Organizational Power: Further Discussions and Comments

A round-up of the more interesting reactions to last-weeks post

Last week, I wrote Understand Organizational Power: Title, Expertise, Relationships. This post highlights the most interesting comments/reactions on it that will deepen your understanding of this topic. (Side note: I’m in touch with 3 senior (20+ years experience) software engineering leaders looking for a change, so if you’re interested skip down to the Senior Talent section.)

Anand Deshpande (founder and chairman of Persistent Systems) suggests that you should plan your career in 4 phases:

I completely agree with him on the importance of relationships for career growth.

In my opinion, the following plan works best:

1st decade -- focus on learning and networking (relationships)
2nd decade -- focus on becoming an expert at something
3rd decade -- identify your corner office and have a plan that has less than three steps to get there
4th decade -- nurture, mentor and plan for life post the paid job (retirement)

You may have almost half a career (20 years) of work in your retired life. That may need more planning than your work career!

Anand’s LinkedIn post has 58 comments, so worth reading directly there.

Ramesh Raskar (Director of Camera Culture group at MIT Media Lab) responded with a link to a detailed slide deck about how to manage your career in a complex ecosystem. He suggests that slide 31 would be particularly useful in the context of this post.

Anupam Gupta (Director Technology Strategy - CTO Aerospace & Defense at Microsoft) makes an important point about how networking should be done out of a genuine interest in building real relationships, and not just about what you want now:

I might also add, that growing your relationships should not be transactional, but genuine. If you approach your career as you would your friendships, with sympathy, compassion, and honesty, and a genuine desire to "do things together", this activity will feel almost natural. I should add that every new engineer and college graduate should read this. Put it out there to sell as a pamphlet!

Anand Hariharan (founder and CTO at Indexnine) points out that networking is important not just for job hunting, but for all opportunities:

I can endorse this for not just networking for jobs, but networking for opportunities. My personal experience has been that when you network and put yourselves out there, the village brings the opportunities. Its amazing how your weak links mobilize to bring you work. Truly grateful to my extended network.

Praneet Singh Butran @PsButran

@NGKabra Building trust takes a lonnnnng time, but once you do, the strength of your network increases exponentially. Strength in this case means how much are the other people willing to go for you to get a job done. Relationships compound!!

Praneet Singh Butran points out that networking compounds over time. This means that initially, it will seem like a lot of effort for little or no returns. But that’s how compounding always works (remember how Covid infections increased, slowly at first and all at once?). You have to be patient, and then suddenly, when the exponential growth kicks in, you start getting large returns for little or no effort.

That still leaves the question of how exactly to go about improving your network and networking skills. I will cover that next week

Senior Talent

I currently know three senior people looking for a change from their current role. All three of them have 20+ years of experience in enterprise software product companies, and they’re all geographically in Pune. In these areas:

1. Enterprise infrastructure software (data-centers, storage, cloud)

2. Cybersecurity and product security engineering

3. Big-data, analytics, cloud engineering

They’re all capable of taking over a division for an established company, or building one from scratch if you’re looking to open a dev center in Pune. If you’re interested, please get in touch with me.