THE 5 PATTERNS OF

EXTRAORDINARY
CAREERS
The Guide For Achieving
Success and Satisfaction
JAMES CITRIN & RICHARD SMITH
JAMES CITRIN heads the global technology, communications and media practice for Spencer Stuart, an
executive search firm. He has been involved in recruiting a number of top CEOs, presidents and board
directors for a number of well known companies. Mr. Citrin (a graduate of Vassar College and the Harvard
Business School) is the author of Zoom and the co-author of Lessons From the Top.
RICHARD SMITH is an author and search practitioner with Spencer Stuart. A graduate of Northwestern
University and the University of Florida, Mr. Smith is the author of Top Tier Talent and a number of other
articles published in business journals.
The Web site for this book is available at www.5patterns.com.

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 The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 1

MAIN IDEA
Why is it some people make it to the top of their organizations while others with equal talent seem to never fully reach their potential?
Does it really come down to luck, political savvy or aggressiveness?
To answer this question definitively rather than by anecdotes, a three pronged research project was carried out:
1. A database of 1.2 million executive employees was analyzed for recurring factors.
2. 8,000 written surveys were sent out, of which 2,000 were completed and returned by senior executives by mid-2002.
3. More than 300 face-to-face interviews were carried out over a two year period to identify thoughts, goals, beliefs and behaviors.
This research program showed statistically that extraordinary careers follow a trajectory which is consistent irrespective of the
industry within which these executives worked. The five career patterns which differentiated those at the top from all others were:

The Five 1 Understand how value is created in the workplace – and get into action
Patterns
of 2 Be benevolent – help others succeed and they will in turn help you
Extraordinary 3 Find a sensible and realistic way to overcome the permission paradox
Careers
4 Exceed your job description and make unexpected breakthroughs
5 Find a good fit – a position that harnesses your strengths and passions

“The five patterns are not a simplistic formula for distilling the complexities of a career into a set of rules. Many of us desperately yearn
for a simple set of rules for dealing with the complexity of our working lives: Do these ten things, avoid these five. The problem is that in
managing a career in real time, where you have to make important decisions without all of the facts, cookbook rules are simply not
effective. Careers, like weather systems or financial markets, contain patterns. In any complex system, there are usually a handful of
factors that govern the vast majority of the behavior of that system. So while in situations with great complexity, such as careers, there
are no easy, rational answers that will always lead to the most positive outcomes, there are patterns that correlate very strongly with
success over time. Many believe that success is out of their control. Yet careers guided by success patterns are understandable,
predictable and manageable over the long run. Our goal is to answer two questions: How are extraordinary careers really achieved?
And what thoughts and actions can you institute to create extraordinary success and fulfillment in your own career?”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith

Pattern #1 – Understand how value is created in the workplace – and get into action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2
People with extraordinary careers understand in great detail how value is created in the marketplace in
which they work. They then translate this knowledge into action by finding concrete ways to add more
value to their organization in each phase of their careers.
Pattern #2 – Be benevolent – help others succeed and they will in turn help you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 3
The people at the top of an organization actually don’t claw their way there. Instead, they are carried there
by the other people whom they have helped to make successful. Thus, to position yourself for the top,
create success for your peers, your subordinates and your superiors.
Pattern #3 – Find a sensible and realistic way to overcome the permission paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 4
One of the great “Catch-22”s of business is you can’t get the job you want without experience, and you
can’t get the experience without the job. Successful executives take charge and find ways to get the critical
experiences they need to get ahead, usually by seeing the opportunities other are missing completely.
Pattern #4 – Exceed your job description and make unexpected breakthroughs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 5
People with impressive careers do their jobs exceptionally well, but don’t stop there. Instead, they move
well past their predefined objectives and create breakthrough ideas, thereby delivering unexpected
benefits to their organizations. This differentiates them from everyone else quite effectively.
Pattern #5 – Find a good fit – a position that harnesses your strengths and passions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 6
People with great careers always make decisions with a long-term perspective in mind. That way they
migrate towards positions that fit their natural strengths and personal passions. Invariably, this will also
include working with others they like and respect.
Application – How organizations put these 5 patterns into practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 7
Extraordinary organizations are not merely a collection of highly successful individuals but a creator of
them. To be extraordinary, an organization has to take the best individuals it can find and then create an
ecosystem where these people can grow to become highly successful individually.
