Cathy Benko’s column in New York Times

November 9, 2008 · Filed Under Uncategorized

I read all of Cathleen Benko and Ann Weisberg’s Mass Career Customization and, along with Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life, I (perhaps weirdly) keep its message close to my heart. The central thesis of Benko’s work is that a career is not a ladder; it’s a lattice. Sometimes you ramp upwards, sometimes you move across. Sometimes, you stay put. Careers are nonlinear. Bateson, a cultural anthropologist, wrote of women’s lives as quilts. I draw on this wonderful image whenever I get impatient or feel as if I’m stalled on the highway of my life (which is often, these days). You never know where the next piece of the pathwork will come from. Sometimes, it’s a scrap you already have. Benko has a nice column in today’s Business section:

Examples of nonlinear careers are everywhere: women who step out of the work force and then step back in a few years later, Generation X-ers and Y-ers who show less loyalty to a single company, executive men who have climbed the ladder for decades and now insist on carving out more family time as they continue to work.

Still, we often walk to the future backward, viewing our direction through the lens of the past.

A dinner I had with a friend (who is also a colleague and mentor), along with his wife, exemplifies this tendency on the career front. Among the many topics we discussed that evening was a new model of career development, called the “Corporate Lattice,” that was fashioned and put into effect at Deloitte L.L.P.

“Why a lattice metaphor?” he asked. I answered that it was a much more fitting visual. Lattices allow movement in many directions. Like the literal lattices you see in gardens, these are living platforms for growth with upward momentum visible along many paths — a much closer depiction than a ladder of how today’s careers are built and talent is developed.

With a long and lustrous traditional career under his belt, my friend had an unequivocal response: If people aren’t continuously climbing the ladder, they won’t be successful, he said. Hmm, I thought, perhaps he hadn’t gotten the memo that today’s careers aren’t nearly as one-size-fits-all as they used to be.

Sometimes it’s hard for managers to comprehend this notion of career building. For some, a career that isn’t going steadily upward is a career going nowhere. How, they wonder, can one effectively evaluate, compensate and promote employees who aren’t consumed with the idea of steady advancement?

Sometimes it’s hard for anyone to comprehend this notion of career building. Especially in its more radical forms, when the 401K isn’t earning and the salary is uncertain. Change takes discipline, not only for those approving the change and signing its paychecks, but for the changers. I’ll soon be traveling for work quite a bit, at nearly eight months pregnant. It might be too much change for me, but it feels more like a ladder step than a lattice step, and that in itself feels good right now.

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