Book Reviews

Recently I posted my reactions to a new book about Harvard Business School called "Ahead of the Curve," by recent alum Philip Delves Broughton. Philip thought I had misintepreted his reflections in the book, and he was kind enough to elaborate on his experiences as an HBS student and let me pick his brain. Here's our email exchange about the value of an MBA for career changers, the HBS culture, teaching leadership and ethics in the classroom, being a humanities guy in an Excel world, and more:

AI: I got the sense from your book -- I think you even say so expressly -- that you weren't terribly clear in your own mind about what you were hoping to do with your MBA before you embarked on business school. It sounds as if you went to business school hoping to take more control over your life, and you assumed you'd be able to work out the specifics of a career change while you were there. That didn't seem to come together as neatly as you had hoped -- by the end of the MBA program, you were still trying to sort out what you wanted to do, and you were finding the job search harder than expected. In hindsight, do you wish you had done more planning or soul-searching before starting business school?

PDB: No, I was pretty clear about why I was going. I needed to be. I left a great job to go to business school. The challenge was remaining clear about it under the kind of peer pressure you find at a business school. I wanted to be able to pursue my own interests while controlling my own P&L. I didn't want an employer. I wanted control over my time. Now this is pretty different from a lot of people at b-school. I didn't want a "career change" so much as more power to decide my own personal and economic fate. It's different. The book is not about my failed job search. It's about my struggle to remain on the path I set out on while pulled in various directions.

AI: I've been somewhat skeptical about the value of business school, even a top business school, for career changers, for some of the reasons you mention in the book, and also because the recruiting schedule starts so relentlessly early that you don't really have any time to navel-gaze about your career once you get there. I'm thinking in particular of the hiring interview you did with the Washington Post (pretty dispiriting), and the following:

"But I was not alone in struggling to change my career. Luis, the Franco-Argentine, complained to me that many people felt HBS failed in its promise to give people a new start. 'They say this is your chance to change industry, but very few are succeeding. You see, the problem is that the path of least resistance is to do banking or consulting. Now, if you wanted to do either of those, you probably could. But if you wanted to get out of them, you really have to fight.... If you don't have experience in an industry, they don't want you, so you end up going back to the industries you do have experience in."

Do you think career changers should go to business school? If yes, what can they do to make their time there, and the job search process, less difficult?

PDB: Career changers need to do a couple of things. The first thing, as you say, is to start thinking early about what you want to change to. Even if you're not sure, you must have a vague idea. Then use every resource - especially alumni - to help you do that. The second thing is to regard your first job out of b-school as a bank shot. You go into one of the standard b-school professions - banking/consulting - in order to drop into the career you want in a couple of years. Lots of people do that successfully. But simply hoping the MBA magic dust will transform you into the dream candidate in the career you're after is delusional. The final thing I'd recommend, is to go to places where people know you already, your home town for example - then your career to that point, plus the MBA, plus trust and familiarity will make a career change easier.

PDB: I wasn't so much naive as ignorant of what HBS would be like. I didn't come from a profession where lots of people went to business school. I wasn't surprised that people were like they were - but given all that we heard from the most successful business people, Buffett/Paulson/Whitman, about work-life balance, I thought people should have taken that stuff more seriously. As I say in my book, I made a lot of very good friends at HBS and admired a lot of my fellow students. Anyone reading the book as a whole - and not just the reviews - will see that. I think the best thing to do to educate yourself is find people who have been to business school and ask them. Also ask people you admire - would I benefit from this? Match only really matters if you're fortunate enough to get into a bunch of schools. Otherwise, you go to the best one you can.

AI: You write about some of the difficulties you had as a humanities guy with no quantitative or business background. How can other humanities or liberal arts types best prepare themselves if they think they want to pursue a management or business education?

PDB: Oh, this is just practice. I hadn't done math since I was 16. I had never opened Excel. You have two years to figure this stuff out, which I did. It's a hassle at first, but short of taking an Excel course before getting on campus, there's not much you can do. You pick it up pretty fast once you're there - but just have to swallow your ego while you're trying to catch up.

AI: HBS says its mission is "to educate leaders who make a difference in the world." In your book, Ben asks, "I wonder why the school can't just admit that its job is teaching people how to run profitable businesses? Why does it even think that leadership is best taught through courses on business? I mean, if it is really leadership they want to teach, why don't they have us taking history or religion courses or spending the weekends with the Marine Corps?" Do you agree? Do you think leadership can be taught in a classroom?

