CAREER VEER: How to Position Yourself for a Prosperous Future

One decent idea--traditional specialists and generalists might be better off becoming ""cluster specialists""--immured in a lot of gab about the ""cacophony of change"" (a la Naisbitt and Toffler) and lots of convoluted self-assessment. Houze is an executive recruiter with long experience at GE and Rockwell International, and he's not wrong about the dangers, in these volatile times, of knowing more and more about less and less, or less and less about more and more. But to make the point doesn't take a cartoon economic history of the Western world (""Blaise Pascal, a teenage French mathematical wizard, invents an adding and subtracting machine in 1642"") or a demonstration of the superiority of the word-processor over the typewriter for producing 150 personalized form letters. A single chapter then disposes of what a cluster specialist is--someone ""who works effectively. . . in a small number of technologies, crafts, or markets having one or more unifying relationships""--and illustrations thereof: a master mechanic, a lead word-processing operator, a senior sales engineer, etc. The balance of the book has to do with corporate cultures, assessing your own relationship to them (""1. Some cultures are for you, some are not. 2. You won't change the culture but it may change you""), and deciding whether or not to enter ""entrepreneuland.' There follow ""models for clustering"" on each of five career paths: worker, supervisor of workers, staff professional, manager of resources, or entrepreneur. This latter material is all intertwined however--so that the individual (supervisor, professional, or whatever) can't zero in on what might be applicable.