is the process by which almost all companies have developed a winning strategy. Walmart is another great example. Many people think of Sam Walton, Walmart’s legendary founder, as a visionary. They assume he started his company with a plan to change the world of retailing. But that’s not what really happened.
Walton originally intended to build his second store in Memphis, thinking that a larger city could support a larger store. But he ended up opting for the much smaller town of Bentonville, Arkansas, instead—for two reasons. Legend has it, his wife said in no uncertain terms that she would not move to Memphis. He also recognized that having his second store near his first would allow him to share shipments and deliveries more easily, and take advantage of other logistical efficiencies. That, ultimately, taught Walton the brilliant strategy of opening his large stores only in small towns—thereby preempting competition from other discount retailers.
This wasn’t how he imagined his business in the beginning. His strategy emerged.
Balancing Emergent and Deliberate
I’m always struck by how many of my students and the other young people I’ve worked with think they’re supposed to have their careers planned out, step by step, for the next five years. High-achievers, and aspiring high-achievers, too often put pressure on themselves to do exactly this. Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives. Underlying this belief is the implicit assumption that they should risk deviating from their vision only if things go horribly wrong.
But having such a focused plan really only makes sense in certain circumstances.
In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey. Understanding this—that strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and that your circumstances dictate which approach is best—will better enable you to sort through the choices that your career will constantly present.
If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense. Your aspirations should be clear, and you know from your present experience that they are worth striving for. Rather than worrying about adjusting to unexpected opportunities, your frame of mind should be focused on how best to achieve the goals you have deliberately set.
But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then, like a new company finding its way, you need to be emergent. This is another way of saying that if you are in these circumstances, experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep going through this process until your strategy begins to click.
As you go through your career, you will begin to find the areas of work you love and in which you will shine; you will, hopefully, find a field where you can maximize the motivators and satisfy the hygiene factors. But it’s rarely a case of sitting in an ivory tower and thinking through the problem until the answer pops into your head. Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
When the Wall Street Journal Didn’t Respond
I might not have had the right language to describe it at the time, but navigating between deliberate and emergent opportunities is essentially how I ended up being a professor, a job that I love. It took me years to get it right.
In fact, I’ve had three careers: first as a consultant, then as an entrepreneur and manager, and now as an academic—none of which I planned. When I was a freshman in college, I decided that I wanted to become the editor of the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper I deeply admired. This was my deliberate strategy. One of my professors told me that I was a good writer—but rather than majoring in journalism, I’d have a better chance of distinguishing myself in a field of thousands of job applicants if I knew the field of economics and business. So I studied economics as an undergraduate student at BYU and also at Oxford. Then I pursued my MBA at Harvard.
At the end of my first year in the MBA program, I applied for a summer position at the Wall Street Journal. I never got a reply. I was crushed, but an internship at a consulting firm emerged. It wasn’t the Wall Street Journal, but I knew that I could learn a lot by helping clients solve really interesting problems, and I hoped that would make me even more attractive to the Journal. Another consulting firm then offered to pay the full cost of my second MBA year if I would take a postgraduation job with them. We were so broke that I decided to accept it—thinking that I could keep learning about business, and then break loose to start my career with the Journal. This was my emergent strategy.
Unfortunately for my deliberate plan to be the Journal’s editor, I loved the consulting work I was doing. But after five years there, just as Christine and I were deciding it was time to start my real career as a journalist, a friend of mine knocked on my door and asked me to start a company with him. The prospect of starting my own business, facing the challenges myself I’d spent the last few years solving with my clients, really excited me. I just jumped at the chance. Besides, if I could tell the editors of the Journal that I had actually founded and run a company, I might be an even better pick for the path to editorship.
We took our company public in mid-1987, shortly before Black Monday. On one hand, we were lucky: we managed to raise capital before the stock market crashed. But from a different point of view, our timing was terrible. Our shares dropped from $10 to $2 in a single day. Our market capitalization became so low that no big institutions would put money into our company. We had planned on being able to raise another round of investment to fund our plan for growth. But without that funding, we became vulnerable. One of our initial investors sold his shares to another venture capitalist, and this sale gave the second venture capitalist enough shares to be in charge of our future. He wanted his own CEO in the top job—and I was fired.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this triggered stage three of my emergent strategy.
Several months before I got fired, I had talked with a couple of senior professors at Harvard Business School about another possibility that had been in the back of my mind: whether being a professor was something that I’d be good at. Both had said that I might. So I stood at a fork in the road. Was this the time when I should finally pursue my original deliberate strategy of becoming editor of the Wall Street Journal? Or should I try academia? I talked to an additional couple of professors about this, and on the Sunday evening of the very week I had lost my job, one of them called and asked if I would come in the next day. He announced that although the academic year had already started, they had gone out on a limb for me and made the highly unusual decision to admit me to their PhD program then and there. Less than a week after I had been fired, at age thirty-seven, I was a student once more. Emergent strategy again preempted my deliberate path.
Sometime after I finished my doctorate and started my job as a professor, I faced head-on the need to get tenure. At that point, I thought through the fact that although academia had come into my life through an emergent door, in my heart and mind I needed to make this new path my deliberate strategy. To succeed in this arena, I realized I needed to truly focus on it. So that’s what I did.
Now, at age fifty-nine and after a twenty-year career in academia, I still wonder occasionally whether it is finally time to try to become editor of the Wall Street Journal. Academia became my deliberate strategy—and will stay that way as
