Do you want to get promoted? Here’s a quick tip… you probably don’t want to get promoted. It’s extremely common for people to attribute their hopes and dreams to the single most common solution to their woes, which is a promotion into a higher-paying job. But that’s not how our souls really work.
The “long tail” is a theory attributed to Chris Anderson of Wired and TED fame. The long tail theory is that for many cultural products – books, movies, and music – we over-rely on a small number of great works that are immensely popular. But there is also a very large amount of product that you might have enjoyed, if only you knew about it, it was easy to access, and you didn’t care that much what others thought about your taste. If you want to get geeky, the long tail web site describes this concept using a power law distribution (1/x), where the popular goods are at the peak on the far left, constituting the “big head,” and the lesser-known goods tail off to the right, going on forever into smaller and smaller numbers, hence the “long tail.”
Bricks-and-mortar storefronts prefer to sell large volumes of popular goods, in order to reduce production and storage costs. By contrast, things sold over the internet can be stored at low cost and sold in low volumes at reasonable profit. The internet opens up your access to a greater diversity of concepts, allowing you to bypass overly-popular mainstream content.
It’s important to keep our eyes on consumer data, because consumer-based big data is about one decade ahead of human resources analytics in terms of maturity.
For those in human resources the long tail phenomenon is a good metaphor for career advancement concerns of employees. Consider our societal obsession with vertical career movement and the opportunity to make more money by working longer hours and enduring greater stress. Contrast that mainstream goal with the possibility of thousands of careers to choose from, a wide range of work-life balance concerns and solutions, and unusual combinations of hours of work and locations of work.
When people meet with career coaches, the employee will often name career advancement as their primary goal, typically to the rank of Director. But after some inquiry, it often turns out that there is a deeper personal objective which is more important to them. It could be energy level, the challenge, pride in craftsmanship, helping others, or greater independence. But each of these individual objectives can be achieved through more targeted efforts. Promotion is only one way to make life better, and in some cases it makes life worse if it takes us further away from the deeper goal.
Career decisions and deeper goals will occasionally line up with the mainstream. For example, it’s usually an all-round good idea to get a degree. But if your motivations are unique, think of your life choices as the equivalent of an obscure garage band with a cult following of two hundred people. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it. But it always matters if you’re doing what’s right for you.
Stuart Murray Speaks 