blood" and "Calm Down"), to highly successful businesswoman (even selling lots of authentic "merch" in China), to whatever she dreams up next, she has never remained in any one role long enough to be typecast. It is highly possible that if you don't occasionally change roles and or switch jobs, you may get stuck as the social media guy forever. Maybe Stanley will change roles soon enough to avoid being typed, but it isn't that easy. There is a guaranteed level of reward associated with the "type," and to try to break the mold throws a person into a very uncertain situation: What if he can't do anything else? What I am talking about is the preordained failure of success. It comes from not knowing when to quit from being too good at something that is a narrowly defined specialty. Then someone can label you with an easy phrase such as, "our man in Paducah" or "social media guy" or "teenage heartthrob," or "Even more to the point, being so specialized, being so valuable in a highly specific setting, means that you are not easily replaced. And so under the time-honored management tradition, your boss may not give permission to the Shelbys who might like to talk to you about a different opportunity. This can also happen to departments or even entire organizations. The Company once hired a young operations research (OR) specialist to introduce new management techniques to all their plants. This young woman, in turn, hired herself a couple of cohorts, and they went to work. In the beginning, they had trouble; all the Plant Managers were skeptical about new procedures they didn't understand. Now and then, the team got acceptance from a department manager to install some sort of special system or other, but general acceptance was elusive. In the early days, the "OR team" would sit and dream of the time when they might get a shot at designing an entire plant. That was the only way to do it, after all. But in the meantime, they were building a substantial record of novel, effective applications. Success eventually arrived. They got to design the entire system at the Portsmouth plant, and their system worked just great. No longer was plant management asking, "What is OR good for? What can they do?" Now everyone in The Company knew; they wanted a system just like the one at Portsmouth. No, don't change a thing; give us one just like Portsmouth. I love being able to check the order status on my phone when I am traveling. In fact, the whole endeavor was so successful that the operations research group persuaded The Company to come out with a Company Standard for Production and Inventory Control Systems - just like Portsmouth. And each plant hired its own OR Specialist, reporting directly to the Plant Manager and responsible for maintenance of The Company standard system. Now it wasn't long before the two young assistant operations research people departed in search of more "creative and challenging opportunities," and the creator wondered where she had gone wrong. For it was clear that the whole OR scene in The Company was suddenly very dead. And where had she gone wrong? Well, her first mistake was in wanting success too badly, and then in defining success in the shape of an epic achievement. Her group succeeded, in the sense that she had defined what OR could do, but in doing so they lost control of their achievement. Plant Managers hired their own OR person, loyal to themselves, and at that point had all the OR they needed. Why send problems back to the staff OR group, when now you had your own OR person who also knew something about production (and who was sympathetic to the local management point of view)? What the Plant Manager had now was just fine-no new ideas, please. As it is, it will be years before we "get the bugs out" of this system. And so the original Operations Research group lost control of the thing it created, by virtue of being too successful. Discussion Questions 1. What do the two stories in this chapter about Stanley and the OR team have in common, and how do they differ, especially in terms of perception, attribution, and impression management? 2. If you currently work, how could you use the lessons of this chapter in the service of your career progression? 3. What is meant by "the pre-ordained failure of success