I was meeting with a senior exec last week and he was lamenting the external challenges his organization was facing. Most troubling to him was the difficulty of communicating the need for change. One of his issues was executive communication, i.e. the ability of his senior leaders to persuasively make the case for change. The second issue was employee inertia and their unwillingness to acknowledge the need for change. Much of their employee population had an “entitlement” mentality about both their company (our customers will always need us) and their jobs (my company will always need me).
On Monday I read the an article in the Chicago Tribune business section entitled, ” The Corporate Ladder: It’s not an escalator … Don’t be passive with your career” http://bit.ly/SlNM3e. Quoting the columnist, “many people get into a job and assume that advancement comes automatically. If that was ever true, it’s certainly not the case now. Workers who don’t take control of their careers risk waking up one day realizing they are not as far along as they’d like to be regardless of how much they bust their butts”.
What are the parallels, you ask, between these two observations?
Don’t be inert; you need to be Ert!
Don’t assume that your job and company will always be there. They won’t be. And don’t assume that advancement comes automatically. It doesn’t.
3 Connections 
Great post – I just blogged about Finding Passion and how it should be a matter of taking the stairs rather than the elevator
Thanks for the comment; I agree!