This report applies career—development theory to the career pattern of Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, as presented in his autobiography, Iacocca. His career-development experiences present an interesting "test case" for varying views of career development and planning.
Lee Iacocca is one of America's best-known business leaders, for reasons ranging from his successful rescue of Chrysler Corporation to his appearances in his firm's ads. Moreover, unlike other prominent business figures who are noted mainly as self-promoters pure and simple, Iacocca is justly given real credit for the revival of Chrysler and indeed of the domestic auto industry as a whole.
Clearly, he is a man who made sound career decisions, decisions which brought him to the Number Two position at Ford and then – after a jealous Henry Ford fired him – to the Number One position at Chrysler. He is thus an excellent test case for what Collin and Young (1986) call the "biographical" approach to understanding career paths. His autobiography, Iacocca (1984), provides us with a (necessarily retrospective) view of a life of successful career decisions.
According to Zunker (n.d.), the developmental view of career development, associated with Ginzberg, et. al., postulates that the key career decisions are made in adolescence, in the transition from the "fantasy" stage of childhood to the "realistic" stage of adulthood. Iacocca's account of his adolescent career thinking emerges by the time he entered college. Iacocca had made two fundamental decisions: one, that he wanted to be an engineer, and the second, that he wanted to be in the car business. He followed these decisions through college and graduate school, and entered the Ford Motor engineer-development program.
Halfway through the program he made the decision to abandon what would seem to be the more substantive portion of his career goals: he lost interest in engineering, and chose to shift...