Conclusion – How individuals can and should apply these 5 patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 8

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To put the five patterns into practice in your own career, a new scorecard is required. Instead of expecting
instant results, you should concentrate on creating value for yourself and your organization. Over an
extended period of time, those efforts will bear fruit and provide a foundation for extraordinary success.

Pattern Understand how value is created in the
#1 workplace – and get into action
People with extraordinary careers understand in great detail how
value is created in the marketplace in which they work. They then
translate this knowledge into action by finding concrete ways to
add more value to their organization in each phase of their
careers.
Careers, like many other aspects of life, are often governed by
subtle yet fear reaching factors. As you learn to understand the
underlying dynamics better, you can make better decisions
which will move you in the desired direction. One of these key
dynamics is your career will always be closely linked to the
amount of value you create in the marketplace. Simply put, to
advance your career, learn how to create more value and then do
precisely that. The more you understand and apply this principle,
the better positioned you are to align with it.
Your own personal worth in the marketplace for talent will
depend on four key macro factors:
1. Demographics – the general level of supply and demand for
your professional talents and competencies.
2. Market liquidity – how many people with comparable talents
to you are currently seeking positions versus the number of
positions open to them.
3. Company volatility – the rises and falls in the market value of
the company which employs you.
4. Intellectual capital – how the financial markets value
intangible assets by comparison with the value assigned to
hard assets.
By continually tracking these factors, you will gain insights in how
to go about increasing your personal market value. Most people
start their careers with loads of potential value and then gradually
increase their experiential value as they gain experience and
know-how. The more experiential value you can gain, the greater
the momentum your career will have and the more options you
will have open up.
In the business world, experiential value is usually more highly
compensated than potential value mainly because experience is
easier to quantify. However, your worth in the marketplace will
not only reflect your present experiential value but will also factor
in your potential value as well. The true metric by which career
progress should be measured is the way in which you manage to
turn your potential value into valuable experiences which in turn
generates additional potential value which can be capitalized in
the future. The faster you can get this cycle working, the more
you’ll be worth.
All careers tend to go through three distinct phases:
1. The promise phase – where your perceived market value is
weighted heavily in favor of your potential. This phase
generally occurs at the completion of your formal education
until sometime in your early thirties. During this phase, who
you choose to work for and the variety of experiences you are
exposed to can have a significant impact on the trajectory of
your future career. If you can succeed in starting to build your
experiential value well during this phase, it will have a
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compounding effect on the results of your entire career.
Similarly, the more experiences you are exposed to early on,
the easier it becomes to know your passions and strengths.
The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 2
2. The momentum phase – where the bulk of your market value
comes from your experience in different situations and the
skills you have acquired. In this phase, you start to take
careful control over the direction your career is moving. You
stop dabbling and focus more intensively on the areas where
you can excel. Typically, you will have many options
available to you in this phase (within your own organization
and with others) because of your high visibility. To keep
moving forward, you have to migrate to positions that are
aligned with your strengths and passions.
3. The harvest phase – where once again the bulk of your
market value comes from your potential value rather than
your experiential value. In this phase, the number of options
can be vast – other companies to run, other boards to join,
speaking engagements to make, books to write, etc. During
the harvest phase, a successful executive can secure some
important roles and responsibilities. As executives take on
new challenges, there is a cross-border transfer of
know-how which frequently transcends traditional industry
boundaries.
Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3
Promise Momentum Harvest
Experiential
Experiential
Experiential
Potential
Potential
Potential
Although the marketplace for talent can seem confusing and
complex, at the end of the day it really does operate just like any
other market – values vary according to supply and demand. The
key challenges are:
1. To position yourself advantageously with a strong firm.
2. To take control of your own career development trajectory.
3. To be proactive in steering your career in the right direction.
4. To understand how value is created.
“I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are
brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the
values of things.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Value is not intrinsic; it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way
in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment.”
– Ludwig von Mises
“Careers, like other important activities in life, are governed by
subtle yet pervasive dynamics that significantly influence your
value in the marketplace for talent. Once you truly understand
them, you are bound for glory. Remain ignorant of them at your
own peril. The most successful professionals understand the
underlying factors, maximize their market value at different
stages of professional life.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith

Pattern Be benevolent – help others succeed
#2 and they will in turn help you
The people at the top of an organization actually don’t claw their
way there. Instead, they are carried there by the other people
whom they have helped to make successful. Thus, to position
yourself for the top, create success for your peers, your
subordinates and your superiors.
The idea of building your own career by making those around you
become highly successful may seem counterintuitive at first.
