Category: JOB SEARCH

Reset to your Maximum

To Outperform your Potential

STRATEGY      TARGETS         TACTICS          RESET SCENARIOS
Natural maximizing mechanisms will re-engage        The indicators of operating at your maximum will increase      Progressions similar to live models        Increase Top-Talent Flow        Honor your savant formula based on your historical experience        Harness future predictability from past patterns        Best savant exercises for scenario selection        Advance in the direction of increased indicators of operating at your maximum        Your new modus operandi        Follow your savant formula and indicators of your maximum        Participate in proactive breakthrough synthesis        Links about breakthrough synthesis        Scenarios for the employed        Scenarios for the unemployed

Our cultures have taught us to operate as separate biological entities.  This would unfortunately limit our potential to what is within us.  Yet, we have been born into a massive biological machinery.  Systems of mechanisms, processes, and forces have evolved to adapt and maximize all living systems for survival.  Could our potential be extended by that machinery and all the systems it orchestrates?  Indeed it can.  Change the way we operate and the bar for human potential will be raised.

Let’s start by resetting you to your maximum and extended potential.  Use the strategies, targets, tactics, and scenario suggestions here to reinstate your partnership with the adapting, maximizing machinery that evolved us all.  Once re-connected, our true power, potency, and promise are released.  Circuits complete.  Processes partner.  Mechanisms mesh.  Systems synergize and synchronize.  Synchronicities surge.  Coincidences cluster.  Sudden knowledge, sudden creativity and flashes of genius flood in.  Growth processes launch.  Our internal-external human system resurrects.

Once re-connected, natural mechanisms inside and outside of you will pull you to peak performance and beyond.  Let’s begin by identifying methods and scenarios which will trigger adaptive processes to restore you to your true maximum. Let’s empower you with the ability to achieve beyond your potential.  Let’s discover the magnitude of the lifetime legacy with which you might advance our world.

Strategy

The strategy for this exercise to reset you to your maximum will be simple:  Find a context such as the scenarios suggested below to abruptly quantum leap to operating at your RESET TO YOUR MAXIMUM to outperform your potentialmaximum with the least risk to your existing way of life.  Shift from your limited internal potential as a separate biological entity to your true potential when extended by the maximizing machinery and all of the living systems it orchestrates.

You do not need to be operating at your maximum to couple with the maximizing machinery.  You only need to be moving in its same direction towards your maximization.  When your speed and direction are right, it will feel as if two gears have re-engaged.  The surge in power and potential will be palpable.  Once connected, natural mechanisms and processes will take over.  Nature knows what to do.  Internal and external mechanisms will re-link.  The natural integrity of your system will be restored.  You will be able to outperform your internal potential.

Targets


Natural maximizing mechanisms will re-engage
We have evolved addictive drives that biologically bias us to use and improve our greatest strengths.  It is advantageous to the survival of the species that we be biologically biased to peak performance.  The more you comply with the addictive drives we have evolved for it, the more you will want to comply with them.  Therefore we need only put you into a scenario in which you begin operating at your maximum and natural mechanisms will work to sustain you at that maximum.

The indicators of operating at your maximum will increase
Merging with the maximizing machinery will increase your experience of the following:

  • Serial top-talent flow states
  • Facilitating events
  • Emotional highs
  • Events in which you operate at full power
  • Your impact on the world
  • Your advance of it through creativity and creation
  • Savant-like Information leaps inside or outside of you:
    • serial coincidences and other facilitators that speed/enhance your progress
    • serial breakthroughs:
      • “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, flashes of genius, epiphanies
      • sudden knowledge, sudden insight, intuitive leaps, enlightenment
      • sudden creativity, sudden creation, creative inspirations
  • leaps to emotional highs
  • Savant-like performance leaps and achieving beyond your norm
  • Scaling of new frontiers
  • Bringing the new into existence
  • Serendipitous projects accelerated as if by magic
  • Activities which are addictive and difficult to resist
  • Activities that are intrinsically rewarding
  • The pull of addictive drives pulling you to use and improve your strongest talents
  • The pull of addictive drives pulling you to top-talent flow states
  • The pull of your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, frontier-pursuit, and core-expansion drives
  • The clarity of the pathway of your maximum path of lifetime impact


Progressions similar to live models of the target maximums will be evident
Real life examples help to identify what we are expecting to happen once you reset to your maximum in your selected scenario.  Previous articles have examined the careers of seven icons  –  Bill Gates, the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos, the founders of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, respectively.  They are examples of biologically maximized careers based on addictive drives to using and improving the greatest talents of each.  Their careers are peppered with world-changing breakthroughs reflective of savant states that emerge from synchronizing with the maximizing machinery.

We learned how the compliance of these seven icons to biological maximizing processes caused them to lead addictive careers of serial breakthroughs, serial frontiering™ or scaling of new frontiers, serial growth, serial creations, serial emotional highs, and serial flow states.  Even a few such breakthroughs have made careers life-changing and world-changing.  What could your career become with serial breakthroughs and sudden-knowledge leaps such as flashes of genius, “Aha!” and “Eureka!” events, sudden insights, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, creative inspirations, intuitive leaps, epiphanies, and enlightenment.  Even those of ordinary intelligence may cultivate such savantism?

Tactics


Increase Top-Talent Flow
We have determined the strategy and the targets of our reset exercise.  It is now time to talk implementation.  Your absolute maximum is a peak performance flow state that emerges while you are applying your strongest most gratifying talents to your most meaningful goals benefiting the audience most valuing of your efforts.  If, in the scenario you choose for your reset, you did nothing but spend your day in this top-talent flow state, you would merge with the maximizing machinery effortlessly.  Magically, new functionality and capabilities would emerge.  Serial achievements beyond your potential would become the norm.

Increasing the time you spend in top-talent flow daily is both a target and a tactic.  It is, in fact, the one tactic that will eliminate the need for all of the rest of the below prescribed actions for resetting to your maximum.  It is a way to turn the task over to natural maximizing processes and mechanisms.  This is because flow is yet another addictive drive:  the more you experience it, the more you want to experience it.  This is why it has been a key driver or, perhaps more accurately, attractor of human evolution.

Let me provide some links below to what I have already said in previous articles about this maximum and maximizing flow state so that your target will become clearer:
“Magic happens when you stretch your best talents to more impactful achievements over long periods of time.  You repeatedly experience an altered state of consciousness that psychologist Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.  Attention is 100% focused on the activity at hand.  Peak performance and growth are built in.  Time, space, and even self-awareness cease to exist.  Flow is intrinsically rewarding.  It too is an addictive drive that will raise your baseline functionality as it did with our super-seven.”
The Triggering of Cascading Functionality Upgrades
Flow maximizes instantly
Your maximum flow:  top-talent flow
Sudden savantism through top-talent flow
Growth through top-talent flow
New meta-skills from extensive top-talent flow experience
Flow is our internal breakthrough synthesis
Serial top-talent flows or serial internal maximizations
Theme of Top-Talent Flow States

Top-talent flow will be the ultimate goal for any of the scenarios below that you might choose to facilitate your reset to your maximum.  However, should this maximum state elude you, there are alternative approaches which will enable you to re-engage with the maximizing machinery that evolved us.  Again, you do not need to be operating at your maximum for your system to merge with the maximizing machinery.  You only need to be moving in the same direction towards maximization.  

