People will tell you that for a business to be meaningful, it must connect up with something that is important to the customer… and so of course in promoting the business in public, we tend to lead with a customer-centric statement — more often than not, its expressed as “..this is what we can do for you and how we can improve some aspect of your life…”.
Of course, as the owner and principal of this business, I’ll definitely be trying to focus my blogging on things that I believe you — as readers about career management issues — will care about, be interested in, and ultimately be able to extract some value from. But before we get there, I think it might be helpful to set some context for you about where I am coming from and what this business — Career Coaching International — means to me.
In a nutshell: first and foremost, I’m passionate about “business done well” and over my 25 years of as an employee, manager, and executive of 5 different global technology companies I’ve gained a lot of first-hand knowledge about how companies really work. In the early 2000’s, I left the traditional employment world and launched a boutique strategy consulting firm and over the rest of that decade I worked with another 25 or 30 organizations on various strategic challenges and operational capacity-building initiatives. By this time I had developed some definite views about shortcomings of business, and have started to explore what a truly “detoxified business” might look like in the 21st century (I’ve captured these musings in my blog The Business Detox Project, so I won’t dwell on them in detail here).
One of my major themes of a 21st century corporation is all around the processes of talent engagement, management, and development. It is obvious to me that our traditional structures designed around industrial-era “command and control” concepts don’t work particularly well in our emerging knowledge based economy, and don’t match up to the reality of a business environment that needs a skilled, agile workforce that can be reconfigured on the fly to pursue new opportunities and adjust to marketplace volatility. The telecommunications industry of the 1990’s and 2000’s was an amazing perspective to witness this from as it went through a massive boom & bust cycle — personally, I’ve been reorganized, stretched, downsized, rightsized, merged, and acquired along various points in my career; deriving meaning from these changes and trying to figure out my next career steps seems like it was a somewhat constant background activity throughout my career as an employee.
My own career path has led me to think long and hard about “talent management” and how best to re-balance the power structure between employee & employer… as I’ve been exploring these issues and researching various alternatives, I came across the opportunity to purchase CCI and I immediately recognized the excellent fit between CCI and my own passions relating to the broader challenge of 21st century talent management.
Which leads to the subject of this entry: for me, what CCI represents is an incredible opportunity to build a new kind of business that serves society by helping individuals discover what they love to do and then helping them materialize those roles. To ensure that this idea doesn’t just become some sort of “throw-away” tag line, the real business challenge is hard-wiring this mission/vision into the DNA of CCI through business processes, customer feedback loops, business metrics and so forth, which are the tools of my trade.
This has become my design-intent as I focus on building out the company, and through this blog I’ll share the adventure with you…
