should be better than this. You decide you want to do work that you WANT to do. You want to contribute real value to the business, but you want to get recognized for it. And you want to get some genuine satisfaction from your work. You want to make a difference. You don't want to give up your whole life for your work. You want your work to fit into you life so that your life works.

You notice that some people have broken out. They started where you were, but now they are in bigger jobs, making more money, and are having more impact on the business. And they even seem kind of happy.

Now you are at a crossroads. Do I continue to react and take the opportunities that come my way? Will I be discovered soon? Or should I do something on purpose to get more of what I want from my work?

Building Success on Purpose

I have always been fascinated with really successful people. What really got them to the top? Was it being really good at what they do that set them apart? Or was there more to it?

What really struck me was that big success did not just happen to talented, fortunate people unexpectedly. Really successful people seemed to get there on purpose, and almost never on their first try.

Successful people hear NO a lot. They screw up and they fail repeatedly. But they learn. They keep going. They DO stuff. It's not always dramatic, but there is always a sense of taking action and making steady forward progress.

I concluded that highly successful people also had some other things in common:

• Yes, they were really good at what they did, but what they were doing seemed to suit them personally. They truly were being themselves.
• They stood out as being different from their peers. They were not doing the job as written - they were always getting more, broader-reaching results than everyone around them.
• They had amazing networks of people they could go to for information or for help. In fact, getting help was something they did regularly.
• They commanded immense respect from others.
• Most of them had plenty of money, but that was never the whole point for them. They seemed genuinely satisfied with their lives. They had happy families, took great vacations, and even enjoyed hobbies and community interests.

I also met many rich people who were miserable, and many successful people who were assholes, but they didn't fit my definition of "success," so I didn't include them in my model!

The On Purpose Success Model

Over the past 20 years, I have built a Model for creating success on purpose that contains the insights and the actions necessary for achieving extraordinary success. The On-Purpose-Success model has three parts:

DO BETTER
LOOK BETTER
CONNECT BETTER

Big success requires all three, not just in sequence or isolation, but in combination. If any one of them is missing you fall behind. You get stuck. And the real payoff comes over time -- once you feel like you have mastered all three, you set the bar higher, and do them all again. That's where the "Better" comes in.

DO Better

DO Better is about producing exceptional results. But is not just about working really hard. In fact working too hard is the single thing that gets more people stuck in their career than anything else.

DO Better is about working on the right things in the right ways. It's about identifying and delivering on the few most critical things, the ones that are really count, and freeing yourself from an overwhelming, tactical workload.

DO Better is about knowing yourself really well, and putting yourself in situations where you can thrive in your work, and accomplish exceptional things. It's also about how you lead, build trust, delegate, and make more time and energy.

Successful people are not burned out, and used up. And they are not the ones who were less busy along the way. They deliver remarkable results and leave room to DO even Better after that.

LOOK Better

LOOK Better is about credibility and relevance. It is about standing out. Successful people do their work and produce their results in a way that is visible with people who count. They understand the audiences who matter most and they communicate in a with the right people at the right times, in a relevant and compelling way.

LOOK Better is about building personal and professional credibility, and becoming relevant with your key stakeholders. People with high credibility get more done because they face fewer obstacles. Successful people are widely known for building extra value into the business, not just doing their job really well.

CONNECT Better

CONNECT Better The most successful people get a lot of help. CONNECT Better is about building a broad base of support for yourself, your team and your work. As you advance, your focus needs to broaden not deepen.

Don’t get isolated in your own world. Build the right networks of mentors, partners, and supporters. Get on "The List" of people who get access to opportunities.

Successful people build an "extra team" around them, and accomplish big things by working with and through others. The higher you go, the more your value is associated with your network.

Your secret advantage

Most people I talk to want some combination of the following things:

• To be more relevant: To be someone who's opinion counts, to work on things that matter, have a real impact, and get recognized.
• To be more satisfied: To get more enjoyment from their work, do work that means something to them, and to enjoy their life more.
• To be more effective: To get control over workload, think more strategically, be a better leader, and escape the soul-sucking tactics and activities that use too much of their time and energy.
• To make more money: To have a chance to get paid really well for working really hard.