Most popular management theories suggest it is necessarily to
fight and claw your way to the top by outperforming and
outmaneuvering everyone else. In reality, however, the best
performers always build a strong team of people around them,
and then draw on the talents, abilities and core competencies of
everyone in the team.
There are actually four categories of leaders:
High
Solid Citizens Benevolent Leaders
Honest but Focused on helping
uninspiring leaders others excel
Trust
Mercenaries Pirates Assemble a
Self-motivated team to get a
Low
free agents specific bounty
Low Alignment High
1. Pirates – are the corporate leaders who are not particularly
admired but pull together a band of high performers by
offering exceptional incentives. Pirates only succeed
long-term if they are superior strategic thinkers or deal
makers.
2. Mercenaries – are leaders who concentrate on their personal
success at the expense of all other considerations.
Mercenaries encourage internal competition as the way to
weed out the weakest. Mercenaries rarely have long-term
success because they are out the door as soon as possible
with as much as possible.
3. Solid citizens – are business leaders who mean well but just
cannot bring themselves to make the hard decisions. Their
subordinates will stay out of a sense of personal loyalty, but
strong performers find they have to leave to find more
attractive opportunities. Long-term, solid citizens struggle to
create a dynamic, go-forward organization.
4. Benevolent leaders – are people whose primary objective is
the success of the team. These leaders set unambiguous
goals, delegate meaningful responsibility, communicate
openly and are honest in their dealings with their
subordinates. Benevolent leaders attract the best and
brightest employees because they create the best
professional environment. Long-term, benevolent leaders
create a virtuous circle effect where the best people create
the best results, which in turn attracts other high performers
who are looking to join a winning team. Benevolent leaders
measure their own success by the internal and external
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successes of the other people in the organization.
The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 3
When managing your own career, you first need to recognize
what sort of leader you are working for and adapt accordingly.
Ideally, you want to become aligned with a benevolent leader
because under this type of leader you have the greatest
opportunity to grow personally. The type of leader you work for
will also impact on your opportunities for promotion.
Later in your career, however, you’ll also need to decide what
type of leader to become yourself. If you build your own
leadership style around the characteristics of benevolent
leadership, you’ll be positioning yourself advantageously. Why?
□ Benevolent leaders are the most likely to be able to attract top
talent and inspire them to superior performance. That means
you can build a strong management team around you.
□ Benevolent leaders are more focused on getting the job done
right than they are on building their own egos. In practical
terms, that means spending more time on the question “What
do we need to do to succeed?” and less time on “What’s in it
for me?”
□ Benevolent leaders trust their people implicitly. Instead of
attempting to micro manage everything, these types of
leaders provide information, delegate responsibility and let
others accomplish the tasks as they see fit. Again, this creates
an attractive environment others will respond positively to.
Benevolent leaders lead, follow and then get out of the way.
In the end, if you can create a work environment where others
want to work, you maximize your own chances of success. To
position yourself for great accomplishment in the future, create
success for others – your subordinates, your peers and even
your superiors.
“A leader is best when people barely know that he exists. He is
the teacher who succeeds without taking credit. And, because
credit is not taken, credit is received.”
– Lao Tzu, 6th century B.C.
“Take the most blame, give the most credit, set ambitious
objectives and let your people strive to realize them, holding
people accountable. Excel in giving direct feedback and
hands-on mentoring and you will reap the rewards of
consistently better teams and consistently higher performance
levels from team members. Over time, you will create a virtual
army of professionals willing to fight in your corner. Follow this
pattern of benevolent leadership and you’ll be well on your way to
creating success and satisfaction, for yourself and others.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“The idea that there are patterns in extraordinary careers is not
the conventional wisdom. Many believe that success is the result
of either luck or larceny. Luck, however, is a convenient excuse
for a lack of success. So what else could separate those who are
successful from those who are less so? It must be good fortune
and impeccable timing. The truth is a successful career is not the
result of one lucky break, like an actress waiting tables when a
star movie producer walks in. It results from a consistent series
of opportunities and performance over time. It cannot be faked.
And professionals who lack character and ethics and are still
able to rise to and remain at the very top are in fact extremely
rare. When they do attain career successes, their grasp on what
they’ve achieved is tenuous and ephemeral. It turns out that
extraordinary careers follow a strikingly consistent trajectory,
marked by the five distinctive patterns that distinguish the very
top from the rest of the pack.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith

Pattern Find a sensible and realistic way to
#3 overcome the permission paradox
One of the great “Catch-22”s of business is you can’t get the job
you want without experience, and you can’t get the experience
without the job. Successful executives take charge and find ways
to get the critical experiences they need to get ahead, usually by
seeing the opportunities other are missing completely.
