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Someday I’m going to have to plan my career. I figure I’ll have time to plan it a few months after I retire. In the meantime, I’m having so much fun at whatever I have instead that if I have any more I’m not going to get any sleep at all.

Oh, I know we’re all supposed to have a five-year career plan with timetables, self-improvement programs, personal re-invention programs, education programs … jazz like that.

Take my advice: Don’t bother. You’ll make yourself miserable executing your plan, you’ll make everyone around you miserable as well, and you’ll be just as miserable when you succeed as you are now.

What should you do instead? Here’s a realistic alternative. Even if your own career is in good shape it may provide a useful framework for helping the people who work for you plan their careers (you do help them plan their careers, don’t you?).

Begin with a self-assessment: Do you really want a career, or do you just want a job? People who just want a job do it to make money so they can do what they enjoy in their time off. People with careers wrap a lot of their identity into their professional lives.

There’s nothing wrong with just wanting a job. You won’t experience the same kind of advancement, personal satisfaction, and monetary reward as the career-minded, but it’s a perfectly valid option.

If you (or your employees) are career-minded, here’s the program:

  • Decide what you enjoy doing. This should be a list, not a single item, it should be short, and each item should be very general. “Solving puzzles,” is a good one. So are “Helping other people succeed,” “Building useful things,” and “Performing in front of an audience.”
  • Figure out which of the above you’re good at. You can build a career out of these. The rest you should enjoy as hobbies.
  • Establish a long-range goal – one that is at least three career steps away. If you’re a regular reader of this column and you aren’t CIO already, that may be where you’re headed. If you are CIO you may want to become CEO someday, run your own company, become a consultant – or become a professional waterskier for that matter.
  • Make a list of desirable next jobs. You don’t have to decide on just one, of course – there are no career police to force the issue. Just don’t be honest about it in a job interview – there, the job for which you’re applying is exactly what you want to do next. You want jobs you can attain, of course – your resume must qualify you for them. They also must fit the profile you established in steps one and two; you must have the aptitude and enjoy the work. Finally, they have to move you in the right direction for achieving your long-range goal.
  • Prepare yourself for the jobs you want next. Attend training sessions or night school, but most important, get on project teams that will give you the right experiences.
  • After a year or two in your new job, repeat the process. You’ll have learned more about your long-range goal, you’ll have learned more about yourself, and you’ll be a different person than when you last went through this exercise.

People with careers sometimes retire. You find these folks volunteering a lot. Others don’t bother to retire – they may slow down, but basically they get paid for their hobby. Supposedly, when asked about his retirement the golfing great Ben Hogan answered, “People retire to fish and play golf. I fish and play golf.”

Why would he retire when his career was in full swing?

Qualifiers are for lawyers, not writers.

“In the absence of exogenous factors it’s generally true that 2 + 2 = 4. Notwithstanding the above, accepted mathematics applies except when unforeseen circumstances lead to different conclusions,” is, to be charitable, ungraceful.

When accuracy and good writing collide, though, accuracy should win. It didn’t in last week’s column on ITIL and The Cloud. I erred on the side of good writing, leaving out a necessary qualifier.

I have just one question about Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments regarding women’s compensation: Did he deserve all the outrage?

Let’s start with his actual words:

Maria Klawe: What do you advise women who are interested in advancing their careers but they’re not comfortable with putting themselves up for promotions or advanced opportunities?

Satya Nadella: The thing that perhaps most  influenced me in terms of how you look at the journey or a career…There was this guy whose name is Mike Naples who was President of Microsoft when I joined, and he has this saying that all HR systems are long-term efficient, short-term inefficient.

And I thought that phrase just captured it. Which is…it’s not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go long.

And that I think might be one of the additional “superpowers,” that quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma. It will come back. Somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person I want to trust. That’s the kind of person that I want to give more responsibility to.

And in the long-term efficiency, things catch up. And I wonder whether taking the long-term approach helps solve for “Am I getting paid right?” Am I getting rewarded right?” The reality is the best work is not followed with your best rewards. Your best work then has impact, people recognize it, and then you get the rewards. And you somehow have to think that through.”

Opinion: The problem here isn’t that Nadella is insensitive to women’s realities. It’s that he’s insensitive to how things happen here on the planet I like to call “earth.”

The problem, that is, is that this isn’t how things actually work.

When an employee, male or female, does great work and that great work has impact, that doesn’t mean anyone in management will even know which employee deserves the credit.

Credit-stealing is routine in American business. Worse, or perhaps better, great work and impact are usually produced by a team. Balancing the importance of valuing team effort with the varying contributions of different team members is quite a difficult feat.

Also, Nadella seems to be implying that promotions and raises come from doing something that has a strong positive impact. I sure hope not. That’s what bonuses are for. Employers should give employees raises when they’re worth more in the employment marketplace, and promotions when they’re capable of a more responsible and valuable job.

What happens instead: When companies underpay employees the result is a short-term increase in profitability. And as accounting systems don’t have any way to represent the loss of talented employees on financial statements, the whole system is tilted in this direction.

The result: In the vast majority of corporations, employees don’t get what they deserve, they get what they negotiate, just like the ad in the in-flight magazines tells you.

Nardella’s response was, in many respects, thoughtful. The problem was that he failed to include something critical, namely, useful advice for the world as it actually is. A far better response would have been:

The situation for women at Microsoft … and at any other company, but I only have influence over Microsoft … should be exactly like the situation for male employees. What we’re striving for is that no employee should ever have to ask for a raise or promotion. We want every employee to be in a position they can succeed in, and that provides them with opportunities to achieve and grow. And we want to pay every employee what he or she is truly worth.

If we’re failing to do that for any employee, that employee should make her … or his … case and we should listen and make an objective judgment. We should give that employee a raise or promotion if one is warranted, and an honest response either way.

As a general rule, in U.S. businesses at least, men are better at negotiating these things than women. Worse, it’s considered okay for men to negotiate such things, much more so than for women who do the exact same thing.

And as the big three when it comes to compensation de-motivators are arrogance, disrespect and unfairness, it’s unsurprising that women, more than men, are likely to find their compensation de-motivating.

Were Mr. Nardella’s words disrespectful to women? I don’t think so. They were worse than that.

They were terrible advice.