Honor your savant formula based on your historical experience.
     Harness future predictability from past patterns
You may easily know your target maximum state for this exercise from an inventory of your experiences of your maximum in your past.  Your Sourcing-Your-Savant exercise findings provide you with the formula for when the maximizing machinery has and has not supported your progress in your past and hence when it will and will not support you in the future.  This formula defines when coincidences, breakthroughs, flashes of genius, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and other such flow events will catapult you to peak performance in your selected scenario.  Therefore, your savant formula will tell you precisely the design requirements for a scenario for reconnecting you to the maximizing machinery.
.      Best savant exercises for scenario selection
There are certain themes or patterns of past events that are likely to be the most advantageous for selecting and operating in your ideal scenario for resetting to your maximum.  For most people, these include:  your unpaid-work theme and your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, and frontier-pursuit themes.  And, of course, your top-talent flow theme will be invaluable since that is the target state we want to increase in any scenario you choose.  There is no point in trying to work against what you find in your historical data.  Choose your scenario accordingly.

Advance in the direction of increased indicators of operating at your maximum
The very capabilities that you expect to have at your maximum are not just the targets.  They are also the tell-tale signs to follow moment-by-moment to arrive at this maximum.  They tell you that you are moving in the right direction.  Follow the indicators of your maximum state and you will automatically be re-integrated into the maximizing machinery and taken to your maximum in one seamless process.  

The criteria used to identify past events of operating at your maximum for the Sourcing-Your-Savant analyses, are the same signals that you will be following to guide you within the scenario you.  When these signposts are not in evidence, you will need to take safe actions in any direction until you find them again.   You might have zigged when the maximizing machinery zagged.

Your new modus operandi
.       Follow your savant formula and indicators of your maximum
You may recall that this is the thrust of the section entitled why you want to Learn All Twelve Categories:
“There is an important reason why you will eventually want to investigate all twelve categories.  This is because this will not be a one-time exercise.  It will become your new routine modus operandi.  You will analyze immediate events as they happen to choose the direction that will keep you hugging the flow of the maximizing process.  Repeating the exercise for more current events will be the way you will read, merge into, and capitalize on the maximizing machinery going forward.These twelve analyses will provide the information that you need for your daily decision-making, goal-setting, and goal achievement.”

If we are resetting you to your maximum then operating in this way will become your new way of life.  You will always want to be directed by the signals of the maximizing machinery.  There would be little point to resetting to your maximum if it was not your intent to sustain that maximum.  Now you know how to do that.  You are ready to make the paradigm shift.

.       Participate in proactive breakthrough synthesis

Let me offer a little more insight into your new modus operandi.  You will be partnering with a nonlinear opportunistic maximizing machinery that is synchronizing and synergizing all living systems for survival and adaptation.  The creativity it uses to resolve maximizing challenges is something I have coined ‘breakthrough synthesis’ in previous articles.

Breakthrough synthesis is the perpetual process of re-combining existing information systems to create a new information system.  Serial breakthrough synthesis is the recognizable serial quantum leap process which underlies all biological evolution.  It is what generates the leaps I often speak of such as coincidences externally and leaps internally such as breakthroughs, flashes of genius, sudden savantism, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and sudden flow states.  This is the process you are merging with when you reclaim your membership in a massive biological machinery.  One goal is to tap into the breakthroughs to accelerate your progress to your goals.  However, there is also an opportunity for you to drive this breakthrough synthesis to achieve larger more innovative goals faster.  Future articles will help you to develop this expertise.

For the purpose of this paradigm shift or quantum leap to your maximum, it is worth imagining that it will take you three to seven coincidences in order to have the information pieces to recombine into a new information system that enables you to achieve your goal.  You will want to be vigilant in letting yourself be guided by the machinery to colliding with the necessary information pieces.  Try not to force yourself to proceed linearly through a known project plan.  Let yourself become nonlinear and opportunistic wherever it is safely possible to experiment.

Even non-creatives and those with less than stellar intelligence will see how to re-combine three to seven information pieces for breakthroughs when they are placed in front of them.  History is riddled with examples.  It is possible for you to become one of them.  Create what has never existed before.  Create your equivalent version of a Google, Facebook, or Apple.

Below are some links to what I have already said in previous articles about breakthrough synthesis:
Breakthrough synthesis  
Brilliant breakthroughs
Biological breakthrough synthesis  
Flow is our internal breakthrough synthesis 
The science behind breakthrough synthesis 
Serial breakthrough synthesis or serial information creation or serial frontiering™   
Brilliant breakthroughs for the ungifted?
Breakthrough synthesis redefines leading?
Breakthrough synthesis – the new job search / job creation process

As you spend time in your new scenario, growth processes are launched that will continue to raise your baseline performance and functionality for the rest of your life.  In effect, even the information system that is ‘you’ will become an ingredient in breakthrough synthesis.  Even you will be recombined with other information systems to create a new ‘you’ around the innate immutable essence that is you.  It is important to understand that there is no finite arrival at your maximum.  Once your partnership with the maximizing machinery extends your potential externally your potential becomes as infinite as nature.  Given this new breakthrough modus operandi, true human potential is as yet unquantified.

Additional miscellaneous tactics for the reset-to-your-maximum exercise

Some additional rules of engagement will ensure the success of your foray into a scenario for your reset to your maximum:

    1. Your work in your chosen scenario must impact or advance reality or the outside world in some way.
  1. Any action you take should elicit indicators that you are moving towards maximization:  top-talent flow     b.   emotional highs     c.   coincidences, leaps, and facilitating events
  2. Comply with the historical evidence:  Pursue those directions and elements that the machinery supports.  Exclude the things it has not historically supported.
  3. As a novice, avoid emotionally-charged goals until your expertise and proficiency improve.  For many this will mean you should not set goals for money, valuing, acceptance and inclusion to compensate for abandonment and exclusion, and abundance to compensate for scarcity.
  4. Protect your system integrity at all costs.  Where possible, take safe experimental actions only.  There is no need to take risks to re-integrate into the maximizing machinery.  Risks should be considered ‘blocks’ to routes you were considering.  Keep the same end-goal but find another route or a better time when the machinery is more receptive.
  5. Watch for facilitating events or gates to open up to show you the best direction in which to proceed.   You should thrill to the prospect of your next action or do not take it.  There should be coincidences, leaps and flow events to facilitate your progress in the adaptive direction for you.  Alternatively, if there are blocks, even internal ones such as negative emotions, stop.  Find a better route to your goal which appears to be supported by the machinery.  Nothing should need force.
  6. However, never leave a flow event or coincidence unexplored.  These are created by opportunities for synergy with other living systems.  Take safe actions to find those opportunities.   They indicate the adaptive direction for your system.
  7. Keep non-play elements to a minimum.  Honor your goal if you must choose between your goal and the goal of your scenario – a charity, for example.  It is important not to be pulled off-track.  You may already have that situation at work so your scenario needs to be a safe free environment where you can meet your maximizing goals.
  8. It is okay to take action with the signposts of the maximizing flow without knowing precisely what your goal is.  An emotional blueprint or how your arrival at a goal will feel is sufficient.