The permission paradox can be paralyzing to your career
building efforts, and a big obstacle to overcome. Therefore, your
initial step in attempting to overcome this barrier should be to
stop and ask: “Where is the biggest problem in my organization?”
Wherever those problems lie will be your greatest opportunity for
success in getting permission to take your career to the next
level. If you can get assigned to a problem spot for your
organization and fix it, that will certainly serve notice that you’re
an up-and-comer. It will also raise your profile with the
organization’s senior management.
Also keep in mind permission within an organization comes in
two general varieties:
1. Direct permission – where your job description authorizes
you to do something specific.
2. Implied permission – where you take it upon yourself to do
something until someone makes it clear you can’t do that.
Successful executives become quite creative at using implied
permission to grow into new roles within their organizations.
They then hope that at some point in the future, that permission
will become more explicit and more direct. This often requires a
very deft touch because if you assume too much, you can be
labeled as a ruthless self-promoter who is putting personal
interests ahead of the organization’s interests. Hitting the right
balance between these two types of permission takes political
astuteness and frequently persistence.
There are actually eight different strategies career builders use
to offset the traps of the permission paradox:
1. The direct approach – Ask your boss for permission to
expand your role and accept new responsibilities. If he or she
says no, you can then ask what experiences will be required
for you to be able to progress your career. The only drawback
with the direct approach is that it undermines your access to
implied permission because the boundaries will be clearly
spelt out. Hazy boundaries are better for implied permission.
(That’s also where the concept that it’s better to ask for
forgiveness rather than permission is played out).
2. Demonstrate competence in component parts – Most
organizations look for someone who has done it all before. If
you can break a new role down into its component parts and
show that you have a good track record in each of those parts
of the business, then it will be logical to assume you will be
able to handle the new role.
3. The clean slate approach – When you join a new division or a
new company, past perceptions count for little. You have a
onetime opportunity to ask for more permission than you
would have ordinarily been granted in your previous position.
Cleaning the slate can free you from the limitations imposed
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by those who base their perceptions of your competencies on
what you were like when you were young and inexperienced.
Utilize this as a great opportunity to expand your role.
The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 4
4. Earn more credentials – To gain more permission, you can
earn the relevant formal qualifications. This may be in the
form of a graduate degree, an industry certification or even
participation in an executive education program. Depending
on your industry, there may or may not be a strong correlation
between credentials and permission but at the very least,
credentials should expand the scope of your implied
permission.
5. Barter with the gatekeepers – “You scratch my back and I’ll
scratch yours” is alive and well in the corporate world. All you
have to do is find out who controls access to the permission
you need and offer them something of value in exchange for
that permission. This works well for both direct and implied
permission.
6. Masquerade as the leader – This is a high-risk permission
strategy. You identify a business unit which is in obvious
need of leadership but which nobody has obvious authority
over. You then start acting like the leader in the hope that in
the future, the management will see you’re doing a good job
and will formalize your authority. Sometimes, this situation
arises when a role is left vacant and there will be some time
before a new appointment is made. If you step forward and
start solving the problems, sooner or later the management
will realize it would be better to appoint you to the position
long-term than bring an outsider up to speed. The risk,
however, is that your co-workers may refuse to cooperate or
you may stretch your implied permission too far.
7. Try two-way mentoring – Go to your boss and ask how they
got to where they are today, and what advice they would have
for how to advance your career. Try and enlist their help as
your mentor to help you become aware of opportunities to
advance your career. Make it worth their while in return by
offering to help them with research into fields they are
unfamiliar with or by offering to do their legwork. If you help
them to be more successful, they will usually feel favorably
inclined to return the favor.
8. Playing politics – While certainly not a pattern followed by
extraordinary executives, many people have advanced their
careers by playing internal politics astutely. The main
shortcoming of this approach is any gains made this way are
likely to be unsustainable over the long haul because of
changes in personnel.
“The permission paradox can be a paralyzing obstacle to
overcome, and is often a self-fulfilling prophecy. Successful
executives, unlike a large number of their peers, rarely have
trouble gaining access to the most critical opportunities in their
careers. They know that the secret is finding some way to get the
experiences they need to get ahead. Sometimes, these are the
once-in-a-decade, career-defining experiences, but other times
they are the incremental but concrete incidents that move your
career to the next level. All the same, extraordinary careers are
set apart from the mediocre ones by the ability to gain access to
critical experiences. Successful executives gain permission and
take charge of their experiences – and therefore their careers.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow
small ones.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Ability is of little account without opportunity.”