(I do know your thinking process changed, and that you found that valuable: "Despite my frustration at being so far behind my classmates technically and in my basic knowledge of business functions, I knew that my intellectual apparatus had toughened. I saw things in the world that I had not seen before. I looked at facts and numbers a different way" -- but that's arguably different than leadership skills.)

PDB: Yes, leadership can be taught. Not in the sense that you're teaching people how to be Churchills or Roosevelts or Napoleons even. Just in the sense of helping people think about managing organizations. Every CEO we heard from said that people management was the biggest part of their job. And this didn't mean making big speeches. It meant hiring and firing, establishing a culture, setting the right incentives - and there is a large academic component to that, in addition to any personal qualities a leader might have.

AI: You took a somewhat dyspeptic view of the HBS culture, which in parts of the book sounds like a cross between American Pie fraternity antics and some kind of EST/Maoist reeducation camp. Do you think that's unique to HBS vs. other business schools? And was perhaps your age a factor? Your non-American-ness? I got the impression throughout the book that the other non-Americans were similarly nonplussed by those parts of the HBS culture. Thoughts?

PDB: Yes, being older made me look at it differently. I was married with a child - therefore not going out to Boston nightclubs midweek. Yes, I'm British, but I've lived in America since 1998, except for 2.5 years, and my wife is American, and my grandfather, aunt and cousins are American.... so I'm not entirely "not American." Yes, I think the foreigners did find it strange. American college culture is somewhat startling to foreigners. I know it's not unique to HBS. But perhaps the contrast between the seriousness in the classroom and the frat-ishness of much of the social life was more glaring. But again, I think this exists in business culture more broadly - you have companies preaching corporate social responsibility in the morning and then doing quite irresponsible things the rest of the day. Would the more exotic nightlife of Las Vegas exist, one wonders, without business expense accounts? I think people outside business are more sensitive to this hypocrisy.

AI: In your book, your classmates come in for quite a drubbing on the ethics front. I'm thinking in particular of the "financial aid BMWs" and the large proportion of the class (3/4 or thereabouts) who thought it ethically permissible for applicants to seek access to an admissions server that they knew to be unauthorized. There seems to be a big disconnect between the values of Dean Clark and his students. Thoughts on that? And do you think ethics can be taught in the classroom?

PDB: Ethics can certainly be discussed in the classroom - but can the ethics of students in their mid-late 20's actually be changed? Not so sure. I did find the discussions thought-provoking though. I'm not sure I give my classmates a "drubbing" about ethics. I'm in no position to do that! What I do discuss, however, is the contrast between what I describe as the rather excessive - and unrealistic - piety of business ethics as we discussed in class and the reality of how most people, business students included, actually behave. HBS took ethics extremely seriously - and kind of sets itself up to be beaten up when its alumni cause the collapse of Enron, and now have their fingerprints all over the current financial mess.

AI: You write in the start of the book that it was not intended as an "inside raid." I hear that some people at HBS nonetheless took it that way. One could argue that you wanted the upside of the brand and the network, but then violated a tacit compact with the HBS community by writing an exposé. In the book you express a lot of appreciation for the power of the HBS network. Do you think you've compromised the value of that network (to you) because you've written the book? Has there been any other kind of fallout? Am I wrong entirely -- perhaps it has increased the value of your network? Why did you write the book?

PDB: I wrote the book because I thought it would be interesting and useful to do so. And because I was offered an advance by a publisher. I knew elements of my experience were shared by many of my classmates. And I think at both HBS and many big firms, one is expected either to be a 100% booster, or a bitter critic. The truth is one can be ambivalent. I say that HBS was about 80% great and about 20% weird. Most people I know who went there agree. I know some people are upset. That's fine. I don't think I violated any compact. I didn't become a Free Mason when I went there. I attended an educational establishment and paid handsomely to do so. And I wrote a book that is honest and true. For every attack I've received from the school, I've received messages from classmates and other alumni thanking me for being so honest about the experience. So I'm ok with that.

AI: You acknowledge that "the Harvard Business School classroom is a safe learning environment, a place to experiment and make mistakes...." and that's why you cloaked the identities of your classmates. You decided not to do so for professors, because you think that they have a "public role." That's not as clear to me. Don't they experiment and course-correct as well? Aren't they entitled to some expectation of privacy in the classroom?