Reset Scenarios

SCENARIOS FOR THE EMPLOYED
to Reset to their Maximum by achieving sustained or serial top-talent flow

These scenarios suggest contexts conducive to releasing you to reintegrate with nature’s adaptation machinery.  Once you begin moving in the direction of your maximum, there will come a point of critical mass.  Nature will take over and begin pulling you to your maximum and into adaptive directions.  Nature’s maximizing machinery will begin grouping your system to advantage for synergies and synchronizing.  For those who are employed, it is still possible to free yourself to reset to your maximum.  Where possible, however, you should keep risks to your current employment status to a minimum until your expertise develops.

Scenario 1:    Redesign your existing job

If employed, your ideal method to reset to your maximum is to re-design your existing job to comply with your natural growth path and the direction the maximizing machinery has historically pressured your system to progress.  If this cannot be done directly, perhaps the following strategies might be used:

  • Add special projects to your job, especially skunkworks or new ventures.  Top-talent flow can only be experienced if you are advancing through new challenges and creations.
  • Join projects elsewhere within your employer
  • Partner with companies that do business with your employer or create projects around the interface
  • Create charitable ventures for your employer’s corporate giving program which require your strongest talents
  • Seek secondments to governments or companies/organizations surrounding your employer which will benefit both sides and yourself.
Scenario 2:    Take a different job within your current employer that already exists
Scenario 3:    Create a new job within your employer
Scenario 4:    Create a new project or new venture within your current employer

Ideally these will become part of your existing job as part of the job redesign sought in Scenario 1.  However, if necessary, work outside of your job on perhaps initially unsanctioned projects until they have advanced enough to be supported by your employer and become part of your job or create a new job ideal for you.

Scenario 5:    Take an active Board of Director position with an outside company

This will let you do the work you were designed to do without leaving your employer. 

Scenario 6:    Work for a charity or not-for-profit after work

Ideally this could be a role sponsored by your current employer as part of their corporate giving program identified in the redesign of your job in Scenario 1.  However, it may be necessary to create a new context conducive to resetting to your maximum which is unrelated to your current job or employer.
Caution:  For the goals of this exercise, it is important to not be dragged into work which is not related to resetting your system to its maximum.  Unfortunately, one must recognize that the needs of the have-nots in this world are infinite.  You are taking on this additional work to reset to your maximum in a meaningful way.  It is best to restrict the gift you are prepared to give to the giving of your strongest talents applied to your most rewarding and valued work at your maximum.  This benefits both sides of the equation while energizing rather than depleting you.  The resulting partnership with the maximizing machinery will reposition you to a more adaptive context long-term.

Scenario 7:    Cultivate a hobby outside of work in which you can maximize

There is the possibility that breakthrough synthesis may find a way for your hobby or home studies to eventually become your source of revenue and ultimately your career.  Remember to choose your hobbies to comply with your unpaid work drives, and creation-pursuit, growth-pursuit, frontiering-pursuit, and top-talent flow drives.  So many fabulous careers have been launched in a home garage.

Scenario 8:    Research projects undertaken for your employer

These projects should comply with your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, and frontiering-pursuit drives.  Achieving breakthroughs that will advance your employer or your industry will advance your career, upgrade your worth to your employer, and become the driver of your biologically maximized career.  So many phenomenal careers have begun with a single breakthrough.

Scenario 9:    Give Speeches.  Write books.  Blog.  Teach.  Pursue a field of study.

The preparation and delivery of material you are passionate about developing within the territory of your strongest talents will pull you into serial top-talent flow states.  This will give you access to the magic associated with coupling with the maximizing machinery and its serial breakthrough synthesis.  Even a few breakthroughs may be career-changing, life-changing, and even world-changing.

SCENARIOS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED
(and possibly the EMPLOYED)
to Reset to their Maximum by achieving sustained or serial top-talent flow

This collection of scenarios for resetting to your maximum capitalizes on the increased flexibility of the unemployed.  The scenarios are grouped into two categories:
Scenarios 1-4:  This set of contexts for biologically normalizing include assembling a company, buying a company, starting a company, or borrowing a company or job
Scenarios 5-7:  This second category of scenarios is fashioned directly from the seven iconic founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon we have been examining in earlier articles.  It is about releasing to your natural drives for growth, creation, frontiering™, and learning until you are able to commercialize them into paid play, often with the creation of a new field or frontier.  This is the means to achieve your maximum lifetime legacy and really explore the outer limits of your capabilities.

Scenario 1:  Assemble a mature virtual company from existing components:
companies, firms, professionals, technology, information systems, contractors, consultants, workforces, skills, and such.

This is one of my favourite techniques for quickly resetting my outplacement clients to their maximum to accelerate their job search process.  A virtual organization is assembled to provide the perfect context to replicate one’s past maximum events.  It should therefore comply with your findings from your Sourcing-Your-Savant exercise:  your unpaid work, creation-pursuit, frontier-pursuit, and core-expansion themes and especially your historical formula for top-talent flow.  Anything that does not help you to persist in serial top-talent flow states is outsourced.  Anything that is more work than play is outsourced.
.        Virtual company design
This scenario is not about starting and growing an entrepreneurial company from scratch.  This is about melding fully operational units together as a mature company.  Nor should this model be used to recreate a lost job.  The job was lost due to system corrections which may have well have been instigated by the adaptivity needs of your own system.  There is little future in trying to go against the flow of the maximizing process.

The maximizing machinery found your de-hiring adaptive for some human system whether that system was yours, the company’s, the market’s, the industry’s, or some other system.  There had to be many thwarting signals consistent with no support by the maximizing machinery that you had to overlook to end up experiencing the surprise loss of your job.  Now that you know what to look for, you will not be blindsided again.  In the future, you will proactively reposition with the signposts of the maximizing machinery to be led out of the old context and into a new more adaptive one.

Coincidences, breakthroughs, flow events, and quantum leaps will catapult you nonlinearly and opportunistically to endgame jobs or the success of this newly created customized virtual organization.  When you have the right design for your system, the virtual company will almost form itself.  There will be magic.  There should be lots of leaps propelling your forward.  So even if you have only an emotional blueprint of the final company design or how it will feel, you can move at top speed to implement it. Partnering with the maximizing machinery will ensure that your natural growth path will become the company’s growth path.

The virtual company is intrinsically rewarding in and of itself.  However it will also be one of the fastest ways to penetrate the hidden job market to close your ideal job.  This will require a separate article to explain.  Suffice it to say that your marketing efforts for selling your virtual company’s services will coincide with selling yourself into your ideal job.

Scenario 2:  Buy a company with private equity

You may not need to create a virtual organization to reset to your maximum.  You may be lucky enough to find a company that will give you your ideal job for operating at your biological maximum and you can simply buy the company.  Look for flows to facilitate finding the right company and blocks to the wrong one.

Scenario 3:  Start an entrepreneurial company along your natural growth path

The design of the company should offer the perfect expression of the maximum you.  The growth path of the company should align with your knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit, frontiering-pursuit and core-expansion or growth drives.  The goal is to be paid to achieve your maximum lifetime growth and achievement.

Scenario 4:  Borrow a company and/or a job

An interim employment contract is a great way to normalize to your maximum.  Employment could be at a company, a not-for profit, an association, a charity, or similar.  If there are no interim executive jobs available, it may be advantageous to offer your services for free to speed your reset to your maximum.  Coincidences and breakthroughs may then quickly catapult you to a more permanent arrangement.

Scenario 5:  Free-form work driven by your unleashed top-talent drives:
.                     Unpaid-work , and knowledge-pursuit, creation-pursuit,
.                     frontiering-pursuit, core-expansion, and top-talent flow drives

This is a completely unstructured approach to freeing your day to the above drives in order to advance the world in some way.  This is intrinsically rewarding in and of itself.  However, over time you will begin to scale new frontiers in your top-talent territory.  A plethora of breakthroughs, coincidences, and leaps will pull you in unknown directions which in 20/20 hindsight will appear immensely logical and adaptive.  You will find that your version of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or Apple will emerge.

This is a frontiering adventure into new territory or bringing the new into existence.  It is pure serial breakthrough synthesis.  Rather than having a defined structure for a project or entrepreneurial company, this is about being pulled by the drives and passions associated with applying one’s strongest talents until the field, the job, the invention, the discovery, or the company emerges.

Scenario 6:   Analyzing and developing your ‘science’

This is not about true science. This is about the development of a set of rules or procedures or discoveries that will allow those without your innate talent to operate as you do or to accomplish goals you were able to accomplish.  You are seeing my science in these articles.  They capture what I do instinctively so that others without my aptitude may apply it to achieve beyond their potential.  As you analyze how you use your strongest talents you will be increasing your abilities and breaking through new frontiers.  For some, this scenario will allow them to achieve top-talent flow states and reset to their maximum.  It will work for the employed or unemployed.

Scenario 7:  Pursue your lifetime legacy

There are those who know what they want their greatest lifetime legacy to be based on the maximum application of their strongest talents applied to the most worthy cause for the most receptive and valuing audience.  By committing to its achievement using the breakthrough synthesis of the maximizing machinery, you will quickly find that you have reset to your maximum.

Proactive Serial Job Replacement

SERIAL JOB REPLACEMENTA Career Game-Changer

A Breakthrough, High-Speed, High-GrowthPROACIVE, High-Impact Career Strategy     Accelerated Multi-System Job Search     Free Support for Your Executive Job Search     Biologically Maximized Job Search     Key Job Search Upgrades     Major Differences between Today’s Job Search and Tomorrow’s Biologically Maximized Replacement     Operating as part of a High-Growth System of Systems     Major Improvements in Information Sources     Breakthrough Synthesis – the new job search / job creation process     Nonlinear Job Search     High-Speed Growth

A  BREAKTHROUGH,  HIGH-SPEED, HIGH-GROWTH,  HIGH-IMPACT  CAREER  STRATEGY

The inefficiencies of today’s job search protocol may leave the majority of executive job searchers jobless for 1 to 2 years.  If we can dramatically shorten that time and remove the challenges, risks, dangers, and damages of the current process, then a powerful new career strategy will become possible.  If we had a high-speed, high-growth, high-impact job search protocol, an accelerated career strategy of serial job replacement™ would be viable.  Serial job replacement™ offers tremendous opportunities for growth, wealth creation, and impact across your career.

For example, a wealth-creation strategy based on serial severance packages and signing bonuses becomes possible.  Each new job may be negotiated at a higher salary level than the scale in which you are currently imprisoned might allow.  Each new job offers new learning opportunities.  Further, if serial job replacement proficiency exists, it becomes less risky to take time off between jobs to grow, pursue fields of interests, raise proficiency, and raise earning potential before negotiating your next position.

For those developing new fields, you could take a break to scale new frontiers before locking into a more lucrative or resource-plenty job context which recognizes your upgraded capabilities or new inventions.  As luck would have it, the new biologically maximized career strategy that we have been investigating has safe serial job replacement™ built into it.  Context changes are integral to the normal system corrections inherent in the perpetual maximizing of systems of living systems.

In the last article we reviewed some of the challenges and weaknesses of today’s job search protocol.  This article will provide a brief overview of a revolutionary replacement protocol.  The key improvements will be highlighted.  Many of the inadequacies of today disappear with a single paradigm shift.  Future articles will provide practical tactics, strategies, and understanding to facilitate using the new paradigm for your job search or indeed any project you want to accelerate and enhance with the power, direction, and capabilities of the maximizing machinery. 

ACCELERATED  MULTI-SYSTEM  JOB  SEARCH

 Most job search protocols assume that you are a separate biological entity.  What if you changed that paradigm?  How would job search transform if you instead exploited the fact that you are integrated with all living systems in synergy and synchronization?  How would it change if you could conscript the capabilities of surrounding systems as well as nature’s machinery of mechanisms, processes, power, forces, and information that keep all biological systems maximized for survival?  Where would your career take you if you rejoined the massive orchestration of all biological systems to maximization and evolution?

We have all seen this maximizing ‘machinery’ in action.  It keeps our internal organs and systems maximized.  Externally, it maximizes systems of systems such as biological ecosystems, stock markets, and economic and sociological systems.  How could we harness this maximizing machinery to expedite and elevate your search for that profoundly gratifying, life-enhancing job?  Executives, by definition, spend their days maximizing systems of systems within their companies and markets.  By and large, they do it in exactly the same way that nature does.  So let’s take a closer look at how you might apply this expertise to capitalize on systems of biological systems.

But before we do, let me first forewarn you that this will not be a tweak here and there to today’s popularized job search protocol.  This will be a complete re-write.  A paradigm shift.  This will be a revolution that will spill over into how you achieve goals in every aspect of your life.  If you are a fan of today’s job search, you may not want to read further.  These strategies cannot work in a paradigm based on biological separation.

The magic happens only when one complies with the systems maximizing mechanisms that have evolved the human race.  Biological mechanisms, processes, and resources not accessible in any other state suddenly become available to you  –  both internally and externally  –  when you operate in your maximized state.  In fact, internal and external mechanisms link up.  Circuits complete as they have evolved together to do.

It is well worth packaging your goals in such a way as to garner the support of this maximizing flow because that support is significant.  The machinery provides the power, the right direction, the right information at the right time, and an abundance of leaps to catapult you ahead.  These leaps vary from information coincidences externally to internal leaps to sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, flashes of genius, and whole-brain savantism.  Included also are leaps to our peak-performance, peak-growth flow states:  our maximized state.

  BIOLOGICALLY  MAXIMIZED  JOB  SEARCH

In previous articles, we have been examining the biologically maximized career strategy observable in the lives of such notables as the seven iconic founders of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.  We want to now build on what you have learned to create a biologically maximized job search protocol.  Let’s see if we cannot replace the hit-and-miss, meaningless, menial, devaluing, and demeaning tasks of today’s job search with a revolutionary approach that is exhilarating, accelerated, nourishing, growth-inciting, targeted, and acutely accurate in its selection of your ideal job.SERIAL JOB REPLACEMENTToday’s job search is externally driven.  It is about selling yourself into the available jobs.  In contrast, the maximizing machinery is dedicated to maximizing your biological predisposition.  It is internally or biologically driven.  Biology pressures us to stretch to apply our strongest talents to creations at increasingly more challenging and impactful levels.  We have evolved addictive drives that biologically bias us to use and improve our strongest strengths to maximize.  The more you comply with these addictive drives, the more you will want to comply with them.

We are therefore, as expected, biologically biased to growth and peak performance because it is advantageous to the survival of the species.  We want to line up our job search strategy and indeed any goal with the direction of this biological bias and predisposition.  Therefore in shifting to a biologically maximized job search, you will be shifting from externally driven selling to internally driven growth.  The new protocol will immediately launch you into a high-growth state from day one.

This is what we observed in the careers of our seven super-achievers, Bill Gates, the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak , Mark Zuckerberg , Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos.  Their careers were defined by their biologically driven growth path.  Their jobs emerged as the ideal next context for that growth to occur.  The jobs emerged as the leaps noted above that are characteristic of partnering with the maximizing machinery:   coincidences, sudden knowledge, and flashes of genius.  Their unprecedented jobs were biologically created as part of the fundamental creative dynamic of the maximizing process:  the re-combining of existing information systems to create new systems.

Alternatively, their jobs were collided with by their growth causing them to be re-grouped with more synergistic systems as part of the self-organizing of the larger system of which they were a part.  An employer, a partner, a customer – these are just biological systems with which it is logical to group you for synergy.  Selling against biological self-organization is unlikely to be successful.  It is smarter to go with the flow.

With the biological commitment to growth and maximization, new functionality will emerge during job search or indeed any time you want to harness the maximizing machinery to achieve goals.  The very meta-skills needed at executive levels are the ones that develop when biologically maximized.  These include improvements to your conceptual, abstract, and big-picture thinking skills, your pattern recognition skills, your creativity, your abilities to deal with ambiguities and unknowns, your expanded consciousness, and more.

You will come out of the job search process with more functionality to bring to your next job.  This is in sharp contrast to today’s job search which tends to deplete people because they are doing administrative work that they do not like.  Today’s job search further undermines most by keeping you from using you career or work talents for one to two years.

All of the indicators of operating at your maximum tracked for the 12 categories of past events for the Sourcing Your Savant exercises are telling you how to proceed at full speed to your next job.  In addition, the Sourcing Your Savant exercises enabled you to identify the kinds of work that maximizing has supported in your past.  You therefore already have the means to choose goals to garner predictable support in the future.

The exercises give you a glimpse of a dynamic order that you can harness in the future to improve your chances of achieving any goal.  They significantly reduce the challenges and risk associated with job search.  Trauma and damage will reduce if you know the safe supported direction.

A you would expect, all 12 categories point you into the same direction.  Therefore, your ideal job will be indicated, for example, by an intersection of your past-event themes of addictive drives drawing you to pursue certain fields of knowledge, creation, frontiers, and/ or unpaid work.  Therefore, you already have the means to adjust your job search process and the job you seek to be able to perform at your maximum to complete a job search in record time.

Positive emotions, passions, and facilitating events will arise as indicators that you are moving in the right direction.  Opposition events will emerge when you are off-path.  The more you have been on-path, the ‘louder’ the messages will be when you slip off it.  They will be an indicator of the body’s rebellion after having experienced the way it was supposed to operate.  We know that your growth path is not linear.  You now have the means to limit the negatives and toxicity often inherent in today’s protocol by moving with the maximizing flow rather than against it.KEY JOB SEARCH UPGRADES


MAJOR  DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TODAY’S JOB SEARCH AND TOMORROW’S BIOLOGICALLY MAXIMIZED REPLACEMENT

1.     Shift from OPERATING AS A SEPARATE BIOLOGICAL ENTITY  to  OPERATING AS PART OF A HIGH-GROWTH SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS

The revolutionary job search protocol I am proposing entails a paradigm shift from the job searcher operating as a separate biological entity to one in which s/he is integrated within and capitalizing upon a system of systems.  It is about driving a biological machinery which operates in predictable, knowable ways to ensure the survival of the majority of living systems.

.     Multi-System Achieving

This machinery or systems of systems is relentless in trying to maximize you through synergy and synchronization with the other living systems it orchestrates.  Therefore, you have a choice.  You can comply with it and capitalize on it or you can fight it.  Who wants to fight upstream against the flow of living systems seeking survival synergistically?  And who wants to be left behind the global trends of synchronized living systems?  How much easier it is to mesh your goals with those of the maximizing process in order to conscript its power and magic.

The Sourcing Your Savant exercises give you insight into your system’s maximum and the kinds of goals the machinery has supported in your past and therefore will support in your future.  Job search will become fast, easy, and fun when you know how to avoid times where you will not be successful and to increase the times that you will experience success.   

If you want to harness the power, capabilities, direction, synergies, synchronization, and information of the maximizing machinery and all of the living systems it orchestrates to support any personal goal, you have only to help it achieve its goals.  You need to be continuously striving to operate at your maximum to align your goals with its goals.  Your career, your job search process, and the job you pursue will all need to align with pressure to maximize your system.

You will also need to recognize that there are other systems relevant to these goals which are also being maximized simultaneously.  The ideal job choice is one in which the employer system provides the best context for your continual expansions while your system is symbiotically pivotal to the expansions and maximizations of the employer system.  The maximizing machinery will promote this synergy among systems.  It will automatically group systems as part of maximizing the larger system of which you and an employer are both a part.  When you merge with the maximizing process you will be pressured to collide with each other through coincidences and leaps.  This will accelerate and enhance the attainment of any goal.

We will therefore want to get it working for your job search process.  That is why the first task after firing is to create work which stretches you to operate at your maximum using your strongest most rewarding talents hopefully in the service of your job search or salary replacement.  This may be the exact opposite of what must happen with today’s job search protocol where you are pressured to begin chasing available jobs.

However, from the high-growth state of maximization, it becomes easy to read signposts as to the pathway to desired jobs or even the correct fit of jobs that are offered.  It will be valuable to be blocked by impediments when you are selling yourself into a job contrary to the biological goals and predispositions of your system.  No one wants a job in which they must continually swim upstream against the current for their system.  No one wants to fight their biology.  Therefore, finessing a sales pitch to get a job contrary to your biological predisposition will either fail immediately or in the short term.

This is not personal.  It is neutral systems maximization.  It is about what is best for the survival of all interacting systems in this system of systems of which you are a part.  The employer’s system, the interviewer’s system, the market system, and your family system may all be relevant.  When you merge with your right configuration of systems for synergy and synchronization, there will be a tell-tale pattern of facilitating signposts or indicators that will confirm you have got it right.

Multi-system achieving is the fundamental paradigm shift which differentiates the new revolutionary protocol for job search.  Merging with the maximizing machinery will not only ensure you are operating at peak performance to conduct your job search.  You are likely to even be able to perform and achieve beyond your potential as your capabilities and information are extended by those of surrounding systems.

2.     MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS IN INFORMATION SOURCES:

  • Shift from stockpiling people (networking) as off-chance information sources to sourcing the right information at the right time via the maximizing machinery
  • Shift to serial information leaps inherent in the maximizing process such as coincidences, breakthroughs, sudden knowledge, sudden creativity, and flashes of genius 
  • Shift to merging with the information sourcing and information creation process that is the essence of the maximizing process

One of the most dramatic differences between today’s job search and the proposed multi-systems approach is the sources of information that each uses.  Networking is the number one strategy promoted for today’s executive job search.  This entails the stockpiling of people on the off-chance that they may be able to either tell you about job opportunities or facilitate introductions for closing a job.  I have discussed this at length in the previous article.

Through partnering with the maximizing process, the proposed protocol provides information in the three ways noted above.  If this indeed proves to be true, 80% of the activity of today’s executive job search protocol will be eliminated.  If networking has not been working for you, now there is an alternative for you to test out.

.         Breakthrough Synthesis  –  the new job search / job creation process

It takes a lot of work to source and sustain a network.  The returns on your efforts are low and by no means guaranteed.  Partnering with the maximizing process offers job seekers the opportunity to source the right information at the right time with very little effort.  Maximizing is really just the process of coming up with creative solutions to improve and adapt systems.  This creativity emerges from the re-combining of existing information systems to create new information systems that are the solutions to maximizing challenges.

I have called this process breakthrough synthesis since leaps or breakthroughs are generated.  It occurs because the larger system of which we are a part groups systems such as us for synergies, resource-sharing and information-sharing.  It orders systems in the same way any CEO would organize company resources.  If we comply with its direction, we will be grouped with the ideal systems for leaps to accelerate our job search or indeed any goal we have aligned with it.

The new job search protocol is therefore partnering with an information sourcing and creation process.  The existing information pieces that will serve as fuel are borrowed from various systems which have been grouped around us for synergies.  Picture this happening as a zipper closing in front of you.

As you move behind the zipper where the borrowed information systems are being re-combined, you will see a dramatic increase in the leaps or new information systems that are its products.  Therefore, you have only to line up your job search goal with this zipper and you will be catapulted to your goal by these coincidences and leaps.  Move your job search to either side of the maximizing zipper and the number of leaps will decrease.

These leaps or new information-system ‘products’ emerge from the ‘zipper link-ups’ as coincidences, flashes of genius, sudden knowledge, and sudden creativity.  The leaps even include shifts into our peak- performance, peak-growth states.  These are the leaps into the altered consciousness of flow states, especially those that emerge from using and improving our strongest, most rewarding, talents on meaningful goals that stretch and challenge them.  This is our maximum state so of course it is the goal state pressured by the maximizing machinery.

.         High-Speed Job Search due to improved information

When you can increase the coincidences helping you to find your job from one or two per month to 20 to 50 per month, you will understand how quickly and efficiently you can locate your next ideal job on your career maximization growth path.  This is a far superior ROI than anything pure networking may help you with.  Further, these leaps are nonlinear.  You may be able to bypass hundreds of linear steps with one information leap.  This is another point of comparison of the current and proposed job search process.  Let’s investigate nonlinearity separately below.

3.     Shift from LINEAR to NONLINEAR JOB SEARCH

Nature has figured out that nonlinear is faster, safer, more creative, and more serendipitous with a multitude of coincidences and leaps catapulting you forward.  As the next section indicates, even growth is nonlinear.  To operate in partnership with biology, then, you will obviously have to unlearn some cultural things such as requiring goal achievement or growth to be a step-by-step linear progression.

The information leaps of which I have been speaking may bypass hundreds of linear steps to speed you to your goal. They may lead to outcomes which may not be possible to achieve linearly.  And they may even lead to outcomes or ways of achieving your goals which never occurred to you.

These outcomes may not even be a linear extension of your start point.  Rather they may be the product of the process of emergence that is inherent in chaos and catastrophe theory.  This may be better understood by thinking of the popularized butterfly effect:  the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system may result in large differences in a later state.  Would it not be wonderful to have this process working for your job search?

The nonlinear leaps that are the byproducts of  the maximizing process are able to take you from one stable state to the next thus minimizing damage or trauma to your system. These leaps and nonlinearity offer unexpected corrections to issues with today’s job search process which I identified in the previous article.  Job search will suddenly become efficient, exciting, accelerated and, frankly, FUN.

4.     Shift from THE DEVOLUTION OF CAREER SKILLS DUE TO NON-USE DURING JOB SEARCH  to  HIGH-SPEED GROWTH:

Even one’s growth path, when partnering with the maximizing process, will be nonlinear.  The application of your strongest talents to challenges that stretch them will always be central to you operating at your maximum.  Therefore growth will constantly be an amplification, an expansion, an intensification of those strongest talents and their impact on reality.  It is not about a linear progression to a new form but leaps to magnifications of existing strengths or predisposition.  Expansions of your essence.  Your core.

This is why I believe serial job replacement will and should become integral to any career strategy.  The more time you spend merged with the maximizing machinery, the faster these expansion leaps occur.  After each one you are likely to want to either re-define your current job or replace it to allow you to continue to stretch to your next frontier of capability.  There is no smarter career or life strategy than to be paid to grow at maximum speed along the path you would pursue anyway given every resource and freedom.

This is what we observed in the careers of the seven iconic founders of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon.  Each lived a biologically maximized career.  Their jobs emerged from their advance through new frontiers of their natural growth paths – even if they had to invent unprecedented jobs to accommodate their growth.  Their careers were not determined externally by what jobs were available but internally based on successive frontiers of expansions that they were biologically pulled to pursue.

Because they were moving behind the maximizing zipper, the jobs usually found them as leaps created by the breakthrough synthesis that is the maximization process.  This is certainly a lot less work than today’s job search process and makes the desired Serial Job Replacement™ career strategy entirely accessible.  This is no doubt music to the ears of any down-trodden job searcher frustrated by the networking approach.

The maximizing machinery itself may initiate this serial job replacement even without you having thought of it.  As the information structure of your system is transformed by a growth expansion, the larger system in which you are housed will group your system with more appropriate systems which have synergy with your newly expanded system.  Nature organizes systems as efficiently as a good CEO would do.  Synergistic systems and especially those which share resources or purpose are grouped together into ‘departments’.

While there are new skills with each growth expansion, there are a multitude of meta-skills which emerge through other aspects of the maximizing process.  Expect to dramatically grow your functionality and especially your executive-level meta-skills during your brief vacation from employment.  In contrast, today’s job search is more likely to devolve you than grow you since you will likely spend 1 to 2 years away from work involving your professional specialization.

Whether you want to launch your biologically maximized career, your job search, or to achieve any goal, you will want to immediately re-center onto your natural core and begin operating at your biological maximum.  This is the way to harness the power, the direction, the capabilities, the information, the leaps, and the magic of the maximizing process that enhances and orchestrates all living systems for survival.  This process will begin in the next article which offers several start scenarios to suit a variety of career situations.

FURTHER READING:
Executive Job Search before biologically maximized
Sourcing Your Savant:  Hyper-Focus your Career on your Genius
Reset to your Maximum to Outperform your Potential.