– Napoleon Boneparte

Pattern Exceed your job description and
#4 make unexpected breakthroughs
People with impressive careers do their jobs exceptionally well,
but don’t stop there. Instead, they move well past their
predefined objectives and create breakthrough ideas, thereby
delivering unexpected benefits to their organizations. This
differentiates them from everyone else quite effectively.
In building your career, the quality of the impact you make often
matters much more than the quantity of your activities. Put
another way, many tasks follow the 80/20 principle where
20-percent of your efforts generate 80-percent of your results. In
business, 80-percent of what you do will be the same as
everyone else and it is how you do the last 20-percent that offers
an opportunity to genuinely differentiate yourself. Successful
career builders keep that last 20-percent foremost in the minds
of the people who matter the most.
Average employees focus on trying to exceed their quotas. If
they have any spare time, they will try and do more of the same.
Extraordinary executives, by contrast, meet their basic job
requirements and then use their spare time trying to come up
with new ideas that will add value for their companies. They go
beyond what they’re told to do and think for themselves. With a
little bit of luck, they may be able to accomplish something
important with is beyond their basic job description. This is a
great way to get noticed.
So how do you actually do this in practice? It really comes down
to three deceptively simple steps:
Ready...... Aim......... ..........Fire
1. Ready
Before you can do something that will make you stand out as
exceptional, you need to have an accurate picture of what
really creates value within your organization. You’ll also need
to become more efficient at your current activities so you
have some time to focus on additional activities that will
differentiate you from everyone else.
If you link your activities directly to whatever creates value for
your organization you create opportunities for differentiation.
For example, if you are an accountant, you might be able to
develop metrics which measure the success of marketing
campaigns quickly so fine-tuning decisions can be made
more accurately. This direct link between what you do and
how the company creates value will be important as it will tie
in your employment to your organization’s success.
You’ll also need to consider carefully how successful
performance is measured within your corporate culture. This
will be needed to get everything in the right context. You will
then need to find ways to free up sufficient resources (time
especially) so that you can deliver results beyond your
predefined objectives. In practice, this will often require a
reprioritization of your job requirements. Rate which of your
job activities have the highest impact and deliver on those.
Replace the low-impact activities on your schedule with new
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projects which have the potential to create differentiation for
you in the future. As long as the new activities deliver value,
your boss is unlikely to complain.
The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 5
2. Aim
Your objective here is to come up with some breakthrough
thinking. How do you do that? Some possibilities:
□ Study the underlying dynamics of your industry and see
whether some changes in standard business practices
wouldn’t deliver greater customer value.
□ Look at all the fringe activities which are around the edges
of what you do. Pick up whichever of these activities raise
your profile and do them on a regular basis.
□ Take some risks. Set up a few market tests for your new
ideas on a small scale. Come up with creative concepts
and ideas, and see how they do in the marketplace.
3. Fire
Sit down with your boss and discuss why you’d like to
reconfigure your job slightly. Logically explain how a
readjustment of your job description would generate benefits
for your organization as a whole. If you have a sound
business case for why your priorities should be changed, it’s
only logical to assume your boss will be receptive to the idea.
By applying the 80/20 principle intelligently, you can move your
career forward. Freeing up 20-percent of your time to focus on
new projects that will add value will be difficult but the potential
benefits are far-reaching. When you combine this with your
strategies for overcoming the permission paradox, you can
move from one organization to another, or within your own firm.
Sometimes, moving from a functional to a general management
role is challenging. By using the 80/20 principle, however, you
can get part of the way by stealth. Start thinking and acting like a
manager in the 20-percent time you have available. Help your
organization’s marketing and product development teams get
insights from the marketplace which will assist them. Inject
market sensitivity into more of your organization’s activities and
there should be a corresponding leap in top-line sales growth
and bottom-line profitability.
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
– William James
“The quality of your impact often matters much more than the
quantity of your activities.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“Today’s workplace demands that you focus not just on what’s
merely important, but what’s wildly important.”
– Stephen Covey
“The beauty of this success pattern is that you have a lot of
control in applying it. They key is to use your judgement to
determine those particular tasks that are important, timely, and
appropriate, and secure the buy-in of your management and
others invested in your success. Real differentiation and
success are achieved when you are able to accomplish
extremely important tasks beyond those that are outlined for
you.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“Applying this pattern can help steer your career in a desired
direction, akin to steering a ship at sea. Tremendous momentum
and inertia build up over time. Similarly, within a career, keeping
the engines running and the ship on course is like the 80-percent
of your job that’s focused on accomplishing your predefined
objectives. It’s the 20-percent that allow you to ultimately steer
your career in one direction or another.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith

Pattern Find a good fit – a position that
#5 harnesses your strengths and passions
People with great careers always make decisions with a
long-term perspective in mind. That way they migrate towards
positions that fit their natural strengths and personal passions.