This book is your personal, secret advantage to take control of your career, do work you want to do, and get a bigger payoff.

Off the Org Chart, will give you...

• Big, career and life changing insights about how you think about your work, and what you can do to take control of your success -- things you wish someone had told you a long time ago - things you will remember and use for the rest of your career
• Practical, really useful ideas for things you can start doing NOW that will make a real difference.

Success happens between the lines and boxes on the org chart, and often off the record. You need to recognize that it is up to you to make things happen in your career that do not happen because of the standard company and management processes. These days, if anything, the standard company and management processes are set against you. But you also have more control than you think.

The On-Purpose Success model described in this book is all about the things you can control. How to see them, and how to act on them – because you need to do specific things on purpose in all three areas of DO Better, LOOK Better and CONNECT better over time.

For example, working really hard won't get you anywhere if no one sees what you are doing or thinks it's relevant. Creating a publicity campaign without the results to back it up will backfire. (We all know those people who are managing their career instead of doing their job and we wish bad things for them).

You can't build a strong network if you are not credible, and you won't know how to use contributions from your network if you are not focused on doing what are the most critical few things to move the business forward. It all works together to build strength, and grow success, in your career and business.

I learned the hard way.

Let me give you an example of how this works, and what happens if you miss the boat--like I did.

In my late 20's I got my first top management role running a software development organization for a major corporation.

In my first year in that role, with the team I built, I achieved stellar results. I turned around a struggling organization. We cut the development cycle in half. We released a product on the new schedule, improved product quality, won the sales force back (they had abandoned us due to lack of confidence). We significantly improved team morale, and restored customer satisfaction.

I thought, Not bad for a year's work! It stood out. It was a lot to get done in one year. I felt very proud (and very tired!).

I had nailed only the DO Better Part.

Up until then, I operated with the understanding that if you deliver great results, you get recognition and rewards. The annual review/raise cycle coincided with my one-year anniversary. The company was doing well. I had given generous pay raises to my top performers, and I was excited to have the conversation with my boss about my pay raise -- but I got a rude awakening.

When my boss informed me of my raise I learned that I didn’t get one. Zero. He agreed that I had exceeded expectations, and thanked me for what I had accomplished, so I asked him, What happened?

Nobody knows you

Nobody knows you, he replied. I tried, but nobody knows you.

What does that have to do with anything?!! Surprise. Anger. Heavy sigh. I missed LOOK Better entirely. No one outside of my own organization or my boss knew what I had accomplished. And I learned that many people in addition to my boss got a say in what happened to me. Oops.

Thus began my journey, to learn about all the other stuff you need to do, in addition to exceeding your job description, to get ahead.

I began to focus on the LOOK Better part, building my visibility with the people who counted. I began to seek out and communicate with key executives across the company. I began to understand what they really cared about and tried to find ways to make my work relevant to them. It required a significant effort. So I first had to go back to DO Better, and do even better than I was doing before -- I still needed to deliver outstanding results, but I needed to do it in a new way so I could make room to do the extra things I needed to do to LOOK BETTER.

I began to see results from my LOOK Better effort. I was building credibility and my team was getting recognized for our good work. In fact, our work in reducing product cycle time and improving quality was so admired, I began to get asked to speak to other organizations to share how we did it. Although that was a big boost to my LOOK Better efforts, it's important to note that this never would have happened if we didn't deliver the outstanding results in the first place -- the DO Better part. Doing exceptional work is what gives you something real to creative visibility for. They go together.

Over the next couple of years though, I felt my career stall again. What was missing? CONNECT Better. I had not been building my network and my "extended team" -- the group of people outside my organization in other groups and at other levels, who could provide support. As great and as visible as my results were, I was not seen as being ready for something bigger because I was not influencing the business outside my own business unit. A huge part of my success came from mentors. In fact, outside my own efforts, mentors had a bigger impact on my success, by far, than anything else. Mentors help you connect at levels and places you would never achieve on your own. Successful people build networks, get help, and have mentors.

