Page 38 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

No, the trumpets were taken. At the end of the day, I couldn’t even get
a stringed instrument like a cello or bass or even a drum. Yes, I had a
choice—tuba or trombone—but I had never even seen either one up close
before.
I reluctantly chose the trombone. But two years later I asked again for
a clarinet. Mr.Wetzel’s answer was,“Well, you can’t have a clarinet because
you’ve already been playing the trombone for two years. You’re a sixth
grader now, and we have fourth graders who get the clarinets.”
So I played the trombone for six years, hated every moment of it, and
learned that life is not fair.
Most careers are a lot like playing in Mr. Wetzel’s orchestra, and I don’t
care if that career takes place in a giant corporation or in the priesthood.
Most people know they want to play some instrument, but they are not
sure that the instrument they’ve been handed is the right one. So they end
up in jobs that aren’t necessarily suited to their best skills. They may not
even know what their best skills are because they haven’t been developed
yet. Possibly the orchestra itself is not very sympathetic to them and has
given them no chance to find out where they could really shine.
There are a million reasons why people become trapped in the wrong
place with the wrong job, but my point
is that most of them do become trapped.
EVEN INCREDIBLY
They might have picked the wrong
SMART PEOPLE
major in college or took an entry-level
END UP MERELY
job in the wrong field because that was
DOING WELL
all that was available at the moment.
BECAUSE THEY
Maybe they graduated with a fine arts
BECOME
major but succumbed to pressure to join
UNWILLING TO
the family business buying wholesale
RISK ANY CHANGE.
lots of nuts and bolts and have hated
their working lives ever since. Maybe
they stayed in a city with few opportunities because their spouse didn’t
want to leave.

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