Invariably, this will also include working with others they like and
respect.
If you can build a career that leverages your passions and your
strengths while being a good fit with your personality, your
chances of success increase dramatically. This is logical and yet
few people manage to actually achieve it because they go about
it the wrong way. Or more specifically, finding a good fit is far
more likely if you use a “career pull” approach rather than the
much more common “career push” approach. The difference
between these two approaches are:
□ Career push means you attempt to move from one step on the
corporate ladder to another, higher position. You move along
the traditional career path for your industry – from manager to
director to vice president to president and so on.
□ Career pull means you migrate to different roles you know
from experience you enjoy and feel passionate about. There’s
no deadlines and everyone’s path is unique because it will
reflect your own preferences.
Many executives get so caught up in career push they never take
the time to evaluate whether the ladder they are climbing is
leading to somewhere they want to be. There is a seduction in
moving through the ranks that can be addictive. A far better
approach is career pull, where personal satisfaction rather than
public accolades becomes the driving force. Career pull is far
more gradual, but it is also more likely to ultimately lead to a
career that will provide you with:
1. Job satisfaction – feeling like you make a contribution.
2. The lifestyle that you want.
3. Adequate compensation.
Finding a good fit is not easy. There are four strategies that can
be applied to the search:
1. “Micro manage” your career – by focusing on your long-term
career objectives rather than the expediencies of the
moment. Successful career builders take the long view and
don’t position themselves in jobs that are mediocre. Instead,
they pursue the opportunities that will keep them heading
where they want to be long-term. Micro managing your
career means to be thinking two or three career moves ahead
at all times.
2. Create multiple career options – because the more viable
and attractive career options you have available, the easier it
becomes to keep focusing in on something that will be a good
fit. The more successful you are, the more options you’ll
have. Career options are good because:
• They validate your demand in the marketplace.
• They allow you to choose a non-conventional career path.
• They provide flexibility.
• They’re fun to contemplate and think about.
As a general rule-of-thumb, it makes good sense to always
make choices that expand rather than contract the number of
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career options which are available to you. This is also why
education is highly desirable, since it usually expands your
career options.
The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 6
3. Take note of any “career flares” – bright lights of passion or
ability. If other people regularly compliment you on the
amount of passion you apply to your tasks, this can be a
career flare pointing to something you’re passionate about.
Pick up on these clues and think about them. Sometimes,
others are more subjective about where your passions lie
than you can be. Take note.
4. Work with the right people – that is, with people you like and
respect. When you find the right fit, it will be easy to make
friends because everyone else will share that same passion
you do. Therefore, before you consider joining a new firm,
analyze whether you’ll fit in. This will be important.
Overall, finding the right fit is a matter of managing your
opportunities and making the right choices. The people who
build extraordinary careers never lose sight of what success
really means. This goes well beyond making loads of money or
accumulating the other trappings of success. It means being
enthused each morning about getting to work and achieving your
goals rather than watching the clock and calculating how long it is
until you can head home.
“Failure’s hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you’re
successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and
opportunity can lock you in forever.”
– Po Bronson
“Far too many people get caught up in career one-upmanship
and lose sight of what success really means. The pitfall is the
trappings of success can catch you off guard. Before too long,
you can awaken to find that you have stumbled into a life of
financial dependence on and emotional detachment from your
daily work. Your job becomes monotonous and life turns dull.
The zeal is gone. But there’s a different, more fulfilling way.
Instead, you can blend your deepest desires with your strongest
skills, allowing yourself to reach untold potential by simply
working on what you’re really intended to be working on. And
that’s the key. Something almost mystical happens when you set
upon tasks that deeply move you – it’s what allows you to step up
and contribute something startling and significant to society.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”
– John Ruskin
“Not only is it possible to leverage both your passions and your
strengths in the same job, but success actually requires it. Of
course, it’s not all that easy to find the perfect workplace where
you fit in, love what you do, and were born for the job. Many
people spend a lifetime looking for it. That’s all right. In fact, just
knowing that this is what makes a successful executive gives
you a leg up on the competition.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“True success and satisfaction, in the end, are goals that need to
be defined by each of us in a way that is consistent with our own
aspirations and values. We are confident that applying the first
four success patterns outlines so far will help you improve your
value significantly in the marketplace. But it is how you use this
value, how you invest the career capital that you will accumulate,
that really counts. Find your strengths, passions and cultural fit
and you will be happier and more successful in your career. How
simple indeed. However, it is how you go about trying to put this
pattern into action that becomes much more challenging.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith

How organizations put these
Application
5 patterns into practice
Extraordinary organizations are not merely a collection of highly
successful individuals but a creator of them. To be extraordinary,
an organization has to take the best individuals it can find and
then create an ecosystem where these people can grow to
become highly successful individually.
