The Right—and Wrong—Stuff: How Brilliant Careers Are Made and Unmade

The source of most career problems boils down to personal blind spots, argues Cast, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, in this accessible guide. Asking why some careers flourish and others stagnate or implode, he identifies five archetypes that personify common, and mistaken, mind-sets. These memorably named archetypes are as follows: Captain Fantastic, Solo Flier, Version 1.0, One-Trick Pony, and Whirling Dervish. Cast provides detailed descriptions of each, and readers are likely to find that some of these hit uncomfortably close to home. However, Cast does not put the entire onus for misguided career-planning on individual employees. Partly at fault, he says, is the focus-on-the-positives development process adopted by so many organizations for their workers. In his telling, management is not being honest about workforce competencies and skills or the lack thereof, and therefore does not foster real improvement. Cast ends by providing a helpful guide to the kind of rigorous self-evaluation that can help readers avoid common pitfalls. This relatable career manual should inspire plenty of white-collar professionals to work on serious self-accounting, take responsibility for their own mistakes, and form support teams of friends, managers, and mentors. [em](Jan. 2018) [/em]