Executive Job Search

Job Search before biologically maximized

The need for proactive serial job replacement in all career strategy

A BIOLOGICALLY MAXIMIZED JOB SEARCH     TODAY’S EXECUTIVE JOB SEARCH STRATEGY     The Hidden Job Market     Networking or ‘stockpiling people’ for information and referrals     Damage and dangers from job search networking     Give-to-get networking     Executive job search networks and job search work teams     Psychological counseling for employer damage control

Today’s job search strategies seem to have been developed by non-executives and inflicted on executives by an industry committed to promoting them despite their historical failure.  How can 1-2 years of daily damage and devaluing for executives to sell themselves into a new job signify success?  Job replacement used to be a career exception.  Serial job replacement is now the rule.  If we can accept that reality, we can stop trying to apply patches to the inefficiencies and damages inherent in today’s job search protocol.  It is time for a total re-write.  Proactive serial job replacement needs to be fully integrated into all career management strategy. 

I have dedicated decades to executive career maximization.  I have known many executives before and after job search.  I used to be able to just pick up the pieces of the battle-worn job searcher once they returned to employment where my invoices were again covered.  Unfortunately, I reached a tipping point.  The destruction of an executive’s esprit de corps during job search is too heart-wrenching.  There is too much loss on every side.  Some never recover either their former glory or their former performance levels.  Some are never able to reinstate their previous quality of life personally or professionally.  Too many are permanently scarred.  I felt compelled to create a new less damaging and more efficient job search protocol.

Putting aside the personal devastation for each executive for a moment, it seems to me that this is no way to run the planet.  How does it make sense to have your best and your brightest out of commission for a couple of years?  Or irreparably damaged, for that matter?  These are our world-changers.  We need them doing what they do, not destroyed by a job search seeking the opportunity to do what they do.  If you were running the world the way you run your company, maximizing your human resources is management 101.  Downtime of our leaders is a waste of key human assets.

In addition, the economy and the career needs of individuals are increasing the number of jobs if not careers that we have over a lifetime.  Clearly we need improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, and humanity of our job search protocol.  It is time to stop tweaking the make-shift protocol that was designed decades ago to address the occasional need for job search.  What was the exception is now the rule for the majority.  We must now accept serial job replacement as a career constant.

Consequently, we must now formally invent an appropriate job search protocol that is fully integrated into life-time career management strategies.  We need to make serial job replacement workable, rewarding, purposeful, and profitable.  Ideally we need a method of serial job replacement which is high-growth, high-speed, and nourishing and fulfilling in and of itself.  We need a paradigm shift in job search protocols.

A BIOLOGICALLY MAXIMIZED JOB SEARCH

The paradigm shift into the biologically maximized career introduced in my previous posts, gave me a completely novel context from which to recommend job search strategy.  What would a biologically maximized job search look like for executives?   But wait.  Biological maximization is holistic.  There would not be the need for a separate job search process.  It would already be integrated.

Job losses or leaps would simply be part of neutral system corrections to improve system maximization or to solve maximization challenges.  Therefore they could be foreseeable.  They could be capitalized upon as with all partnering with the maximizing machinery.  What could these neutral system corrections be used for?  Quantum leaps in growth? Repositioning for greater performance?  Wealth creation?  Could it be that we could not just protect ourselves from the damage of today’s job search but become so good at serial job replacement that it could be proactively used for profit and gain?

I therefore sought to create a high-growth, high-speed, job search process that actually accelerated executive careers and the growth of their baseline functionality.  This became so exciting and successful that I gradually began to build proactive job replacement into my career maximization strategies.  Soon every client employment contract was negotiated to maximize the benefits of a new serial job replacement process.  Serial severance packages and signing bonuses became a pivotal wealth-creation tool and a signature of my executive career partnering services.

This was indeed excellent lemonade from what had previously been a serious career lemon.  However, one must be very good at job creation or job replacement before one may partake of this lemonade.  I will need to provide extensive instructions to help you to make this paradigm shift with serial job replacement proficiency.

Therefore, I have broken these instructions up into a number of articles.  This first article merely gives us a common understanding of today’s executive job search and indicates some of its inefficiencies and damaging aspects.  The next article provides a comparison of today’s executive job search with that of the new biologically maximizing paradigm.  Articles beyond that will start to get more practical to help those wanting to apply the new model.  Let’s get started.

TODAY’S EXECUTIVE JOB SEARCH STRATEGY

Today’s job search strategies seem to be based on the sales approaches of the insurance industry developed sixty years ago.  Cold-calling and relationship-building techniques that are used to build entire insurance-agent careers are applied to a small job-search project. The same amount of time and effort required to develop a network to launch the lifetime career of a real estate, insurance or executive search agent must be applied to develop a network for a single job search project.

With this much front-end effort, the ROI will therefore be considerably less for this job search project.  This is especially the case when neither the development of the skills nor the end products are likely to be more than nice-to-haves when one returns to one’s real career.  Obviously today’s job search protocol is massively inefficient.

In addition, today’s job search industry appears to have grown up around administrative staff and well-meaning counselors.  It emerged to protect firing employers with deep pockets.  There were few executives or strategists developing the field or taking into consideration how executives operate.  So again, it is not been designed for efficiency for the executive target market.

The average job seeker may find a new job in six to seven months.  Executives, however, may take one to two years.  U.S. Department of Labor statistics suggest job search duration may increase one month for each $10,000 in desired income.  Therefore, an executive making $150,000 would be expected to be in job search around fifteen months.

Imagine whom you might become in a year of fear, devaluing, humiliation, and most importantly, not doing meaningful work.   As I have alluded in a previous article with respect to Steve Jobs, “the blocking of creative expression may be the greatest cause of illness in [high-achieving] executives”.  I do not like to even have my executive clients retire without some channel for the application of their strongest talents to meaningful work for the audience or context that will value it most.

Only about 15-20% of jobs are advertised on internet job banks and in other publications.  Responding to job advertisements is not a good use of executive time and talent.  Many are ill-equipped for the technical savvy and menial repetitive work required to pursue advertised jobs.  Not only may this approach dampen their spirits but it may damage their stature in their work communities.   Again, we are seeing the flaws of what has evolved as job search protocol.  These flaws likely would have been avoided if a protocol had been specifically designed for executives.

The Hidden Job Market

The hidden job market accounts for perhaps 80-85% of all executive hires.  Therefore, this should be a key target of any re-written job search protocol.  These are positions that are filled before they are advertised and may not even involve the Human Resources department.  The hiring manager makes the decision.  Perhaps s/he has an idea for growing the organization, and seeks a prospective employee through her/his network.  Perhaps someone has quit unexpectedly creating a gap that must be filled immediately. Or the company might have landed a major new client and needs to hire immediately.  There may be neither time nor money for either advertising the job or working through a recruiter.

Positions may also be created for candidates who come to an employer’s attention through employee recommendations, referrals from trusted associates, direct inquiries, and the networking efforts of a job seeker.  Therefore, contacting companies and their respective line decision-makers is a great way to gain inroads and initiate discussions that lead to interviews.  Any effective executive job search campaign should focus 80-100% of its time, resources, and strategy to addressing this hidden job market.  An opportunity-seeking mindset is therefore an asset.  Proposing a project may create the job for which you are hired.  Job creation then should be a key part of the job-search-protocol redesign.

