Develop A Taste For Doing What It Takes To Be A Business Success
Travel and new assignments are two aspects of a business career that many people would like to avoid
. Where business travel once meant for some going from New York City to Syracuse by overnight train, today's global companies think nothing of asking their leaders to continually circle the globe when they and their families aren't being asked to move from continent to continent to take on new assignments.Who can thrive in such a demanding environment? I've recently given that subject a lot of thought and believe I have some answers that may be helpful to you. The lessons can be summarized as follows:
-Find an industry you love.
-Work for companies that inspire you.
-Love everyone you meet.
-Bring your personal flair to the job.
-Enjoy taking on bigger challenges.
-Keep learning new things.
-Savor your successes.
As one source for drawing these conclusions, I thought about people I've known who traveled a lot for business and continually took on new assignments over many decades. Many of these people were strategy consultants. Here's how they found happiness:
-They liked the combination of learning new things and advancing knowledge that strategy consulting brings.
-They sought out opportunities to work for prestigious organizations filled with talented people who encouraged their natural desire to do better.
-They enjoyed meeting people and becoming better acquainted.
-They had personal styles of working and living that could best be expressed by being strategy consultants.
-Success would inevitably draw attention from clients with bigger and more interesting opportunities and problems than the ones that they had just solved.
-Focus on one area of interest often inspired new theories of how clients could be more successful, theories that required more research and analysis to validate.
-Travel provided lots of time to reflect about past successes in comfortable surroundings with colleagues.
As you might imagine, that profile doesn't fit everyone. When it does, however, great satisfaction can follow. Let's look at an example to understand better how people can match themselves to the right business career to gain success and happiness from challenging work. In the process, you should be able to draw many lessons about what kind of business career will suit you best.
Continual shifting of jobs to new locations is tough on families, especially children. How can the children cope? Many families find that sending their youngsters to boarding schools can help to provide a stable environment during the critical developmental years.
That's exactly the route that Mr. Steven Grey's family took for his primary and secondary education while the family lived in six different countries. Traveling to these new homes during his school vacations taught young Steven that each of the countries had its own culture, language, and idiosyncrasies, which made him appreciate valuable lessons about acceptance, tolerance, and getting along in other societies.
Boarding school brought more than book learning. He also gained insights into the value of cooperation, rationalizing activities, leadership, and self-discipline.
Having grown to love living in many different countries, Mr. Grey began to think about careers that would bring that opportunity after he got out of school. A vocational aptitude test suggested one possible fit for his interests and personality in hotel management. That choice seemed appropriate to him, and he began to seek advice.
Those in the industry told him to skip regular university studies and to attend a Swiss hotel school instead. While considering that advice, he took a job in Brussels for the food and beverage department of a major international hotel chain to test his liking for the field. Satisfied that he had found the right industry, he enrolled in a Swiss hotel school eight months later to take the next step in his business adventures.
Studying at hotel school was good for gaining the rudimentary knowledge needed to work in virtually any area of hotel management and to provide perspective for developing some appropriate career goals for future responsibilities. After graduating, it was time for him to develop more specialized skills.
Hired by Hilton International to work in Germany, he found himself managing the dishwashing and kitchen cleaning crews which had similarly limited German language skills.
The next few years brought frequent moves, taking him to London, three different locations in Australia, New Zealand, and Paris. In the course of these experiences, Mr. Grey learned a lot about what interested him, developed a passion for food and beverage management, opened new properties, and lectured about food and beverage management to university students in Australia.
The move to Paris was for a job at The Walt Disney Company where he was impressed by the company's management culture and methods. A routine human resources assessment there revealed that he needed more education if he wanted to advance his career.
Looking around, he noticed that those in more senior positions had one thing in common, an MBA degree, something that he lacked. He set some new goals:
-In the short term, he would earn an MBA degree.
-In the medium term, he would start a Ph.D. program and return to lecturing on food and beverage management.
-In the long term, he would become a vice president of a major hospitality or entertainment company, either in operations or in strategy and business development.
With a busy schedule, he needed an online MBA program that provided lots of flexibility in subject matter and scheduling. With focused effort, he earned his MBA degree in general management with a specialization in strategy and development from Rushmore University after 18 months of intense study. One reason these studies went smoothly was because his boss encouraged him to apply his MBA studies to real-life problems for Disney.
Some of the accomplishments of these projects led to publicity that attracted a job offer from a family-run hotel chain whose owners wanted to become international players. That position didn't work out as expected, and Mr. Grey soon joined with some of the people he met at the new job to establish a hotel management and consulting company.
This new role has provided many opportunities to apply his new MBA-based skills around the world. Mr. Grey took particular pleasure in opening China's first boutique lifestyle hotel.
After that accomplishment, he was asked to fill brand new roles at two different companies where his work involved creating food and beverage concepts and brands, including some for franchising. In the new roles, he enjoyed exhibiting his personal flair for making dining better for everyone.
Chances are that someday you will eat somewhere that Mr. Grey operates . . . or may have helped create. I'm sure that his well-seasoned success will taste good to you when you do.
Whether or not you want to take on a high-flying role that keeps you in the air and continually moving to new continents, the lessons I described earlier will serve you well in your business career:
-Find an industry you love.
-Work for companies that inspire you.
-Love everyone you meet.
-Bring your personal flair to the job.
-Enjoy taking on bigger challenges.
-Keep learning new things.
-Savor your successes.
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