Why you need corporate experience

After reading my posts and my book, you may think I am anti-corporation in my viewpoints. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Corporate life is a necessary and vital part of your career life cycle.

If you haven’t worked in a big corporation or a big agency, you will not have the breadth of experience to appreciate the forces that operate within such a group. That experience, although it can be painful and psychically damaging, is a challenging but essential part of developing an understanding of your full capabilities and limits.

I dare say that most of us, even the best and brightest, need to work for a big organization to understand the ins and outs of career success. There are a few, like Bill Gates, who can drop out of school and bypass the whole industrial experience, because they are bright enough to create their own industry.

For the rest of us, corporate life is like a rite of passage. We do
it because our families or friends expect us to do so. We charge in and
we give it our best. A few learn the real insider’s game and enjoy it.
Others develop products or handle customers against all odds until they
find that they have poured years down the drain and they have little to
show for it.

My whole point in writing Danger – Quicksand: an unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment is to prepare corporate employees to take their lives back and get them under control.

Corporate employment can be a vital part of your work experience –
as long as you don’t lose your sanity and your family in the process.
If you can get in, learn from the experience and then get out while you
are still sane enough to put your experience to work, you will succeed
famously.

Corporate life can be like quicksand. If you are careless, it will
engulf you and smother your initiative and leave you begging feebly for
help. If you are determined and lighthearted, you will sense when the
ground under your feet is liquifying and you will be off to higher
ground with no harm done.

On the other hand, there are always those who enjoy being told what
to do, how to do it, and don’t mind being made wrong on a daily basis.
You are not among them if you are reading this.

Enjoy corporate life if it is working for you. When it loses its
charm, there are many other options. This weblog is devoted to
exploring them.

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