Virtual CEO

Yes, I agree with Pranati that manager/bosses influence career of their buddies. I will also take pleasure to express my experience regarding the same. I work with a company where talent is less important than loyalty as people from outside see this organisation but as a lower/middle level manager we see exactly opposite. Here we find that the employee should be loyal enough to his/her boss instead of organisation. Once upon a time there was less demand of talent in this organisation but not now. now a days talent are much more employed and their career is purely depend on their so called loyal boss who decide the fate of their buddies.

I started my career in electrical/electronic maintenance in this organisation. I got an offer of doing cross functional assignment for about one year where I was very successfull. My unit head as well as I wanted to switch over and continue to new assignment but my immediate superior did not and as a result I had to come back to maintenance once again. The very reason behind the leg pulling is not that I was indespensible to this department instead the reason was loyalty to my immediate boss.

Now coming to the influence of family, freinds and colleague: Yes, all they have very big role to decide one's career. Family or specifically parent sometimes impose their want or need to their children. Sometimes children also get influenced to see their parents the way they live. Yhe act of playing in childhood sometimes become the real life role when chidren mature. Same thing happened to Mr. Randy Komisar. He saw the seriousness of his father regarding career. Moreover the socioeconomic condition of the individual plays a vital role. The way people grow up in developed country, the facility they get, the environment they are surrounded by, the culture they swim into are totally different in developing country like ours and the developed country like Mr. Randy Komisor. Mr. Komisor had the luxury of styding at Harvard, working with apple and floating the life as he wanted. To him life is not to struggle but for willingness to see himself/herself as the individual want. To him, he is the virtual CEO and least bother to the way world think.

Friend and colleague pressure is the one which never ending force sometime decides one's career. This pressure force to take some career path where individual satisfy their ego by comparing economic status, social status, positional status and sometime self satisfaction with the view of 'grapes are sour'. Mr. Randy Komisor never thinks of others though he needs not to be but in our society, it is difficult to supress the external forces. Living beyond all expectation and isolating private life and professional life is not so easy in our society where individual works for 16 hrs a day and merely gets 8 hrs for other activities This horse racing is not only to acheive the target one set for his career but also sometime to sustain in present global competetive market. I think, most of the cases, least likely we get an opportunity to opt for career path rather than we force-fit ourselves where sustenance is a big question in our society depending on demography, race, caste, age and educational background.
When we talk about freind pressure, I can remeber one of my friends who could not join in IIT instead did BE from regional engineering college, still he desires to get a MBA degree from Harverd to compete his friend who did B tech from IIT
I see careervis not independent of variables like family, friends, relatives, surroundings, culture, race, demography rather it very much sensitive to the external factors where we need to manage career instead of making career.