Linear careers differ from portfolio careers just like a tree trunk differs from a coppice

Linear careers are like single tree trunks. 
Portfolio careers branch out like a coppice.
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 122

1. Some careers are straight tree trunks:

Many career paths are stable and predictable. If you pursue a career in medicine, you know the steps you need to take: study for years and invest consistent effort in one direction to obtain a specialisation. 

2. Other careers are crooked trees:
The tree trunk of a linear career is not always straight, just as trees don't always grow perfectly straight. In fact, German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that "out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." If you change direction, e.g. move from finance to teaching, the sharp turn would result in a crooked tree in the forest of life. Also, there may be smaller career hiccups (e.g. gaps and sabbaticals) that create knots in the wood grain. Yet, the resulting trunk after 30 or 40 years is still a single massive block of wood.

3. Portfolio careers are shaped like a coppice:
Some people have portfolio careers: a diversified set of activities, such as consultancy, entrepreneurship, sitting on corporate boards, volunteering for charities. This model resembles a coppice. Coppicing is done by cutting down a tree to the ground, so that multiple shoots come out from the stump and grow into a bunch of (thinner) trees. Coppicing stimulates growth and increases the yield of harvested timber. By foregoing a linear career, you get a more interesting and diversified portfolio career which may result in a bigger timber harvest, i.e. higher income compared with a single salary job.

4. A "tree trunk" or a "coppice" career is mostly down to choice
Most trees can be coppiced: typically hazel, ash, willow, elm, beech, oak, chestnut. However, a small number of trees are not amenable to coppicing, for example birch. So it is of paramount importance for the "birches" among us to know that they should not pursue portfolio careers.

Coppice tree
(image source: Wikipedia)

Walking on lake ice is like navigating corporate culture: slippery and occasionally sinking

Clear ice is stronger than white non-transparent ice on a frozen lake; Transparent companies are safer to work for or work with than murky ones.

CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 119

When walking on a frozen lake, you should step on the stronger clear ice and avoid the weaker white ice. Choosing the company to work for or work with has analogous parallels. 

1) CLEAR ICE: 

Companies with transparent employment practices are like clear ice.

Clear ice is formed when still water freezes directly. There are few air bubbles, which results in solid ice, so even though he surface is slippery, it is firm under your feet. Similarly, companies with transparent employment practices have fewer undefined “air pockets” in the corporate structure and provide a well-charted course for career development. The same metaphor also holds for dealing with or investing in companies. A “clear ice” company has transparent financing and is less likely to suddenly spring a hole and sink. 

2) WHITE ICE: 

Companies with “murky” nepotistic employment practices are like white ice.

White ice contains air bubbles and impurities which compromise the integrity of its structure and make it more fragile and unreliable to support your weight on your journey across the lake. In a similar way, a company with nepotistic employment practices ("air pockets") offers an uncertain future: you would not have a clear roadmap since career advancement is not entirely determined by performance. And when dealing with a "white ice" company as a supplier or a customer, you constantly have to be on the lookout for concealed financial information or quality-cutting practices.

Whether you are seeking employment or a corporate partnership, consider the risks of taking a step off the clear ice and onto the white ice on the frozen surface of the "corporate lake".

Frozen lake in Canada
(image source: Wikipedia)

Corporate careers are nouns. Entrepreneurial ones are verbs

By George ILIEV

CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 115

Corporate careers are static: they resemble the nouns in language. 
Entrepreneurial careers are dynamic: they resemble the verbs. 

Yet, there are no limits to who can be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is like the English and the Chinese language: most nouns can also be verbs, with no changes required: to turn, to spin, to fly; a turn, a spin, a fly. 

And even in languages where the verbs and the nouns differ in form (e.g. German, Russian, Spanish), the root of the word is what the two have in common. So almost any root can be shaped into either a corporate noun, or an entrepreneurial verb. 

In five words: Entrepreneurship is an open door. 

Open doorway (Source: Wikipedia)

Is your career a bird cage or a shark cage?

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 110

A career builds two cages around you: a bird cage and a shark cage. You may think that a bird cage sounds better than a shark cage but think about it:

The bird cage limits you: from soaring in the sky.

The shark cage protects you: from being eaten by the sharks outside.

The two cages usually come in a package. But do you have any influence on how much of your cage will be a bird cage or a shark cage?

Shark cage (Source: Wikipedia)

Stalling planes and unemployed people have a solution: look downwards!

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 85

The software on modern commercial planes is designed to avoid "stall" at all costs: once a plane stalls, it becomes difficult to control and starts dropping like a brick or spinning towards the ground. The two recent Boeing 737 Max crashes are an unfortunate corollary of having systems so heavily focused on preventing stall. 

In human careers, you can also see this (almost deadly) effect of stall. Once someone becomes long-term unemployed, they can hardly ever recover and start work again. This also applies to people who lose their job at an advanced or pre-retirement age: they struggle to get another job.