PDB: No. They are paid extremely well for their work at HBS and earn even more from outside gigs linked to their role as HBS professors. Most professors come off well in the book. I'm only actually critical of one. They can experiment and course-correct, fine, but I was paying the school $100 per class. I think I'm entitled to do what I did with the experience.

AI: How would your wife reflect on your MBA? Is she glad you went? Any advice she would give prospective business school spouses?

PDB: My wife enjoyed it, I think. We met lots of interesting people and I was around a lot when our second son was born. The only challenge was going back to a student life and budget after living like grown-ups for so long. But that was pretty easy, and rather refreshing. Advice? Be prepared for your other half to become a navel-gazing egotist while going through the process.

And a nice bonus for people working on their Round 2 HBS essays right now: Philip also had some advice for people writing the "career vision" essay (optional this year, but in my opinion still highly recommended):

PDB: I don't think HBS wants to hear "I want to make VP at 30 and MD at 35 and partner at 40." They want to hear that you have some sense of where you want to go: do you want to be in finance, do you want to manage a factory, do you want to be entrepreneurial? Or in my case, do you want to take your proven skills in writing, journalism and being a foreign correspondent, add on some business know-how and go write your own pay check - somehow. Anyone applying to business school should be able to come up with something which is consistent with their life and professional ambitions.

A lot of Gen Y experts out there are telling companies to suck up to Gen Y's parents. Here's an excerpt from a blog posting, for example, by Tammy Erickson in connection with her book ("Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving At Work") put out by Harvard Business Publishing (meaning, she's obviously no slouch):

• Distribute packs of information for parents to students at universities and job fairs
• Hold a career fair in your community designed specifically for parents
• Create special FAQ material directed at parents' likely questions and concerns (retirement, health benefits, 401(k) plans, educational opportunities and so on
• Hold parent orientation sessions or conference calls
• Invite parents of interns and new hires to visit the Y's place of work and meet the boss and colleagues
• Provide the staffing necessary to follow through with parent requests
• Run ads communicating your positive attributes as an employer aimed at parents
• Provide incentives for parents to refer their children (beginning with your current employees - if your current employees won't refer their own children, consider whether you really are a good employer)
• Include parents in employee benefits

Do you have a parent-approved brand?

I can see the short-term benefit of this kind of recruiting strategy. Very short-term. However, I wonder what kind of people you end up with when you use that kind of selection mechanism. Maybe the same subset of Gen Yers employers complain about all the time: the ones who don't show up on time, can't follow directions, can't make even simple decisions on their own, can't behave like grown-ups. I would posit that there's a connection between that kind of recruiting and that kind of employee.

So maybe you get entry-level bodies in the door that way. But what's that going to look like longer term? When you're trying to groom young employees to rise up through the management funnel? How do you make grown-ups, let alone leaders, out of people whom you selected for their dependent, child-like qualities?

I give Gen Y's parents a really hard time about infantilizing their grown children, and now companies are being encouraged to do the same thing. I have to think that's not a good outcome for those companies as a business matter, and it's downright toxic for Gen Y.

And for those whose immediate response is, "That's what Gen Y is like, there's no way around it," I say: You're not looking hard enough. You have to recruit more wisely than this, because with some of these recruiting strategies, you are inviting longer-term headaches.

Please weigh in. Am I wrong? And Gen Yers: do you want to be treated this way? Do you think that's a good thing?

(Here's my memo to employers; my memo to helicopter parents; and my memo to Gen Y. And here's a sample HR Director's lament.)

I don't get books like this new one called Ahead of the Curve by recent HBS graduate Philip Delves Broughton. He was apparently shocked to discover that students there are competitive! And graded on a curve! They work hard/play hard! And head off to stressful, high-paying jobs! This guy was a journalist for ten years before going to business school. Why were these newsflashes to him?

The HBS culture is a strong one, and it's pretty transparent. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. Why go there if it's not your cup of tea? I'm thinking this was more a failure of due diligence on his part than it was a failing of HBS.

With Round 1 deadlines right around the corner, this book is a good reminder to think hard about what kind of environment you want. People are seduced by name brands all the time, and the biggest, baddest name brands do have much to offer. There's nothing wrong with being brand-conscious, because brands have value, and they matter in the real world. (I doubt the author is suffering because he now has an MBA from HBS.) Still, if you're going to be miserable there, as this person obviously was, question whether you should go at all, and at a mininum make sure that the benefits (which can be considerable) outweigh that particular cost to you. And don't go there and then complain that HBS is... HBS.

Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana is coming out with a new book called From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management Education. His publisher is kind enough to be sending me a review copy, and I'll be excited to read it and interview Prof. Khurana in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, if you're in the Cambridge/Boston area, you can come hear him speak this afternoon at 3 pm at Harvard Book Store. More details here.

When a gay, Canadian associate sued the venerable law firm Sullivan & Cromwell for anti-gay, anti-Canadian discrimination, he brought to light an uncomfortable truth: plenty of law firm partners treat everyone like crap, not just protected classes. It’s one of the paradoxes of our legal system that you’ll get into trouble if you treat certain subsets of humanity badly, but if you treat everyone badly, you’re generally in the clear, legally speaking.

From this article about the lawsuit on law.com [the link is now dead -- I haven't seen the content reposted somewhere else]:

Charney's complaint, say former associates, accurately captures the ambience of the firm, especially the mergers and acquisitions department. "Every word of that complaint rang true to me," says one former lawyer. "They [M&A partners] are just vulgar."

Still, even those who express sympathy for Charney doubt that S&C partners are homophobic. "I don't think it's discrimination; M&A is just a brutal group," says the former lawyer. "I think this guy was treated badly and unprofessionally." Sums up another former M&A associate: "S&C isn't antigay, just antihuman."

Every big-firm lawyer I know can tell horror stories -- really bad behavior is not unique to the M&A partners at Sullivan & Cromwell, or that particular firm, or even the legal profession. The associate's complaint alleges, among other things, that the partner he worked for "threw a document at [his] feet and instructed [him] to 'bend over and pick it up -- I'm sure you like that.'" If I had a dime for every muckety-muck boss who's ever thrown documents (and even objects) at people while saying nasty things, I'd have retired by now.

(For those interested in this case and its fall-out, Above the Law has had the best coverage and updates on the various filings.)

As that sad tale makes clear, people of all stripes can and do experience hostile work environments in which they are subjected to nastiness and degradation on a daily basis.

That’s why I couldn’t help but pick up "The No Asshole Rule" by Stanford business school's Robert Sutton, a manifesto for the new millennium that calls on browbeaten, belittled, and berated employees to rise up and take over. Well, he’s not really calling for a revolution, but he is proposing something radical: that assholes at work need to be identified and weeded out -- ruthlessly -- not just for the good of their (usually subordinate) employees, but also for the good of the organization. It’s one of those observations you’d think was totally obvious until you realize that nobody has identified the problem, dissected it, given it a name, and proposed a solution. Sutton does so with this book, succinctly and unsparingly.

And there’s no better word to describe these menaces. Somehow, as Sutton explains by way of defending the book’s title, “jerk,” “bully,” and even "assclown" don’t quite capture the primordial nastiness, or the instant recognizability, of the office asshole. Anyone who has experienced the wrath of an asshole can spot another one a mile away, even if only through a subconscious Gladwellian sort of pattern matching.

Here are the defining traits of the asshole, according to Sutton:

Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?

Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

And it’s Test Two that makes this book so relevant to my audience of college students and recent graduates: you’ll be the prime targets, and the fresh meat, for every office asshole out there.

I’ve encountered my fair share (as we all have). My favorite stories, or at least the ones I still remember after all these years:

• The boss who decided to lock up the sugar packets in the communal kitchen because he decided his employees were being too profligate with them

• The boss who didn’t bother to make an appearance at his long-time and very loyal employee’s office baby shower and contributed five dollars instead

• The boss who told a colleague who had recently miscarried that she was too old to be having babies anyway

In my experience, asshole bosses, like assholes in all areas of life, also have the charming tendency to blame everything they’re not happy with on other people. Remember Alec Baldwin blaming everyone but himself for that horrible voicemail he left for his daughter? Classic asshole behavior.

