As reported on TechCrunch.
by COLLEEN TAYLOR
Maynard Webb knows a thing or two about navigating through a career path. From the start of his professional life as an entry-level employee at IBM, he has risen to be one of the tech industry’s most respected veterans. After working his way up through increasingly senior ranks at technology firms, he became perhaps best known for working in executive roles including COO at eBay from 1999 to 2006, helping build the e-commerce company through its biggest boom times. After that, he served until 2011 as CEO at customer service technology firm LiveOps, where he remains chairman of the board. Today he also holds board seats at Salesforce and Yahoo, responsibilities he juggles with a number of other initiatives.
And Webb just added another role to his resume — author — to help other people better forge their own successful work lives. Along with Carlye Adler, Webb has written a book released last week called Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship, in which he talks about the tools needed to build a successful career in the modern age, and how it’s different now than it’s ever been before.
The new age of entrepreneurship we’re living in now, he says, is distinct from the “age of paternalism” that preceded it — whereas people used to be able to rely on their employers to “take care” of them and nurture their career paths through the years, today, companies just don’t last long enough to count on in the same way. We’re entering into a time when everyone should have a streak of entrepreneurship within them, even if they have no ambitions of actually starting a company themselves.
It was a real pleasure to have Webb drop by TechCrunch TV last week to discuss his new book and the ideas behind it. You should watch our whole sit-down in the video embedded above, but I wanted to pull out one bit that I liked here in the text. Much of Rebooting Work focuses on how many of us employees need to change how we view our jobs in today’s new age, but he also has an interesting opinion on how employers should also tweak their mindsets:
“You can create an environment where people have a say. In the old days, we used to think of our people as our property. And we’d say things like, ‘Oh, that guy poached our person.’ And that is not necessarily the most enlightened view. …The best way to have your people be happy and satisfied is to earn the right to have them come back to work for you the next day, knowing that there are tons of other places. And what are you going to create an environment where they’re challenged, and inspired, and learning.”
Watch the video embedded above to hear Webb discuss how Rebooting Work came to be, what people in the work world can learn from sports, what his personal goal list looks like for rebooting his own career, and much more.