For an organization to excel, it must attract, retain and motivate
the best people. To achieve this in practical terms, the
organization must meet three key imperatives:
1. Create a culture of success.
This will occur when everyone recognizes that individual
career success ultimately benefits the entire organization.
Therefore, each employee should be provided with the tools,
resources, information and working environment needed to
foster his or her own career advancement. In this type of work
atmosphere, employees become emboldened to take action
thus benefitting the organization as a whole.
In too many companies, individuals excel in spite of the
organization rather than as a result of the assistance the
organization provides. This may be the result of too rigid a
management style being used or a misalignment between
the individual’s goals and those of the organization.
To create a culture of success, employees need to be taught
the five patterns of extraordinary careers and empowered to
use them as they see fit. When each individual is optimizing
t hei r o w n perso na l ca ree rs , th e d irec tio n an d
accomplishments of the organization will take care of itself
without further management input. This will also deliver a
competitive advantage to the firm that will be difficult for
others to replicate.
2. Assess accurately and then reward performance.
Great organizations consistently and accurately assess
performance and regularly acknowledge their best
performers with appropriate rewards. There are four general
approaches which tend to get used in this area, each with its
own advantages and disadvantages:
□ Some companies attempt to create a teamwork
environment where compensation is paid to all team
members split by a predetermined formula. This
approach lowers turnover but has no mechanism by
which top performers can be recognized and rewarded.
□ Other firms allow executives to rotate from one
assignment to another quickly with the aim of high
performers ending up in positions where they earn
superior rewards. The main problem with this approach is
it becomes difficult to measure accurately what any
executive’s actual results are if they are changing
assignment too rapidly, plus this approach tends to be
inward looking rather than aligned with customer needs.
□ Many firms have very structured bands within which
compensation packages can be set. This is good in that it
encourages consistency across the organization. The
drawback, however, is that exceptions cannot be made to
attract the top performers of the future. By creating a level
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playing field, outstanding talent cannot be recruited or
retained.
The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 7
□ A minority of companies identify their top performers and
reward them disproportionately well to keep them
motivated and engaged. This can be thought of as a
precision promotion approach. It will only work well if
there is a robust and consistent evaluation system in
place.
3. Periodically move to close the gaps between the alignment of
resources and actual market requirements for success.
To close the gaps means to periodically fill or upgrade critical
management positions before they are needed. To be able to
achieve this, organizations must have a consistent and
robust evaluation process in place. Unless it is possible to
measure existing skill levels across the primary functions of
the business, it is unrealistic to expect the leadership to be
moving to recruit new talent quickly enough.
A good organizational assessment process which helps fill
the gaps will have three main attributes:
□ It will be time sensitive – allowing the leadership to
analyze and project management needs in advance
rather than after the need has become acute.
□ It will be accurate enough to provide worthwhile
information rather than vague ideas.
□ It will be sufficiently objective using consistent
benchmarks rather than constantly changing criteria.
Overall, extraordinary organizations don’t leave things to
chance. They have in place systems whereby existing
employees can evolve into high performing professionals. They
also understand and reward success in meaningful ways. By
consistently raising the bar, great organizations outperform their
peers and grow successive generations of strong business
leaders who are capable of taking the organization forward
confidently into the future.
“To be extraordinary, a company must seek to fill its ranks with
the very best, providing its professionals with the knowledge of
success and empowering them to take control over their careers.
It must create a culture of success, establishing a strong value
system based on empowerment, proactive behavior, and
integrity. By rethinking its core approaches to attracting,
selecting, developing, assessing, and rewarding its employees,
an enterprise can emerge as an extraordinary organization
benefitting from the success of its individuals.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“No duty the executive had to perform was so trying as to put the
right man in the right place.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“The five patterns rest upon pillars that must exist within your
organization if it is to remain competitive and self-sustaining –
namely, trust, creativity, teamwork, customer focus, and
self-actualization. Start with these attributes and organizational
success is that much easier.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“There is something that is much more scarce, something finer
by far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize
ability.”
