Working identity - Herminia Ibarra

This book offers a powerful model for career reinvention that reverses conventional wisdom. It includes fascinating case studies of personal and professional reinventions - from literature professor to stockbroker, from psychiatrist to Buddhist monk, and from investment banker to fiction writer, among others. It gives readers a new way to understand change in their lives. Career change is not a step-by-step linear process - it's crooked and takes much longer than we think. Nor is change the result of one big event. Rather, many small steps add up to a successful change. This book offers a new theory of reinvention in which a multitude of possible selves competes for attention. During transition, what is actually happening is a reconfiguration of a set of possible selves. The book illustrates the three "acts of reinvention" that characterize successful career transitions: doing new things, connecting with new people and groups, and reworking the story we tell ourselves and others about who we are. It exposes the flaws in most of the career change literature.;For instance, most career books focus on personality tests, interest inventories, and introspection rather than learning by doing.