This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Fundamentals of Navigating a Career in the 21st Century, with Neil Irwin, Senior Economics Correspondent, The New York Times, and Author, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World
The Big Picture
My job is to be an economics writer. So what I do every day is write about these big-picture issues in the economy, what’s changing in the corporate world, GDP, what’s going on with the federal reserve. Then at night, often over the last several years, I’ll go out and see a friend, or see a colleague or a source, and we’ll talk about how hard it can be to navigate a career in the modern world. How you have to make a lot of decisions, there’s not a nice, linear path you can follow like our parents’ generation did.
And eventually I realized these conversations I was having at night over drinks, and these things I was writing about during the day as a writer of the New York Times, were actually two sides of the same coin. And that figuring out how to have a successful career is really about understanding how the economy is shifting, how you can be in position to take advantage of those shifts rather than being steamrolled by them.
Change makes things more exciting, but it also makes them a little scarier. You don’t know exactly what the path is towards success, the way an earlier generation did. And so I think the central idea is that all these environments, if you go to any industry, you go to retail, you go to banking, you go to certainly any part of the tech industry, healthcare, education, you name it. They’re all driven by the same centralized forces. It’s digital disruption, it’s the changing nature of competition and globalization. And that’s happening across the corporate landscape, not just in any one industry.
Shifting Workplace Dynamics
I started right out of college as a summer intern at the Washington Post back in the year 2000, which feels like a really long time ago at this point. And at the time, a place like the Washington Post was very much an assembly line. It was really, literally a manufacturing company. We manufactured newspapers. I was one end of the assembly line. I would write a story, feed it into a process, go through all these different editors, and printing presses, and delivery trucks, end up on people’s doorstep.
And we thought that way, too. If you wanted to have a good career, everybody knew exactly how to do it. You do this job for three years, then that job for five years, then you become an editor, then you become a more senior editor. I think what we’re seeing now in media, certainly in my current employer, which is the New York Times or any place like that, is a much more fluid, team-based environment.
So it’s much less certain what it takes to have a successful career and have a long lasting career because the technology is changing all the time. One day it’s podcast, the next day it’s apps, the next day it’s video. And what that takes is different types of skills. And whereas in the past a writer at the New York Times or the Washington Post could be in a little silo and write their articles and then go home at the end of the day, now what it takes to succeed is really understanding how these teams can fit together and make great products, even when that pulls together different types of skills.
A single team might have a couple of traditional writers and editors like myself, might also include graphic artists, might include software engineers and developers, business-side people understanding product strategy. All those things have to come together to make a good cooking app, or whatever it may be from a modern media organization. It’s not at all what it was like 20 years ago. So I’ve kind of witnessed this change upfront and up-close as I’ve gone through my own career.
Making Adjustments
This has been hard for me in the media industry. We’ve seen a lot of changes, a lot of financial distress. And a lot of that came in the era of the crisis and the recession, the business model that had paid all our salaries for decades was falling apart beneath our feet. So there was this great sense of fear. Now, the good part of that whole crisis for the industry was, it did create some opportunities for younger people like myself to get jobs that we might not have gotten until we were 50 in the olden days.
And so I got to start covering national economics at a fairly young age, which was really exciting. But the real hard part was adjusting to how this shift in technology and the economics of the media industry, what that meant for our jobs as producers of content. And the idea that your goal is not to write something that gets on the front page of the newspaper, your job is to write something that will find readers, that people want to consume.
And I think thinking of customers first has been the biggest adjustment. It’s not just about making your editors happy, it’s not just about getting a gold star from the boss. It’s really about writing something that is going to resonate with people because we have data now to know what resonates with people better than we used to.
So I think getting used to writing in a digital way, using better headlines, being responsible for my own graphic’s headlines, all the elements of presenting an article in the New York Times has been a real adjustment for me and an exhilarating one, but one that not everybody was able to make. And some people who were not able to make that transition over the last decade have had to leave the industry or find something else to do.
Defining Your “Win”
I titled this book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, not How to Make the Most Money in a Winner-Take-All World, not How to Become a CEO. And the reason is, there are a lot of different forms of winning, a lot of different forms of success. And I’m not going to sit here and tell you exactly which should be that form for you. Maybe it is becoming a CEO or a top executive, maybe it is making millions and millions of dollars. But maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s finding a career that’s challenging and rewarding and satisfying, but allows you enough time to spend time with your family and really have a rich home life. Maybe you have hobbies or side interests that you want to be able to pursue.
And there’s nothing wrong with any of those. I think the key is being thoughtful about what your real purpose is, and what your real drive is, and making sure that the career choices you make, the kinds of organizations you work for, the kinds of skills you cultivate, are aligned with that broader set of interests. And not just letting it happen by accident because, oh, well, I’m supposed to want to get a promotion or make more money, so that’s what I have to do. Be thoughtful about it.