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 Recently, someone that worked for me over 20 years ago wrote something on her blog adn she quoted something I said 20 years ago. Sometimes I may not remember what I said so long ago, but it is always interesting to note how important what you say is to others.  Here is an article from Joy Chen.  After she worked with me, she continued to other big things.  She  worked for the California State Government  as the Deputy Governor of Californa and recently started  her own firm of recruiting.  I thought you would enjoy this article.

Time to Get Entrepreneurial

An article called "Managing Your Career as a Business" in today's New York Times business section discusses my career experiences and what I'm seeing in the job market:
Joy Chen followed her own entrepreneurial career path. Ms. Chen, with a master's degree in business administration from the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, had been a deputy mayor of Los Angeles and then went to work for Heidrick & Struggles, the management search firm. She left to start her own recruiting firm, Chen Partners in 2007, just as the economy started to slow. Business was initially scarce, she said. "Many employers were even then hunkering down."

Then this year, Ms. Chen said, things changed. "Many companies noticed that after all the layoffs and uncertainty, skilled people were available at lower salary demands than in former years. And now business is very active." The lesson of the economy's ups and downs, she said, is that workers cannot let hard times or lower pay discourage them. "It's a change in the market, not a depreciation of who you are as a person."

The article points out that you need to develop a more entrepreneurial mindset about managing your own career.  The recession has laid to rest the notion that your company will take care of that for you. I'm always meeting people who make the mistake of being highly strategic on behalf of their companies, but not at all strategic for themselves.  Certainly, when a company gives you a set of responsibilities you should identify with your job and try to excel in it. But just as the recession is forcing companies to innovate, people should innovate on their own behalf.

One way to be entrepreneurial, of course, is to go out and create your own company. My very first boss, Yue-Sai Kan (靳羽西), is China's most famous woman, built a media and retail conglomerate there over the past 30 years. When I started Chen Partners, I recalled her advice: "Never just work for other people. They could fire you!"
Candidates sometimes ask me what it's like to own a small business. I never discourage them from exploring it, though if everyone started a business, I'd be out of business. Being an entrepreneur is an exhilarating experience, and headhunting is a special joy. For me, the most exciting part is helping great companies grow and sharing in their successes.

This recession has turned many of our previously-held assumptions upside down. One lesson we may take away is that now, we're all working for ourselves. That's true whether we're doing so within a larger company or in one that we've created ourselves.

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