The Moral of the Story:

As you advance in a company, success becomes less about the specific work you do and more about who you are as a person and a leader. It's about your ability to create broad visibility, credibility, connections and support outside your organization. The higher you go, the more your results come from enabling people who work for you to deliver great things, and working with people around and above you to eliminate obstacles, get ideas, negotiate for resources, secure cooperation, and build momentum on a large scale. It's not about the work you deliver personally.

Why I wrote this book

First, I felt an obligation to share.

I was very fortunate to get a lot of help from smart people who cared about me along the way. I got told a lot of stuff that no one else did. I want anyone who wants to invest in their success to have access to this information. There is no real reason that all the unspoken rules of success are secret--it's just that most people don't ever get around to discussing them, or find a way to clarify them and make them concrete and actionable.

So I want to help. I know what works, and I want to share it in a way that is really useful for people trying to figure out how to get from the middle to the top.

Second, I hate wasting anything! Particularly time and energy.

I am a born maximizer. So I am driven to find the most direct and effective path to do things, then do them the best they can be done, whether that is being a CEO or making a tuna sandwich. So I don't like to see people wasting time in their careers, investing their heart and energy, but working the wrong way on the wrong things, and getting stuck.

Through my more than 20 years in business--and all the learning, mistakes, failures, embarrassments, wins, and advances along the way--I have discovered and developed a practical and repeatable approach for building the success you want over time, one that avoids wasting time and energy. This became the On Purpose Success Model--and I want to share it with you. Get there faster.

It has been a huge lesson for me that break-out success can come from doing relatively simple things. The key is in the DOING. And the things that have the biggest impact are all very doable; it's just that they are easy to miss if you don't learn them, and make a point to do them on purpose.

Where I came from

Growing up, I was a fat kid and a nerd. I was an artist, a singer, an actor, and I was drawn to math and science.

When I started at university, I was registered as a fine arts major, but when I showed up to orientation I heard my mother's voice in my head saying (for as far back as I can remember), You will go to college. You will get a good education and a good job and you will support yourself. Never expect anyone else to support you. That's your job.

So, fearing I would struggle to earn a good living as an artist, I crossed out "Fine Arts",penciled in "Electrical Engineering" and went to stand in the Electrical Engineering line.

I began my career at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ, as an engineer in the robotics research lab. I hated it. I was miserable and thought I had screwed up my life. (More on this and what I did about it later…)

I went on to work in individual roles as a technical sales consultant, a sales rep, a product manager, and a product marketing manager. I did plenty of trade show booth duty. I know what it's like to start in a thankless, entry level job.

In my late 20's I got my first big multi-level management job running a software development organization of about 150 people. I eventually held executive roles in Marketing and Sales organizations, as well as General Management.

My career really took off when I became Hewlett Packard’s youngest general manager at the age of 33. I was running a $1B software business for HP at 35 and was CEO of a private software company at 38.

(Long term, the "get an education and support yourself strategy" backfired a little on my parents as I somewhat over-achieved on the "get a good job" agenda and they have no grandchildren.)

I am very lucky to still have the guidance of many mentors and brilliant people who care about me. I could not have achieved any level of success without the support of my parents, husband and sister. I still enjoy art and I'm an avid cyclist and scuba diver. I donate to charities, and I like expensive shoes. I am no longer fat, but I am still kind of a nerd.

What is here for you in this book:

Insights:

• All the unspoken rules and secrets I have uncovered along the way.
• Things that count most toward building real success, and which common hazards and traps are a waste of time.
• Magic: Things that work so well for getting successful outcomes, I refer to them as magic. There are only a handful of these and they are preceded in the text by: MAGIC.

The On Purpose Success Model

• The book is organized into the three sections of the model: DO Better, LOOK Better and Connect Better. You will learn how to become Better in each of these areas and why it matters so much.
• The model contains key insights which will change the way you view your success and your ability to impact it.

Resources

• Pointers to important and useful resources I have found most helpful along the way.
• My recipe for a tuna sandwich

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