Say goodbye to career planning: Tim Clark at TEDxPlainpalais

the word career is a verb it means to move in an uncontrolled way which pretty much describes my career over the last 30 years the notion that we can control our careers or or plan them seems silly to me let's see a show of hands how many of you straight out of school had a career plan which you followed straight into the career that you were involved in today how many okay and how many of you like me blundered about and muddled through and somehow wound up doing what you're doing today okay so can we say goodbye to Career Planning the um today I'd like to share with you a very important discovery that I made about careers as well as a tool a wonderful tool which changed my life and which I think could really help you magnify your power of one the story starts in University I graduated and I was clueless as to what I was going to do in my career I knew only two things number one that the world of business and offices and suits was of no interest to me it seemed like a one-way ticket to a boring life and I craved excitement the other thing I knew was I had a band I loved music and we were going to be rock stars so for several years I played music until I found out that no we were not going to be rock stars and in fact I didn't like being broke all the time and working at night and that I was more of a yuppie as you can see that then I had thought I was so I turned to the next thing that excited me which was the Japanese language I'd studied this at university and once again craving excitement I moved to Japan I was still clueless but this time I set a provisional goal for myself as I said I'm going to become a professional Japanese to English translator and I did and I was really lousy at that but after translating a few thousand pages I started to catch on to the principles of good professional writing and I found that I enjoyed it and I I made a good living it at it as I did that for several years but after a time I started to feel that there were I had other skills and some other parts of my personality that needed to see the light of day and so in a moment of weakness I took a corporate job with a fortune 100 company which made me into a junior bureaucrat doing corporate planning and I soon discovered that you know I had been right the first time around I was not made for the world of organizations and suits and conventional business and so once again craving excitement I moved on by this time I had become a very heavy PC and email user and in 1994 I got my first dial-up internet account and I discovered the World Wide Web now at that time the web didn't have any images there's no pictures it's all text but the very first time I I went online I was astounded I found myself in a French library and I'm still astounded today that on your own computer you can browse documents that were located half a world away and the first thing I saw I think the first thing I thought when I saw this was how how do you do this in Japanese because I looked all over the world wide weapon there was no Japanese language World Wide Web to be seen and immediately it struck me maybe I could have a small role in developing this Japanese language web and I wanted to spend all my time on this very interesting issue so I decided well I have to start a company so I told everyone I'm going to start a company doing Japanese language online marketing and marketing research for US and European companies that want to enter these markets now I didn't think I was going to make much money doing this which was a good thing because there are absolutely no demand whatsoever from my new circuit but we we stuck with it for a couple you stuck with it and we got a few clients and then in 1997 amazon.com engaged us to create their first Japanese language web pages and to do all their banner advertising in Japan after that we started getting some very interesting work from companies that wanted to implement or even replicate their business models in Japan and elsewhere in Asia now as time went by these business models became more and more strange and by late 1999 I found myself in Silicon Valley listening to 23 year old paper millionaires telling me how they wanted to sell dog food online in China and they were getting more and more excited and I was getting less and less excited fortunately we soon soon after that we got a multi-million dollar buyout offer from a Nasdaq listed entity which I accepted that was a positive experience and I as a condition of the deal I worked for the new owner for a couple years but by the end of that I've been working so hard for eight years and I was completely burnt out on this internet stuff web sites and email and Internet enabled cell phones and blogs and so I left and I took a year off during which time I dreamt of a world a world where this internet and computer fad had blown over and we were all communicating face-to-face and writing letters with pens and papers like real human beings should such a world was not to be but I also went into a midlife crisis because my company was gone and I had nothing to do so for the first time in my life I we started to become very thoughtful about my career and very deliberate about my career and this is when I formulated the Tim Clark theory of career development and go something like this picture yourselves coming out of school you come out of school you get any job you can if it doesn't drive you crazy you keep doing it okay if it drives you crazy try something else so now as years go by you become more thoughtful and you the question changes the question becomes does this job excite me and if so well you do it some more and you you go deeper okay and if not well you you move on and you try something else okay I think this is the default method by which many of us develop our careers the problem is we we stay too long in some positions and when we move on we don't move on to the right time or in the optimal way but I decided well what I looked back over these past eight years and longer and I said what what activities did I really enjoy and I well I enjoyed teaching and training and writing and researching well what occupation combines those things well University professor so I decided to become a university professor and the first thing I wanted to teach was entrepreneurship because I had just been through this eight-year whirlwind of activity and I've fortunate to be able to do something that most people never get to do and I wanted to understand and articulate the the lessons I'd learned and share those with other people because when I started I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship I didn't even know that people sold companies so I started studying entrepreneurship formally and I started teaching and that formal study confirms some things that I had intuitively felt as an entrepreneur but I hadn't been able to articulate for example when you start a venture ordinarily you have an idea about what kind of value you're going to create and how you're going to deliver that value to a specific set of customers and that logic is called a business model but what almost every entrepreneur discovers is that the initial business model they have in mind doesn't work when you go out in the market and you try it you've got to change it sometimes you have to completely reinvent it so entrepreneurship is not about writing a business plan of than implementing that plan entrepreneurship is about hypothesizing a business model and then testing that model and validating or or tweaking it in the marketplace okay around the same time I had another fundamental insight and that is that our own careers are a form of entrepreneurship and in fact just as a venture has an organizational business model we as individuals have what I call a personal business model and by that I mean the logic by which we create and deliver value to a specific set of customers and just as organizations must hypothesize a business model and test it we as individuals we don't plan and execute we hypothesize and then we test and sometimes in a very inefficient way so the age of planning is dead and it has been for years we live in an age of modeling as I continue my doctoral studies on business models I encountered the work of two wonderful researchers who live right here in Switzerland many of you know of them Alec Alexander Osterwalder and Yves ping you're wonderful people and they had just started right book based on a tool they had created called the business model canvas and I became involved in that book and in fact I became the editor of this book and that's when my life had changed once again because one day as I was sitting down and working on the book I took this tool the business model of canvas and I thought well I'm going to try to apply this to me as an individual and so I took that tool and I created what I call a personal business model and when I did that the results were just stunning because here for the first time was a visual and a logical and a simple yet powerful way to describe and articulate the logic by which we as individuals create and deliver value to our customers and when I did this for myself I suddenly got a lot of clarity around my own career and where to go with it and I was very fortunate being able to as a result of this create value for many many more people than I ever thought I would be able to which of course is the essence of entrepreneurship I am convinced that if I had had this tool as a as a younger man it wouldn't have taken me 30 years to be here telling you about it probably would have only taken 27 years so I'd like to encourage you to try creating your own personal business model use it to design the most important business model in the world and that's business model you and then use it to magnify your power of one you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 285,969

Rating: 4.6785898 out of 5

Keywords: Career, Switzerland, Business, ted, tedx, ted x, Geneva, TEDxPlainpalais, Model you, Plainpalais, tedx talk, tedx talks, ted talk, TEDx, English, leadership, inspiring, ted talks

Id: JJsuWB3LQ_o

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2013