Networking or ‘stockpiling people’ for information and referrals

The most touted strategy for looking for work in the ‘hidden job market’ is networking.  This is a marketing campaign where employers are the buyers, and you are the product. Cold marketing means that you apply to employers who do not know you.  Thus you are ‘going in cold.’   Warm marketing engages an intermediary known to the employer to introduce and vouchsafe for you.  As a result, you receive a ‘warm welcome’ instead of a cooler reception.

A lot of focus must be paid to defining the job you are seeking.  Next you research to find potential contacts associated with those companies.  And finally you need to have a strategy for getting to those contacts either for the job directly or to refer you or , at minimum, to join your network.  It is then ideal to have a customized resumé for each of those approaches.

Given the greater success of warm marketing referrals over cold calling, a networking strategy is promoted.  Networking is a way of leveraging the people you already know to get introduced to decision makers at employers you would consider working for.  When done with finesse, you are not asking your network contacts for a job.  Rather, you are seeking information that may lead to a job. 

Networking is about building and maintaining relationships with the people around us. Theoretically, the more people you know, the more people that the people you know are connected with, and the more relevant they are, the more powerful your network. Job-hunting is now billed as a contact sport.  And networking is obviously a numbers game.

As an information source, networking is pretty inefficient.  As suggested above, your ROI is going to be extremely low for the efforts invested to find, attract, and maintain the people in your network.  This will need to be addressed in any new job search protocol.  It would be more efficient to be able to access the right information at the right time rather than stockpiling people on the off-chance that they discover information that may help you with your job search.

Damage and dangers from job search networking

The most successful executives and managers are great networkers.  Unfortunately, many executive job seekers who use their work network for job search destroy the very relationships they need to actually do their new job once they get it.  Executives need a certain stature to operate at this most senior level.  Using their work network from their weakened state or stature as a job hunter may change how they are perceived by their network and, worse, how they perceive themselves.

Personal power is critical at executive levels and one may not recover either inside of oneself or outside with one’s network if you use your work network for your job search.  For example, if you have always been the magnanimous feeder of your network, asking for job-search favors outside of your usual protocol may make relationships awkward and reveal that relationships are limited to the existing protocol or formula or are not reciprocal.  Your relationships may not have the ability to adapt to a new formulation and the old channel is destroyed while you find this out.

My advice is to refrain from beating yourself up for not networking to find your desired job.  If you normally have good throughput, then you are likely not procrastinating when you avoid networking.  You are sensing real danger in pursuing this highly promoted job search strategy.

Historically, how many times did overruling this resistance to action work out for you?  I suspect that it never did.  I trust your gut!  To back it up, use the Sourcing Your Savant exercise criteria to make a rational unemotional decision based on the historical evidence.  Remember, the job search industry began with counselors, administrative personnel, career managers, HR people, and executive search consultants.  Not an executive among them.  Trust your instincts and your history.  Operate from your strengths and your maximized state.

     Give-to-get networking

There must be mutual gain in networking.  Many executives have delicately balanced quid-pro-quo relationships in business.  This is how business has traditionally been done.  There may be permanent repercussions from seeking help from individuals in your work network.  ‘Friends’ in your last job may be competitively threatened personally or for their companies by placing you back into a powerful position.  Putting friendship aside, it may be a savvy business strategy for them to keep you from getting into a power position which may diminish their company’s profits.  Unfortunately, they may proactively pursue that strategy using their own work network to block your job search.  Your losses will be compounded if their work network is the same as yours.

However, your vendor networks may want exactly the opposite.  If you are likely to use a new job to bring them business, they will happily flex their executive muscle to put you into a position of power with one of their customers.  Many large vendors may even have the power and influence to have a current incumbent removed to create a vacancy for you.  At minimum, they may offer you an office and resources on their premises for your job search because it is in their interest to do so.  But understand, quid pro quo will be expected or there may be negative repercussions when you are re-employed.

Hopefully, the new job search design will not only circumvent the inefficiencies but the dangers of networking.  It would be ideal to formalize more direct sources of information into the new job-search-protocol redesign.  There are also a lot of undesirable menial and administrative tasks inherent in both networking itself and addressing the hidden job market.  These need to be eliminated or minimized in the new design.

     Executive job search networks and job search work teams

Support networks of fellow job seekers may be good for many.  I therefore differentiate them from both your network which supports your work and your main job search network where you are asking contacts for referrals, job information, or jobs.  These are pay-it-forward organizations where support and shared information are encouraged from peers in transition.  The intent is that job openings are shared and warm introductions of fellow members to potential employers are encouraged.   However, I think the real value is in the shared experience, shared learning, inspiration, and emotional support.  For the duration of your job search, these are your peers and colleagues.  This is a very different network which deserves cultivation.  Below are some examples:
HAPPEN Canada’s largest networking group for executives in career transition
The Executive Network Group of Greater Chicago
Exec-U-Net
Executives Network
Senior Executive Networking Group: New England
Technology Executives Networking Group
Technology Leaders Association
Kettering Executive Network

     Psychological counseling for employer damage control:
. . . . .The dangers of letting someone inside your head

Psychological counseling harks back to the origins of job search support where employers needed de-hires defused of the emotions which would cause them to initiate legal cases against them.  The laws have changed to make this less of a threat.  However, the inclusion of psychological practice persists.  Most executives know who they are and their strengths and weaknesses.  They will resiliently recover if they can quickly engage in thrilling work rather than the menial tasks inherent in today’s job search methodology.

If you have never needed someone messing with your head, protect yourself in your temporarily weakened jobless state.  You are an accomplished executive who deals with major challenges and setbacks every day.  Why start needing help now.  I am very protective of some psychological counselor suggesting flaws in one my clients as a cause of their job loss.  In my experience, psychological counseling is one of the major sources of damage in reviewing executive clients coming out of a traditional job search process.

Remember, in biological terms, the loss of a job is just a system correction.  That system could be the employer, the executive, the industry, or the markets.  You will come to know that these corrections are neutral and foreseeable by watching the signposts of the maximizing machinery.  Any ‘mistakes’  that seem to have been made by the executive are simply neutral reflections of the need for a system correction.  It could be that s/he needs to find a better context for continuing their biologically maximized career.  It could be that they made the leap to a wider expansion of impact, talent, and power around their greatest strengths and they need a bigger context that reflects their bigger system.  Again, the correction is neutral.

In the biologically maximized career, your de-hiring is a neutral information feedback event for moving to your next level of operation.  If you were-de-hired, there were likely many signposts in reality of a pending system correction.  As you learn these signposts, you will be able to proactively take action in the future to capitalize on the correction or to prevent or minimize negative or damaging events resulting from it.  This will make a commitment to serial job replacement not only possible, not only profitable, not only strategic, not only adaptive, but also safe.

I invite you to proceed to the next job search article to see a comparison of the old and new job search paradigms and protocols.

FURTHER READING
Serial Job Replacement™ –  A Career Game-Changer