Here are Sutton’s “Dirty Dozen” worst asshole offenses:

1. Personal insults
2. Invading one’s “personal territory”
3. Uninvited physical contact
4. Threats and intimidation, both verbal and nonverbal
5. “Sarcastic jokes” and “teasing” used as insult delivery systems [this one is key, in my opinion, because it’s a really passive-aggressive way to bully someone]
6. Withering e-mail flames
7. Status slaps intended to humiliate their victims
8. Public shaming or “status degradation” rituals
9. Rude interruptions
10. Two-faced attacks
11. Dirty looks
12. Treating people as if they were invisible

The best part of this book is the series of anecdotes that capture the asshole in his native habitat so perfectly:

• “Chainsaw Al” Dunlop, former CEO of Sunbeam, whom another executive described as “a dog barking at you for hours…. He just yelled, ranted, and raved" (more here)

• Hollywood Producer Scott Rudin, who went through 250 personal assistants in five years, as estimated by the Wall Street Journal (more here and here)

• Linda Wachner, former CEO of Warnaco, who would “dress you down and make you feel knee-high,” and whose attacks were “not infrequently laced with crude references to sex, race, or ethnicity" (more here)

• Richard Phillips, formerly an attorney at Baker & McKenzie’s London office, who famously hounded his secretary to pay his dry cleaning bill while she was dealing with her mother’s funeral (more here and here)

• Neal Patterson, the CEO of Cerner Corporation, who “complained that few employees were working full forty-hour weeks, and ‘as managers – you either do not know or do not CARE.’ Patterson said that he wanted to see the employee parking lot ‘substantially full’ between 7:30 A.M. and 6:30 P.M. on weekdays and ‘half full on Saturdays,’ and that if it didn’t happen, he would take harsh measures, perhaps even layoffs and hiring freezes. Patterson warned, ‘You have two weeks. Tick, tock’” (more here)

• Movie producer Harvey Weinstein who went on the attack against (physically) much smaller Universal chair Stacey Snider: “he was a fearsome sight – his eyes dark and glowering, his fleshy face unshaved, his belly jutting forward half a foot or so ahead of his body. He jabbed his finger at Snider’s face and screamed, ‘You are going to go down for this!’” (more here)

The examples in this book spare no profession -- lawyers, MBAs, doctors, executives, professors, you name it. He even walks his readers through a study of wild baboons who tortured the rest of their troops with their asshole alpha behavior.

Fortunately, Sutton is not advocating a workplace full of spineless wimps. He believes in the notion of “constructive confrontation” (a concept borrowed from Intel), which brings me to Generation Y: criticism is pretty foreign to this age group (see here and here), so twenty-somethings are a bit thin-skinned and are more likely to label perfectly good managers assholes just because as a group they’re not used to receiving negative feedback of any kind. (If it's presented in a way that helps them understand how they can do better, however, they respond well.) I call this the Devil Wears Prada problem -- more on that here and here.

The Devil Wears Prada problem is also relevant here because a boss might in fact be an abusive asshole but still enormously helpful for your long-term career, if you can just stick it out a little longer. Sometimes you shouldn’t jump ship, even if the person is a class-A, certified asshole. Apple alums love to bitch about Steve Jobs long after they've escaped his wrath, but many of them are also quick to acknowledge how much they learned from him. As Sutton describes it:

[T]he people who tell these [Steve-Jobs-the-asshole] stories argue that he is among the most imaginative, decisive, and persuasive people they’ve ever met. They admit that he inspires astounding effort and creativity from his people. And all suggest -- although his tantrums and nasty critiques have driven the people around him crazy and driven many away -- they are a crucial part of his success, especially his pursuit of perfection and relentless desire to make beautiful things. Even those who despise him most ask me, "So, doesn’t Jobs prove that some assholes are worth the trouble?"

It’s a fair question to ask. Most assholes at work aren’t Steve Jobs or Miranda Priestly. Also, asshole behavior is contagious and “spreads like a germ in the workplace.” Sutton’s advice, as expressed by one of his Stanford colleagues:

[W]hen you get a job offer or join a team, take a close look at the people you would work with, not just at whether they are successful or not…. [I]f your future colleagues are self-centered, nasty, narrow-minded, unethical, or overworked or physically ill, there is little chance you will turn them into better human beings or transform it into a healthy workplace -- even a tiny company. If you join a group filled with jerks, odds are that you will catch their disease.

Great advice, that. I’ve seen that kind of workplace in action, and it ain’t pretty. Do your due diligence before you accept an offer, and “[f]ind out if you are about to enter a den of assholes.” If you're going to join one, you should go into it with your eyes open.

Assholes are why I left the law, and I'm not alone (see here and here). There are just too many of them, and I didn’t see an escape while remaining in the profession. Are there great lawyers who are also wonderful human beings? Sure, and I’ve worked with some of them. But life is short, and I decided I didn’t want to turn into what so many lawyers turn into. (I don’t think they all start out as assholes; many learn that behavior along the way.)

