Softcover

ISBN 10: 1591394139 ISBN 13: 9781591394136

Publisher: Harvard Business School Press, 2004

How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into Reality

Whether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we’ve invested in our current profession.

In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.

Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities.

Through engrossing stories from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can:

Explore possible selves
Craft and execute "identity experiments"
Create "small wins" that keep momentum going
Survive the rocky period between career identities
Connect with role models and mentors who can ease the transition
Make time for reflection without missing out on windows of opportunity
Decide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the new
Arrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming.

A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us.

From the Inside Flap:

"Herminia Ibarra has written one of the year’s most important business books. Sophisticated and savvy, it challenges much of the conventional wisdom about how and why people change careers—and illuminates the experimentation, struggle, and joy that are essential to the process. For professionals contemplating a career change, Working Identity is essential reading."
—Daniel H. Pink, author of Free Agent Nation

"Through countless stories that inspire because they come so close to our own, Ibarra provides a world-shifting breakthrough in how we can go about refining our lives and changing our careers. She has given us long-awaited, enormously practical, and deeply insightful wisdom about the improvisational nature of our selves and our professional development."
—Ronald A. Heifetz, Cofounder, The Center for Public Leadership, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government and coauthor of Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

"Career and life transitions are as certain as death and taxes, and we are prone to face them with the same fear and anxiety. Working Identity affords us the courage of common sense. Ibarra's in-depth research and sharp insights show that successful transitions occur one step at a time, by trial and error, experimentation, and incremental experience."
—Randy Komisar, Virtual CEO and author of The Monk and the Riddle

"Working Identity is one of those rare and wonderful books that combines deep knowledge drawn from careful research with practical ideas that can be put to immediate use. The book’s message of hope and possibility—that it is possible to reinvent careers and lives—should be embraced by everyone thinking about transitions in today’s turbulent world."
—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, author of World Class and Evolve: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow

About the Author:

Herminia Ibarra is Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.