Career-development Theory & Lee Iacocca

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 coll

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went to the East Coast, where he had, in effect, to hustle himself a new job in a regional sales office. It would not be far wrong to say that he quit "cold," and then took an entirely different job with a different division of the same company. O'Connor and Wolfe (1987) present a model of midlife transitions in career (and in family). This sequence may be outlined as stability ( rising discontent ( crisis ( re-direction ( re-stabilizing Iacocca's shift from engineering to sales in his first months at Ford can hardly be called a "midlife" transition, yet it has some of those characteristics, particularly in the view of the firm and consistent way in which he had previously pursued an engineering education and career plan. The rising discontent, crisis, and goals of redirection are clearly identified: I was nine months into the [trainee] program with another nine to go. But engineering no longer interested me. The day I'd arrived [in an assigned engineering group], they had me designing a clutch spring. It had taken me an entire day to make a detailed drawing of it, and I said to myself: "What on earth am I doing? Is this how I want to be spending the rest of my life?" I wanted to stay at Ford, but not in engin
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Approximate Word count = 1508
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)