I still talk to, and consult with, a number of lawyers, especially in the context of associate retention. Law firms love to think that throwing more money at associates heals all wounds, but they’re wrong. The best and the brightest always have options, and law firms routinely drive them out with their bad behavior. It’s hard to discipline or cut loose a profitable asshole, but as this book points out, organizations need to sit down and calculate their TCA -- total cost of assholes. For every Apple/Steve Jobs, there are many more companies whose assholes are doing more harm than good.

Sutton also has a wonderful blog. Read it here.

One of the things I’ve learned over years of working with twenty-somethings is how often fear motivates their decision making as they embark on life after college. Our culture treats graduation as a rite of passage, and yet college does such a poor job of preparing graduates for the working world. I see four common patterns in particular:

1.    You’ve been enriched by a wonderful liberal arts education, but as graduation looms, you’re convinced you don’t know how to do anything, that you haven’t been trained to do anything. You love the humanities, and you write well, but you have no idea how to translate those skills into a meaningful job. You don’t know the “business world” very well (at all, really), but you feel pretty certain that you won’t like it, or won’t be good at it. The job search process seems overwhelming, and your instinct is to stay in school a bit longer. Many of your friends are applying to law school, and it starts to sound better and better. You don’t need any prior work experience or specialized training to apply, you figure you know how to write well, and the paychecks look awfully good. Plus, you’ll get your parents off your back. They’re certain that if you don’t go to graduate school now, you’ll never go back.

2.    You’ve been preparing for a particular profession since you were a teenager -- say, medicine. You’ve been studying a specialized curriculum for many years and invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in that track. Over time, you’ve become less and less enchanted with your training, but becoming a doctor has become so central to your identity, and is so expected of you by this point, that you charge ahead. Each step of the way is already planned and fairly predictable, and deviating from that plan and the career you chose as a teenager becomes unthinkable.

3.    You wrote all those wonderful essays about your career goals and made it into a top business school. To get in, you had to sound very focused and knowledgeable about your career plans, but in truth, like most people, you had hoped to figure that out in grad school. As business school graduation approaches, you have many wonderful options, but you’re still not entirely sure what direction you should choose. You’re feeling the pressure to “pick a horse.”

4.    Your parents came to this country with nothing and have struggled to give you only the best opportunities. Because of a mix of their own life challenges and cultural norms, they insist that you follow a particular path during and after college. Maybe you want to explore another direction, or you have no sense of direction at all yet, but you feel obligated to follow the path they envision for you.

Do any of those scenarios sound familiar?

How wonderful, then, that there’s a new book called Getting Unstuck by Dr. Timothy Butler. I’ve been a fan of Tim’s for years. He co-authored one of the books I frequently recommend to my own coaching clients, Discovering Your Career in Business, and he more recently published The Twelve Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back. Getting Unstuck is his third book, which focuses on how people can break through mental impasses that hold them back personally and professionally.

Tim brings many years of research and coaching to the issue. He is a psychologist as well as a Senior Fellow and Director of Career Development Programs at Harvard Business School. One of his long-term research and practice interests is the relationship between personality and work satisfaction. He uses the term “deeply embedded life interests” to describe those innate preferences, specific to our own individual personalities, that make us jump out of bed in the morning and want to go to work every day.

So what do we do when our work lives don’t engage those embedded interests? And -- more relevant to twenty-somethings -- how do we discover those embedded interests in the first place? This week I sat down with him to talk about his new book and explore what advice he would give to twenty-somethings in particular.

Fear of the Dark

In his book, Tim talks about people holding themselves back because they essentially fear “the dark”: We want to move in the sunshine, walk along familiar streets, and have experiences that are sure to give us pleasure. We want to feel that most of life can be planned and that we have a reasonable chance of avoiding pain.I would argue that for many people, merely graduating from college is moving into a “dark place,” and that rushing off to graduate school is a way to stay well within the familiar and the comfortable. I asked Tim for his thoughts.

His advice is to recognize that feeling anxiety at these important junctures is not a bad sign. He also emphasizes that your twenties are ideally a time of exploration. At this stage in your life, you don’t know enough yet about the world (including the working world) or how you fit into it, and you’re going to be testing yourself in different situations and environments. His advice to recent graduates is to give yourself permission to do that exploring and testing, to look around and take it all in.