– Elbert Hubbard
“Attracting, retaining, and developing the very best talent is one
of the most critical challenges facing organizations today.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith

How individuals can and should
Conclusion
apply these 5 patterns
To put the five patterns into practice in your own career, a new
scorecard is required. Instead of expecting instant results, you
should concentrate on creating value for yourself and your
organization. Over an extended period of time, those efforts will
bear fruit and provide a foundation for extraordinary success.
In implementing the five patterns in your own career, you will
need to use what is termed “detached impact” – the realization
that the positive outcomes resulting from positive actions are not
always immediately apparent. There will be times when you will
need to take the right actions for a period before the results
appear. If you look for immediate results and see none, you may
be inclined to think these actions are in vain and yet over a period
of time, the correct actions will always generate the right results.
As you start taking action to implement the five patterns, there
may be little immediate impact but the long-term results are
certain.
To measure success in a career based on the five patterns, a
new scorecard will be required. This scorecard must reflect the
long-term impact of the positive actions taken rather than the
short-term impact of those actions. Specifically, your career
scorecard must measure and track your actions and
experiences in each of the five factors:
1. Whether you understand how value is created in the
workplace, and what you are doing on a day-to-day basis to
translate that knowledge into action.
2. The degree to which you are assisting others to develop their
own careers, thereby creating a core team of people who are
keen to see you succeed as well.
3. Your strategies and actions in overcoming the permission
paradox, and what you are doing to expand the amount of
permission you can harness to build your career.
4. What you are doing to not only do your defined job well but
also create breakthrough ideas and unexpected additional
value for your organization.
5. How effectively you are making day-to-day decisions with
your long-term objectives in mind rather than being ruled by
the expediencies of the moment.
Success in developing an extraordinary career can, at times, be
a subtle process. Unexpected developments can arise, which
appear to be far removed from the actions you take. Bridges that
were built and relationships which were established early in your
career may not bear fruit until much, much later. Paradoxically, to
gain control over your career over the long term, you actually
have to let go of it in the short term. Instead of trying to exert
control over every turn of your career, manage it using the five
patterns and a long-term view. Have confidence that small,
positive actions taken early in your career will, over time, create
substantial upward momentum.
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The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers - Page 8
“For skeptics, the five patterns may seem too simplistic to be
truly meaningful in the complex world of careers. We, too, agree
that the patterns are simple in concept; Attain career knowledge
that is learned only when peering between the lines. Focus on
the success of others, who in turn will carry you to the top. Use
creative strategies to gain access to critical opportunities, and
then deliver breakthrough impact to create lasting differentiation.
Follow your true fit in strengths, passions and people and you will
be rewarded with the ultimate levels of success and satisfaction.
All very simple notions, to be sure. But it is the rarity of their
occurrence w hich makes t hese patterns s o pow erful.
Understanding these patterns, in the end, may be relatively
easy, but it is the deliberate act of putting these patterns into
motion within the context of your own life that can dramatically
alter the course of your career.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“You don’t just luck into things as much as you’d like to think you
do. You build step by step, whether its friendships or
opportunities.”
– Barbara Bush
“Career success is not achieved easily. Like all things of value, it
requires significant investment – in time, effort, focus, emotional
exertion and personal sacrifice. Yet our research clearly
confirmed those achieving the highest levels of professional
success are more satisfied with their jobs, their lifestyle, their
compensation, and the balance in their lives. Understanding the
five patterns of extraordinary careers and tailoring them to you –
your personality, aspirations, personal situation and strengths
and weaknesses – is well worth it and will help you accomplish
the ultimate payoff: career success and satisfaction, under your
control, and beyond your grandest expectations.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith
“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the
success of those we don’t like.”
– Jean Cocteau
“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice. It is not
a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”
– William Jennings Bryan
“There comes the mysterious meeting in life when someone
acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the
circuits of our highest potential.”
– Rusty Berkus
“Taking positive actions in a career really does result in positive
impact, allowing the patterns of extraordinary careers to
manifest themselves. The five patterns of extraordinary careers
are a testament to the power of positive thought and action, and
to the potential that exists within every professional. If successful
careers seem random or unattainable, secret or stolen, they are
not. From the most subtle and well intentioned replication of the
five patterns in your own careers extraordinary things can
emerge, and we truly hope they do for you.”
– James Citrin and Richard Smith