The textbook solution to overcoming stall is to lower the nose of the plane down towards the ground to regain speed. The solution for coming out of unemployment is similar: stop looking up towards glamorous job opportunities and accept any "down-to-earth" job offer that comes your way.

Plane in deep stall (Source: Wikipedia)

Crop rotation and alternating career stages recharge the batteries

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 81

In the 16th century, farmers in Flanders (Belgium) discovered the four-field crop rotation. This led to an agricultural revolution in continental Europe and in copy-cat Britain. The discovery that planting wheat, turnip, barley and clover on the same plot over four consecutive years would not exhaust the soil led to a big increase in productivity, compared with the previous practice of leaving the land to lie fallow every third year.

Modern lives and careers are starting to look similarly compartmentalised: with the end result of recharging and reinvigorating the person. The four-field crop rotation in one's career can take the form of:
a) work for a company;
b) work for yourself or start up a company;
c) travel;
d) study.

Young people in Western Europe nowadays increasingly take a gap year after high school to travel the world. Mid-career people often do it as well. This corresponds to planting turnips on your field: as the Jewish saying goes "to the worm in a turnip, the whole world is a turnip." After all, it's not a bad idea to come out of your turnip and see what other turnips in the world look like. 

Studying no longer happens only in one's youth. People often do professional degrees after working for some time, e.g. an MBA in one's late 20s / early 30s, or an EMBA in late 30s and 40s. And even beyond that, to keep up with technology advances, many professionals choose to do shorter (e.g. 3-month) IT courses. This is the experience that recharges one's career the most, similar to the effect of clover and other legumes on the soil (enriching it with nitrogen that benefits the crops thereafter).

Entrepreneurship also comes at different stages in life: one may try out an idea in their 20s (what I call Type 1 or  "wolf-type" natural entrepreneurs), then work for a company to gain experience and contacts, and then start up a company again in their 40s or 50s, tapping their accumulated expertise (which I call Type 2 or "dog-type" corporate entrepreneur). In the farming analogy, this stands for planting barley - from which craft beers for the hipsters are made.

Working for a company is the remaining (most mainstream) piece of the sequence. Good old wheat is the bread (and butter) of the global economy after all.

Apart from the four-field rotation, there is another very productive agricultural technique which was developed by the Native Americans before the rise of modernity: planting maize (corn), beans and squash simultaneously, known as the Three Sisters. However, this simultaneous recharging of the soil by growing three different crops has a much rarer analogy in the human world. It can only be pulled off by the Rennaissance Man / Woman. It takes an entrepreneurial polymath to manage to juggle with study, travel, working for a company and launching a startup at the same time. 

Crop rotation (Source: Wikipedia)

Does changing jobs make you an orangutan?

Changing jobs and moving through the jungle canopy share the same activity pattern

George ILIEV

The best avatar for someone changing jobs is the orangutan. Imagine an orangutan suspended from a tree, grasping the branches with its long arms, swinging effortlessly from tree to tree. Now imagine this orangutan is you, the branches are the different corporate departments and the trees are the different companies you will swing between in your career. If only changing jobs was always as smooth as the swinging of the organgutan.

Photo: Orangutan (Source: Wikipedia)

The corporate world and the jungle

In the corporate world you swing, rather than hop, between companies: businesses are not a flat surface for hopscotch but a hierarchical jungle canopy, with many levels up and down. Trees lumped together are companies in the same industry, so it is fairly easy for your esteemed orangutan to swing between companies while staying in the same industry. Trees far apart are companies in different industries and it takes a bigger effort to traverse a larger distance.

Losing your job and falling to the ground

The main rule in the orangutan's jungle is not to fall to the ground. In corporate speak this means not to lose your job, or else you risk entering a downward spiral.

Recruiters often cite a well-known paradox: "the most important factor for getting a job is having a job in the first place." Even without access to recruiter advice, the orangutan does exactly that: it rarely lets go of its branch before it has grasped the next one.

Once in a while the orangutan may be forced to "fly" between trees in a long jump, the equivalent of leaving a company before you have another job offer in your hand. However, in such a forced jump, the orangutan is likely to land lower than its starting position and may occasionally drop to the jungle floor.

If you've had enough of the orangutan analogy, think of the swift, one of the fastest birds in the world. The remarkable thing about the swift is it never lands on the ground. If it did, its short wings would not be able to generate the lift needed to take off again. You need to be perched somewhere high to be able to fly out to somewhere higher.

The MBA: a shortcut through the jungle

The MBA degree is one of the few shortcuts in life. It is a walkway above the jungle canopy that allows you to move to a different patch of trees (a new industry or new location), which would otherwise be either impossible, or would take a whole series of consecutive moves.

If you are ever in doubt about your career, take your cues from the orangutan: 

1) Move between trees and branches in a planned succession; and

2) If you ever lose your job, get another one as soon as you can.