Manage your career like a hedge fund
99% of us are managing their career in a risk-averse way, making safe bets in the name of stability, believing their current employers will offer them years of employment and regular pay increase. Nothing wrong with this, but nothing big to expect from it.
And there is this 1% who manage their career like a hedge fund. Taking risks and making choices seen by others as crazy. Seeing opportunities where everyone else is walking away. Taking on this new challenging project, moving in a new country, creating their own business, or learning new skills that may seem unrelated to their core competences, stepping out from the comfort zone.
Hedge funds base their performance on research. Their goal is to know just a little bit more than most investors about company shares, convertible bonds, a currency, a local or sovereign debt. This little bit more requires thousands of hours of hard work done by very bright individuals - crunching gigabytes of quantitative and qualitative data.
That's exactly what "hedge-fund" minded individuals are doing before making career choices. Evaluating their options based upon intensive research. Most of us are skeptical when someone takes on a difficult task that no one else wanted to do. And then, a few years after, this person makes 3X more money than others with comparable education and experience.
Want to manage your career like a hedge fund ? Consider the following strategies:
- Best practices review : Look at what the best in your company or industry are doing. Study their careers. What choices did they make ? Create a list of some of the most successful individuals you know, identify what they have in common, see if you could apply their strategies to your own career.
- Overlooked subjects : Look at what's not really working well in your department/ company, and try to find solutions that could help fix the problem(s) no one else had been able to solve so far. That could be a difficult group of customers, a faulty process, a product positioning gap. Focus on issues that others have been avoiding so far. If you have a solution, you ll win big. Even if you do not have a solution, you ll be seen as courageous and daring - always good for your next performance review.
3. Predictive Analytics : Most of us are doing a superficial job to understand what factors drive revenues and/or cost. Sales people, for instance, are used to conversion ratios (how many leads do I need to call to sign a deal). But very few perform a detailed root cause analysis to understand why they are winning, or losing prospects. Top guns invest a lot of time to understand the mechanics behind their performance. Identifying revenue drivers and harnessing them makes all the difference between the best and the rest.
4. Emerging markets : Doing business in a new country, or new customer segment, is risky. Most of the time, available resources are limited, and market evolutions will be much less predictable. But if you make it, you ll make it big. Some of my friends went to Russia in the nineties, when no one else wanted to go. One friend made millions bringing food &supplies to isolated oil platforms in the extreme north of Siberia, flying in a 30 year plus Antonov cargo plane. It was a risky move, by all means, but one that paid above his wildest expectations.
5. Global macro : Zooming out from day to day activity and looking at what larger or even macro trends could impact the business, is the secret sauce of many elite professionals. Researching present and upcoming regulations, demographic evolutions, productivity trends, monetary and fiscal policies. If you are working in the tech & digital space, you may not immediately see the usefulness of looking at the latest political evolutions in Bolivia, until you discover this country has the biggest reserves of lithium, the key material in any phone, laptop and now car batteries. And how local elections in the remote district of Potosi could impact the future of Tesla, Apple or Lenovo.
6. Event Planner: Anticipating the future strategic moves of your company (mergers, acquisitions, divestments, ..) is also a smart way to see opportunities that could fuel your career growth. Your employer is about to invest in Vietnam or China ? Make sure your know more about those two countries. For this, stay informed about what’s happening in your company, but also look at what your company’s competitors are doing. Even if you can not access to C-level information, just have a look at what type of businesses other market players are buying or selling, and you ll have a good idea of what will be your company’s next move.
Implementing the strategies presented above requires a lot of research, hard work, and a permanent risk of failure. It’s not for the faint hearted, and certainly not something you would like to pursue if your first objective is stability or work/life balance (if such a thing ever existed). Now, if you want to reach the stars, keep in mind what President Kennedy said when he launched the Apollo moon landing program : “We decided to do things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”