Not having a plan

Tim also emphasizes that clarity about your career and the kind of life you want to live doesn’t come to everyone at the same time. If you’re looking around at graduation and panicking because everyone else seems to have such a clear plan, don’t. It’s OK not to have that clarity right away, and trying to fake clarity won’t serve you well at all.

Parents

He also concurs that some parents don’t realize what a negative impact they are having. They want what’s best for their children, and in their minds that usually equates with lining up the best grad school options, right now. That sense of urgency precludes any meaningful period of exploration. In your twenties, all you should be doing is getting a general sense of North, South, East, and West – a general sense of direction, not a specific “Point A, then Point B, then Point C.” Parents would do their children a big favor if they encouraged a phase of career exploration. (My mantra, especially when I’m talking to parents, is: “Grad school isn’t going anywhere.”)

Assessment

Tim is a big fan of career assessment, and your twenties are the perfect time to start engaging in assessment exercises to get that general sense of direction before narrowing in on a particular career. (He says that it’s in one’s thirties that the challenge becomes how to narrow in. Twenty-something don’t need to be doing that yet.) Getting Unstuck has two exercises that I encourage people to try. One is called the 100 Jobs exercise, and the other is called the Ten Basic Interests exercise. You’ll have to buy his book to do them -- a very cost-effective investment.

Pedigree

So many of the people I work with who are going through the admissions process fall into a very common trap of defining themselves by where they went to school or where they hope to go to school. So much of their sense of self-worth seems to hinge on a standardized test score or admission to a particular program.

Tim agrees that parts of our culture reinforce that equation very strongly, especially on the hiring front when we read that certain firms hire primarily from a small number of schools. He adds that the obsession with pedigree can be a source of suffering and pain for people, and that this is just one factor that can cloud their ability to recognize what kind of career is going to be meaningful to them. A great resume does not equal happiness, he points out. And ultimately that’s how he defines what makes a good career for someone: a role that allows you to feel that you’re making a contribution because you’re in a place where your talents and energies and embedded interests have the best chance of being realized.

Read more about Tim’s book here.

"Whether geared toward helping you figure out what you should be doing, could be doing, what you want to do, or how to do it better, the books have this in common: They're tools that you can use to help build a better life—personal, professional, or both." See the list here.

Lecherous congressmen are only one species of scary predator. Then there's this expose by Ken Wooden, who wanted to test how easily otherwise smart college students -- Ivy Leaguers and criminal justice majors among them -- could be lured into a total stranger's van. Answer: Very easily. One guy even let himself be tied up with duct tape inside the van. See the exposé on the CBS Early Show here. And then go out and read Gavin de Becker's "The Gift of Fear."

So Randal and Dante are back in Kevin Smith’s Clerks II , and they surprised me!

More than ten years after making directionless, lazy slackerdom appear charming and funny in the first Clerks, they now show us how tired that shtick can get when you’ve seen your thirtieth birthday come and go. Randal is still breaking the record as the world’s worst employee as he surfs X-rated websites on the job, mocks a burger-ordering internet millionaire for his sell-out ways, hurls racial epithets at one customer, makes another one vomit, and brings the kind of transgressive performance art into the workplace that would give any HR director a heart attack. Talk about a red flag: When even stoner Jay (of Jay and Silent Bob) concludes, “Sometimes I wish I’d done more with my life,” you have to wonder whether there’s any hope left for Randal.

But Dante? By some miracle, he managed to jump over that fence into adulthood and discovered expectations. He decides he’s sick of slinging EggaMoobyMuffins and figures out that perhaps he’s been hanging out with the wrong crowd. In one of the few redeeming scenes of the movie, when they’re sitting in lock-up and Randal calls Dante a sheep for wanting more out of life, Dante calls him on his BS: “What would you do if you were half the master of your destiny that you think yourself to be?” He reminds Randal how they ended up spending their entire twenties working at the Quickmart in the first place: they had started community college together, but dropped out soon after starting for lack of motivation. And here’s what really impressed me. Unlike some of the folks whom Anya Kamenetz profiles and defends in her now notorious book Generation Debt (including someone who dropped out of community college because she didn’t like the commute), Dante and Randal both figure out that what they need is a good kick in the pants. Wake up and smell the Mooby Coffee!

Surprise number two? When Dante decides that he wants to do something with his life and inspires Randal to jump the fence with him, I half-expected them to do what so many real-life people do when they’re looking for a quick and easy entré into professional respectability: apply to law school. Instead, they figured out what they were really passionate about and made it happen. God bless ’em.