3 Tools You Must Have To Be Successful In The Corporate World

Many of us were the first in our family to graduate from college.  We also became the first to enter the white collar workforce.  With this step came a foreign environment with its own set of skills and behaviors.  Theses are skills and behaviors which come innate for second or third generation white collar.  They had many opportunities, as they grew up, to observe and model these skills and behaviors.  Through out my professional career, I have seen many first generation white collars trying to apply the inappropriate skill for the situation and disappointed when the end result was not what they anticipated.  It always reminded me of watching my father, he was a mechanic, trying to remove a metric nut with a standard socket.  My father only had one set of tools it was a standard set.  It was all he had ever needed.  It was the set we had been using in America since the invention of the automobile.  But suddenly there was a fuel shortage in the world and for the first time in America we started to import great numbers of Japanese automobiles all of them requiring metric tools.  Back to my father, the socket kept slipping, so he switched to a crescent wrench, when the nut edges were completely rounded he took a pair of vice grips and with all his might torque the nut off.  He was able to remove the nut but it ruined it for future use.  Similarly many times with all our might we apply blue collar work tools to a white collar work set.  While it helps us obtain our short term goal, it is generally at the expense of the long term opportunity.  Like our parents it is generally the only set of tools we posses.  I remember being told son work hard, don’t get in trouble, mind your own business; they will notice and take care of you.  It didn’t happen.  In order to enjoy success in proportion to our capacity we must: