Admittedly, this is a challenge in my life: I am, at my core, a workaholic. I am a product of an entrepreneurial family with a career in tech startups, where working 60+ hours per week (at least) was a badge of honor; I am compulsive enough by nature that it plays directly into both my work style and my ego; and I am a volunteer junkie who is the first in line to take on difficult new challenges that no one knows how to accomplish.

My husband and business partner is the opposite. While he can and has worked insane hours during various points of his professional life, it is not what he enjoys and it is not what he wants. And, for him, my over-and-above hours of work detract from our time together, which is not the trade-off he signed up for.

The VentureBeat article, titled “You work 60-hour weeks. Should your employees?” is probably made even more noteworthy by the comments left by readers. As is often the case, comments fall heavily into two camps:

The What Kind of Slacker Only Works 60 Hour Weeks? Camp — which is the modern equivelant to your grandfather’s old saying, “Back in my days, we had to walk to school a mile in the snow both ways…” It’s a sign of geek and/or entrepreneurial bravado to be the Michael Jordan of work hours, and demonstrate that you can push yourself longer and harder than those around you.

The Work Is Never Going to Love You Back Camp — who are the advocates of “work-life balance” and who are acutely aware of the fact that no one lies on their deathbed saying, “I wish I’d had just one more meeting…” It’s a sign of idiocy to this group that one would ever do anything as foolish as risk their health or personal relationships by refusing simply turn off the computer and leave work at a decent hour.

The thing that is most interesting, though, is that — as always happens in this debate — people over-look a simple, basic fact: different people need different things for different reasons.

In all the politically correct talk about “work-life balance,” there is something important that is often missed: some of us need to work long hours for reasons that have little or nothing to do with anything or anyone else. And, when we find ourselves in a work environment that does not place that demand on us, we will find a way to create it. Consider this:

Work People

• Get their energy from work.
• Derive their motivation from work-based accomplishment.
• Experience their strongest social connections to other people through work.
• Use the inertia of long hours to build momentum for accomplishing their goals.
• Find an intellectual stimulation and satisfaction in work that they don’t find anywhere else.

Life People

• Get their energy from social or personal activities.
• Derive their motivation from hobbies and social interactions.
• Seek social connections that are based on non-work interests, often as part of the respite from work.
• Require the break from work in order to recharge and return productively.
• Experience a wider array of sources that can lead to satisfying intellectual, emotional or psychological stimulation.

And while debates can wage about which side of the coin is “healthier,” it really doesn’t change the fact that my husband is unlikely to ever be an 80-hour-per-week-maniac and I am unlikely to ever be happy trying to keep my work week limited to 40 hours. We’ll each do what we need to do as circumstances demand, but what is native to each of us is different and meaningful for our own reasons.

The VentureBeat article recommends focusing on great results, not the means by which specific individuals arrive at those results. I’d agree with this approach, but take it a step further: it’s not enough to have this expectation of your staff. You have to find staff who want and thrive with high expectations.  Only hire people who like that kind of pressure and motivation.

A “life person” who is asked to work 60+ hours per week by their boss may technically put in the hours, but they are likely to trading in quantity at the expense of quality. For people who need off-hours to recharge their batteries, the point of diminishing returns comes sooner, and time put in working after that threshold is always less productive (sometimes to a costly degree).

Yes, there are always going to be times when the realities of a business require additional time and work, but I think the focus of a boss should be on finding staff whose workstyles fit what you need, rather than trying to turn who you have into someone they are not. In the end, that approach is just asking for trouble, because not only will you always be frustrated — frustrated at having to ask, frustrated by feelings of disappointment and frustrated by the results you get out of people — but you’ll also be setting your team up for failure by creating a situation that runs counter to their individual needs.

Ultimately, you can’t change a person. And asking someone to behave in a way that is fundamentally counter to their nature is never a long-term solution. So my advice is to focus on the fit first. Jim Collins refers to this as ‘getting the right people on the bus.’ If you are a workaholic who likes achieving the impossible at the drop of a hat, then an employee who rolls into the office at 10:00 and rolls out right at 6:00 is probably going to drive you crazy — no matter how much amazing work he gets accomplished in that eight hours.

Tim hits the nail on the head right out of the gate: the absurdity of that recommendation is the idea that once a business is successful, it is somehow going to miraculously be easier for an entrepreneur to walk away from it to start building a life.  He gives a list of very useful things to do to avoid falling into this trap.

For me, though, the real problem with this advice is the assumption that it is only business that it hard — having a life is easy.  Anyone who says that has never tried to shift gears and go from being a workaholic to being a romantic partner.  As someone who has spent five years working on that transition, I’ll tell you: it’s much harder than it sounds.

If you spend your twenties — and worse yet, also your thirties — focusing on building your business while neglecting your life, why would anyone assume that suddenly starting to focus on having a life at 40 is going to be a cake walk?  There are days when I am convinced the reason we live so long is because that’s how long it takes to practice to even start getting our lives right.  If we don’t even begin until it’s half over, then we’re out of time before we begin.

One of my favorite bloggers, Penelope Trunk, writes about this regularly: as a serial entrepreneur, she moved her family from New York City to Madison, WI for their life.  She founded a tech startup in a city with virtual no tech industry because that was where it made sense for her family to live.  Has it been a struggle?  Sure.  Was there reasoning in her logic?  Absolutely.

Everyone wants to know that their legacy has an impact — for some people having kids is enough.  For others, leaving behind impressive business accomplishments is enough.  But if what you want is both, then you can’t delude yourself into thinking that you can ignore one for half your life and suddenly make up for it in the second half.  Time doesn’t work that way.

So many entrepreneurs I know start their own business because they want a lifestyle that allows them what working for someone else never has: opportunity and flexibility.  And most of the reasons they want those things are because they have, or want to have, a life.

I’m with Tim: waiting until your business is successful to start building a life is asking to have a lop-sided legacy.  And that may be fine for you, but make sure you know that going in.  In business these days we spend so much time discussing how hard it is to build the necessary relationships to be successful.  Does anyone really think it’s easier to build successful relationships in the rest of your life?

(This post is part of my Entrepreneur Evangelist series and was originally published on WorkingPoint‘s Small Business Blog.)

When the bubble burst back in 2000 it was because speculation had driven realistic performance expectations, sanity and reason out the window (keep throwing endless piles of money at most people, and eventually most of us will get stupid). The industry itself, as well as those watching and investing in it, had bought into its own hype, and then it was crushed under the weight of it’s own hubris and lunacy. (Not unlike what is currently happening to the financial services industry.) Critical lesson: watch the hype and don’t drink the KoolAid. (A caution I would also issue to the current level of hysteria going on in the social media space.)

What this meant, of course, was that companies that had not yet become profitable or did not yet have a self-sustaining business model were S.O.L. VC money evaporated over night. Gone were the massages and catered lunches and lavish holiday parties. Suddenly we were awash in pay cuts, layoffs and absorbing the workloads of people who’d left because we couldn’t afford to replace them.

We were lucky. At that point, we were still a services company (though we were working on our product; it just wasn’t done yet), and that bought us a little bit of time. Not a lot, but — as it turned out — enough. And we sold our asses off. Everything we did for clients was billable. Everything was custom. Everything was a one-off.

Naturally, this presented problems in the scheme of things, because while this was providing us with live-saving revenue, this was not at all scalable. And our leadership knew it. So we continued to push forward with our plans to transition into being a product-based business that offered additional, ancillary services.

The troubles here were strategy, communications, education and execution. For those of us who were living on the services side, we had a culture that was services-centric — not product-centric, and there is a huge difference. In a services-centric culture, your answer to clients is always “yes.” And clients expect your answer to always be “yes.” It never occurs to either of you that the answer could or should be anything else. There is a culture of expectation that must be transitioned, and it must be done thoughtfully and carefully in order to avoid alienating the very people who are keeping you in business.

Now, to be sure, you aren’t going to have a business if you get in the habit of saying “no” to your customers, but there is a big difference between being an order-taking organization whose response to “Jump!” is always, “How high?” and an organization that provides expertise and consultation to customers, as suppliments to a core product offering. The culture, the relationship, the value brought to the table are all very different. And shifting from one to the other is a significant change that needs to be managed carefully in order to keep both your staff and your clients onboard.

Furthermore, our problem was compounded by the fact that the product team was very insulated from the rest of the business. That include socially. They literally sat in a different building. The two groups barely knew each other, so not only did both sides feel misunderstood and taken for granted, but we did not have the opportunity to really find any solid common ground. The services teams thought the product teams were snobs; and the product teams thought the services teams were cowboys. And we were probably all at least a little bit right. But what we weren’t seeing is that each group had a different mission, and that we were each very much in-line with what we needed to be doing at that time.

What we didn’t do was actively execute against a long-term strategy to bring both teams in-line with each other. To whatever degree that did ultimately happen, it was more by brute force of circumstance than by much in the way of active planning or cultivation. Looking back now, so many of the conflicts, headaches, and missteps are painfully clear. And, since hindsight is 20/20, I see so many opportunities that were missed, that would have made all the difference — both when it came to the internal culture, as well as in our relationships with clients.

Of course, looking back, I also now realize that this was one of the early seeds that sparked my interest in change management. This was a big change that had do-or-die implications for the business. The sense of urgency and relevance needed to be truly understood by the services team to get their buy-in, and it simply wasn’t. Without that comprehension, managing client expectations was an endless series of bungled missteps that were constantly needing to be corrected. The services teams needed a roadmap; and we didn’t even have a compass.

Another reason that I love startups is that, given enough time, I know that I’ll have the opportunity to tackle this type of problem again, and be able to apply some of the hard-won lessons from last time to doing it better.

And then I got a job — that ultimately turned into a career — at a start-up. Pay dirt!

The transformation that sparked in me is still an endless source of amusement among my friends. It took me a while to realize why, but eventually it was clear: the problem with school is that there was an upper limit on what I was capable of achieving. It was an artificial cap on how well I could be scored. I found that inherently disincentivizing. In business, however, there is no upper limit. You can take something as far or as high as you can push it (given the right environment, of course).

And, even better, in a scrappy, entrepreneurial, risk-taking startup (especially one trying to survive an economic downturn) someone who is hungry, talented, teachable and willing to dive into the deep end of the pool head first has tremendous opportunity for growth. The first three years of my career were the most educational, exciting and energizing time of my life — all of my years of school combined couldn’t compare to those three years. Everything was new, everything was interesting and I never once had the slightest bit of doubt that I could conquer anything that came my way.

Ah, the hubris of youth!

Of course, there were downsides. Like many young people, I didn’t know my limits and was constantly pushing the envelope in ways that I probably shouldn’t have (and in ways that I’ve since learned not to do). Whereas many 26-year-olds may be more inclined to do that with parties, I did it with work. I ended up missing a lot of important events in the lives of friends and family because of that.

I was also still extremely idealistic about a great many things. Instead of The Pragmatic Contextualist, an appropriate blog title would have been something along the lines of The Snarky Idealist or Bring it On and Get Out of the Way! (Which, ironically, is still how some people tend to view me, though I have toned down considerably with age.)

But that idealism was invaluable to me, because it made me fearless: if anything is possible and I’m extremely capable, then what do I have to be afraid of? I don’t tend to be very risk-adverse in general, but I have become more cautious with age (though, not quite enough for either my husband or father’s tastes). Back then, though, it would never occur to me that I wouldn’t figure out a way to succeed at whatever I did — which meant I was a hopeless volunteer junkie.

My biggest rush came from fixing problems, and in a post-bubble burst start-up, there were plenty of things to be fixed. So I had an endless supply of opportunity, and endless confidence in my own success. Happily, I also had bosses who went from having nothing to lose by letting me try, to truly believing in my ability to make a positive difference.

As was inevitable, a few kicks in the teeth later, and I stopped being quite so cocky. The pragmatist in me was ultimately born of those experiences, and the eternal idealist retreated to the back, only to come out for the occasional political event.

One of the biggest, most valuable lessons I learned was how to deal with chaos. More recently in my career, I had a bizarre moment when a senior IT Director — who was easily 25 years older than me — groused that we were working in “the most chaotic environment” he’d ever experienced in his life.

I wanted to laugh and call him a weenie (I restrained myself — though barely). The environment we were working in at the time was easily the least chaotic environment I’d ever experienced, and his inability to roll with the punches made him a particularly weak and frustrating leader in my opinion, because he got frazzled very easily, whined constantly and was tremendously rigid. It never occurred to me until that moment that my ability to handle chaos was all that unique.

Naturally, one of the dangers of getting a bit too used to high volumes of chaos is that you can become a drama junkie. This did happen to me, and it took me a while (and outside circumstances) to curb it. But what I have seen of most drama junkies (and trust me, I wasn’t the only one I knew) is that, the older we get, the less tolerance we have for that same constant fever-pitch of insanity.

This is another reason that I have often recommended aimless twentysomethings seeking career advice to explore startups: because by the time people are settled in their career, married or have kids, startups can be a bit too rough on the lifestyle. So if you’re going to do them, best give them a shot while you’re young, energetic, single and have as few external obligations as possible.

But when I look back on that time now, I am profoundly grateful. I was drinking from a fire hose, and it never occurred to me there was any other way to work. I got to sample a spectrum of potential opportunities and figure out which ones held some appeal, and which ones didn’t. If I had found myself in a more stable, structured environment back then, I can’t imagine where I’d be now, because the lessons I learned there, and the all-you-can-eat-buffet of opportunities that I had available to me at the time are how I found my way into a career.

In the scheme of things, I look back on the most pivotal, impactful decisions of my life and the day I left the famed O’Reilly Publishing — which is where I thought I’d wanted to work for years — and went to MarketLive (at the time it was still called MultimediaLive) was one of them. And since then, I have found myself encouraging twentysomethings who do not know what they want out of a career to look at startups, because as long as they can develop a bit of tolerance for chaos (which I firmly believe everyone should do), they’ll usually find opportunities they never knew existed.

What do you think? Are startups a good or bad place to start out your career?

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices can really set the stage for the directions we take in life. As is often the case, many of the largest influences on our lives are not obvious until many years later. And while I am as likely as anyone to take them for granted, every once in a while something will happen to make me stop and consider the series of events that brought me to where I am now, and what the unintended consquences of seemingly small actions or events have ultimately provided.

There were three defining elements of my early career that I have been noodling on, because they had much larger impacts on me than I ever would have predicted at the time:

• Getting your start in a startup. What is the value to launching a career in a startup environment?
• Being in the ‘wild west’ of a new market space. What does it mean to be in a new space?
• Transforming a company from being “a services company” to “a product company.” What are the differences and why are they important?

Undoubtedly, the first two of those are a bit sexier than the third. However, all three ultimately shaped me in ways I never fully realized at the time. The lessons learned were a bit rough sometimes, but when I compare some of my experience to that of my peers, I realize that I had the opportunity to be involved in some things that have served me extremely well and that I wouldn’t trade in for anything.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll cover each of these topics in a separate post (each one is too long to combine them).

Implications of Being “Even”
The first definition for “balance” on Dictionary.com defines the word as:

a state of equilibrium or equipoise; equal distribution of weight, amount, etc.

While I recognize that the phrase is not literally intended to mean that there should be a minute-by-minute division of one’s day, the fact is that “work-life balance” implies that one’s work and personal lives are supposed to be (at least reasonably) evenly balanced. That is a flawed assumption.

For starters, as a rather classic ENTJ, I would argue that assuming I could possibly be happy with that much of my time focused on non-professional activities is presumptuous and inaccurate. For me only working 60 hours per week is ‘taking it easy,’ and there is no way that anyone else’s expectation of how much time I “should” be spending outside of work changes the fact that is simply not who I am or who I want to be. Period.

On the flip side, the best example I know of is my younger sister. She easily has 30 IQ points on me, and yet she does not have a career-oriented, ambitious bone in her body. She has spent her entire career careening from one dead-end, mindless job to the next. She has been happiest when she was not working at all, but was a stay-at-home wife experimenting with organic and/or vegan recipes, doting over her cats and playing computer games all day. For her the only reason to have a job is to have a paycheck, and even then, only if there are not other arrangements that can be made so she can simply avoid the entire unpleasant mess.

If the universe were to decide to amuse itself and play a Freaky Friday on the two of us, we’d both be miserable. By lunchtime I’d be breaking into the liquor cabinet; and she’d probably call in sick and not bother going to work at all. By the time we switched back, I’d return to my life to discover that she’d thrown away all non-organic food products in my house and updated the OS/service packs on my computer; and she’d return to her life to discover that she had half a dozen job interviews lined up and her three rooms worth of pack-ratted storage had all been hauled to the dump. Neither of us would be happy, because both of us are most happy when our lives are completely ‘out of balance.’

Dividing the Red Sea
The other objection I have to the idea of “work-life balance” is the idea that there is a hard-and-fast separation between work and the rest of your life. I suppose for some people, this is probably the case. I have known a few people in my career who do not make a habit of socializing with co-workers and who, once out of the office for the evening, are disengaged and ‘out of pocket’ until they return the next morning. However, coming from a technology and start-up background, those people are in the extreme minority of my experience. Most people that I know flunk on the ‘work-life balance’ if for no other reason than because there is not that clear of a distinction between their work life ends and their personal life begins.

Since the time I started working full-time in my early 20′s (even before I was done with college) my closest friendships have always been with people I met at/through work. Always. And while we certainly do and talk about other things when we are together outside of the office, we also talk about work and our careers. There is no clear line where one stops and the other starts.

On top of which, there is a universal truth about the tech sector: tech geeks are tech geeks at home as well as at work. How many server engineers have you met who rebuild machines at home all the time just for fun? How many of them have servers in their garage (or pantry) that run their home network? And how many of them come into work eager to try a new trick that they spent the weekend experimenting with and want to apply it to the work environment? Ditto with developers and all other types of tech geeks. And, in a 24/7 web-run world, you never launch, upgrade or convert anything during the day. That always happens late at night. And people rarely come into the office for that. Instead, we all get online, jump on a bridge call, and work from home in our pajamas all night. Further blurring the line between work and life.

Another issue I have with this concept is that I find it to be semi-disingenuous political correctness in good times, and then completely absent in bad times. I’ve never been at a company that touted the importance of work-life balance in good times that didn’t stop as soon as economic conditions turned south.

We’ve past the point where the phrase “work-life balance” either suits us or serves a genuine purpose. The real notion is “work-life integration” or “work-life compatibility” (for the late adopters and/or non-info workers out there). Most people only work because they need a paycheck (or benefits, etc.), which means that often the life side of the equation is what matters most. Those of us who work even when we don’t get a paycheck need far more time spent on work on any given day. It’s only the small minority who fall somewhere in between really stand a chance of finding that mythical “balance.” For the rest of us, finding an integrated solution is what we need so that we can keep our focus where it needs to be — wherever we are, or whatever we are doing.

This week Forbes published an article by Dr. Steven Berglas asserting that a recent study suggests that Generation Y (otherwise known as “The Millennials”) are “too soft” for the dog-eat-dog world of entrepreneurship.

I am not sure whether to laugh or shake my head and sigh. Where to begin?

The 80/20 Rule
If there is one truism that seems to pervade any social context, it is the fact that the vast majority of contribution comes from the smallest minority of individuals. By definition, these individuals are the exception to the rule. These are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world, who defy all the “norms” they grew up with and did something completely out of the ordinary and leave a staggering sea of change in their wake.

As such, my point is this: if it’s always the minority that makes the most staggering contribution to posterity, then does it really matter whether or not the vast majority of a generation wasn’t raised to prize an aggressive entrepreneurial spirit?

Baby Boomers were notorious for wanting a secure job at one company for the duration of their career. As such, most of them were not entrepreneurs. And, if one buys the argument that most Gen Xer’s are slackers, then most of us wouldn’t be entrepreneurs, either. So does it really matter why the vast majority of Millennials are also disinclined towards the uncertain and financial turbulent lifestyle of an entrepreneur?

Gen Y Employee Shortage
The fact that The Department of Labor expected a 30 percent decrease of workers in their 30s and 40s between 2000-2010 is another reason that Dr. Berglas’ contention strikes me as a bit absurd: if major corporations around the world really are going to be experiencing a massive employee shortage, then those corporations are likely going to pay top dollar for the best of the small crop that exists. If that’s true, then the issue is much bigger than Generation Y. An entrepreneurial existence can be rough, and it is often difficult to raise a family on one. I have known plenty of people over my life — starting with my own father — who has spent his life struggling to maintain a small business for lack of other good options. If corporate America had been able to provide a more profitable, sustainable and stable lifestyle, there are plenty of struggling entrepreneurs who would happily give up the uncertainty of that lifestyle for a long-term corporate sponsorship.

The danger here is Dr. Berglas assuming that entrepreneurs are exclusively entrepreneurs simply because they possess a strong entrepreneurial spirit. That is another unsubstantiated assumption. Necessity is the mother of invention. There are plenty of business owners who do what they do out of (a sense of) a lack of other options, and many of them have very difficult and unstable professional lives because of it. Sure, there are plenty of people who want to own their own business. But there are also plenty of people who own their own business who would happily trade it in for affordable health care, a 401K and an ability to take a vacation or a sick day every once in a while.

Generational Generalizations
Of course, this is probably the bigger objection I have to this whole assertion: generalizations are typically simplistic b.s. While I did get a chuckle out of Dr. Berglas’ describing Millennials as “”The Everybody Gets A Trophy” generation” (because the eternal championing of mediocrity has often been a source of scoffing among me and my friends: kindergarten graduation ceremonies? Gimme a break.), the fact is that social pendulems swing from one extreme to the other. Defining such a large group of people in such broad terms is simply absurd.

If you want to address specific conditions that do impact Generation Y, then we should discuss disruptive technologies that practically spawn new business models daily, or about how fast/easy it is to start online businesses in an SaaS world. Those things will impact Gen Y’s entrepreneurial spirit more than whether or not they got the fourth runner up medal at their six grade spelling bee.

So when I see someone use generic terms and sweeping generalizations to describe large groups of people, I think of all the times throughout history that has happened and for all the different reasons — some of them simply ignorant, others out-right nefarious.

But no matter what the reason, that kind of generalization is just lazy. If we know anything, it is that history is made by the exception, not the rule. So who cares if the Gen Y “rule” is to sing Barney’s theme song while living in their parents’ basement?

The Entrepreneurs
The “ideas” people whose passion rallies supporters; they inspire loyalty and motivation. They find people willing to make sacrifices (often in the form of lower wages) in order to help gamble on getting a business up and running. They tend to build organizations whose culture reflects their personalities, in both positive and negative ways. Inexperience can often lead to a blurring of lines between their life and their business. Experience is often needed to separate the two a bit. This separation will have a ripple effect on the type of organizational culture they foster, whether they always realize it or not. Without these people, none of us would ever have a job. However, a successful organization will almost always out-grow its entrepreneurial roots, which most often requires a ‘changing of the guard’ when it comes to bringing in new staff whose skill sets more closely reflect the subsequent stages of an organization’s development.

The Mature Organization Professionals
The “process” people whose passion is around scalability, sustainability and predictability. Ensuring that an organization provides reliable goods and services is central to the success of the business, and that in order to produce predictable results, managing the process of delivery is key. These people can be every bit as much of a workaholic as entrepreneurs, but part of being sustainable is having an organization that functions at a stable level of efficiency, which means that heroic efforts of over-worked employees are suboptimal, because they are too volatile to be reliable. Part of being a stable business is being able to build a framework that can accomplish what it needs to within a standard, predictable, reliable schedule that allows employees to leave at the end of the day and unplug, so that they can return the next morning refreshed and able to provide a consistent level of effort day in and day out.

The Change Agents
These are the people who bridge the gap. Change agents are the ones who help guide an Entrepreneurial Organization down the road to becoming a Mature Organization. A good change agent understands the beauty of both models; he understands the sense of personal investment the entrepreneurial people have in the business, and he understands that the mature business model requires not taking things (too) personally. A truly good change agent realizes that an entrepreneurial culture — no matter how valuable it may have been in the beginning — is not typically scalable enough to remain intact in a mature organization.

A change agent needs to be more sensitive to things like culture, politics and employee engagement than the other two types in many ways, because the change agent is often in a position of trying to convince entrepreneurial people to adapt and stay committed to an organization that is growing into something else — often something that is not the type of organization that those people would have been as interested in working at. But a change agent also understands that, particularly while trying to evolve an organization, you still need the passion and dedication of those who founded the company, because (if properly leveraged) they can be some of your most powerful advocates.

Of course, there are people who can float back and forth between all different types of organizations. But the people who are truly good at that often find they make a better living as a consultant whose area of expertise is exactly that: floating back and forth, cross-pollinating ideas across organizations (if not industries). For those of us who prefer to be an active, permanent part of an organization, odds are that we identify pretty closely with one of those three categories. Entrepreneurial types don’t look for jobs at General Electric or Hewlett-Packard; and Mature Organization Professionals don’t look for jobs at tech startups being housed in a developer’s garage. A Change Agent could go either way, though usually they will opt for the startup; they tend to assume that working at GE would be less interesting (or even out-right boring), which may not be the case, but is a common inclination.

I had an amusing reinforcement of the roots of my theory recently: a director lamented that “this is the most chaotic environment I have ever worked in.” My knee-jerk reaction was actually laughter (which I managed to contain, though just barely), because, by comparison, that same environment was the least chaotic I had ever worked in. It stunned me for a moment that anyone with as much experience as he had could possibly feel that way, until I remembered the types of organizations he’d worked at in the past (most notably major financial institutions) versus the type I had worked in (all technology startups). The “chaos” he was seeing around him was causing huge amounts of stress and anxiety for him; and while I would experience acute moments of frustration at times, they were usually localized and specific, before returning to my normal pace (which, relatively speaking, was far more relaxed than I was used to).

The last lesson I’ve learned about this theory is that size and age are not necessarily defining characteristic in determining an organization’s development stage. They may be clues, but it’s definitely possible to be at a huge (even publicly traded) company that is still, for all intents and purposes, a startup; just like hitting a 10-year anniversary is no guarantee that the organization is a mature one. Just like with people, age and size do not define maturity.

Of course, as someone who identifies as a Change Agent, first and foremost, the great thing about these three (admittedly broad) categories is that there are always new companies being started, and they need to be nurtured and developed and grown. Some fail and some thrive, but there is always a steady stream. And if you are good at what you do, there is always endless opportunity, because the only true constant in life and business really is change.