Analysis: The Inner Bank Account

<div>We all glibly speak of experience mattering.&nbsp; Companies select the 'experienced' candidate.&nbsp; How much attention do we actually pay to the nature of the experience?&nbsp; Twenty years of varying jobs on a CV means little.&nbsp; One has to go deeper into really looking at the actual experience a person has had.&nbsp; In a sense, experience is something that accrues to one's inner 'bank account' on the basis of situations or challenges faced and decisions made.&nbsp; If one habitually takes the easy way out or escapes from challenges, the personal accrual of experience in one's own (inner) bank account amounts to little. It is discounted.&nbsp; It has low value and there is little to show apart from a big external bank balance.<br /><br />Arjun has a great academic record, but that is only a potentiality, a possibility, a promise...something that can achieve things.&nbsp; What did he actually do with the challenges he faced, that which would have been instrumental in providing him the bank of experiences?&nbsp; Several things: he is bored and decides to leave internal audit, prefers to work with his ex-boss in a unknown start up consultancy, joins a clothing company and decides to leave because his boss fudges numbers and makes wild projections, goes to the Middle East as a taxation manager and leaves because he finds they expect him to drink beer with them, becomes a VP of an IT company but when they want to post him to Lagos in Nigeria, he quits. He joins Pleats, a manufacturer of children's clothes and leaves because the pricing of the clothes is over the top for the Indian market.&nbsp; He seems to systematically escape from every challenge he has had to face (especially the last one, where his education as an accountant, a cost accountant could have been employed to develop a winner pricing strategy for the company where he was not a minion but the financial controller).&nbsp; He doesn't appear to dive in but merely skims the surface, then leaves so he can start afresh in a new industry.<br /><br />When he is asked about the nature of the IT business he is currently in and is unable to answer, in spite of having been there for 7 months, it shows his level of disconnect with what he is doing. Arjun clearly comes across as a person who has had little by way of experience (or chooses not to experience). He has seen to it that he remains untouched by life.&nbsp; These are people who are very different from those who have faced challenges and have had to make it the hard way, by making decisions that have dealt with issues and not just escaped.&nbsp; <br /><br />What are some of the ways he might have done things differently?&nbsp; First would be leaving internal audit not because it was boring but because he had outgrown it to something larger.&nbsp; Second, he would have faced the fudging boss and tried to push for a cleaner image. Or that he would have had pricing conversations &mdash; difficult ones &mdash; with Pleats.<br /><br />Organisational life is full of these things.&nbsp; There is no smooth ride for anybody. The smoother one expects it to be, the flatter one's growth.&nbsp; If we do not take on difficulties, we remain forever 'unlined' by time.<br /><br />We outgrow a condition.&nbsp; A job becomes too small because we know it so well; it ceases to be a challenge.&nbsp; A baby outgrows the womb.&nbsp; A child outgrows a class.&nbsp; We all have outgrown our clothes.&nbsp; The world of experience is not that different.&nbsp; If we are not open to the experiences we have outgrown we continue to remain within that space, not unlike a child wearing clothes that are too small for him.&nbsp; The reverse is also true; we transition to something too soon, before we outgrow it, before real mastery takes place.<br /><br />On the other hand there is Sudarshan who, by contrast starts up with a lesser academic record.&nbsp; However, the little that we have here says that he was posted to the US after 5 years of initial work.&nbsp; In his first company with whom he lasted 10 years, he was posted across six locations.&nbsp; Here is a person who has not jumped ship but has seemingly stayed the course.&nbsp; His need to move back to India comes from his wanting to be with his classical music learning son. Definitely unlike Arjun who decides to move to Delhi from Hyderabad because his wife wants Bombay when his mother is alone and ailing in Bhopal!&nbsp; There is mindlessness about this decision-making that appears to protect him from facing life.<br /><br />All in all, while one would have preferred some more information on the 'sacrifice-for-son' Sudarshan, the one red thread that is clear is that bypassing challenges does not create relevant experience.&nbsp; One thing that can actively support the formation of such personal equity is the setting up of intentional choices.&nbsp; These choices determine the direction of experience.&nbsp; It is about 'leading oneself' more than simply 'leading others'.&nbsp; When one begins to lead oneself, the basis is being aware of oneself in the context of the world.&nbsp; We see clearly who we are and where we stand as well as where we need to go.&nbsp; This is the foundation of choice that leads one to develop an intentional approach to building requisite competence.<br /><br /><em>The author is at the Asia Pacific office of the Center for Creative Leadership</em><br />&nbsp;<br />(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 17-12-2012)</div>