A reframing or re-description of the pitch, more congruent with our times is the visual presentation of a “tag cloud” found in blog website design. The tag cloud conveys the immediacy of a digital image caught in the lens of a cell-phone: it is fuzzy rather than studied, and open to the other’s interpretive sense-making rather than the producer’s sense-imposing.

The shift in sensibility is similar to the difference between who I am and what I do. Only, here, the idea is the portrayal of the broadest scope of what I do rather than emphasis on a singular skill. It mirrors what anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed “thick description”: it conveys information that both invites and requires the listener’s unpacking.

An example: an accountant says to me, “oh you’re a psychologist…. What do I need with one of you guys.”  He chuckles, “I’m crazy anyway and everyone knows it.”  Sounds like a brush-off. The translation is, “hey, keep away, man, I do not need a shrink.” Only I say, also chuckling, “well, one part is clear, but you might very well be interested in how I look at asset management from a slightly different angle than your own.”  Suddenly, he’s interested and the talk continues. I’ve redefined myself for him in the context of our relationship. I have reframed my skills as a function of his interests rather than his preconception of my training. I have also affirmed that my engagement with him is about business and not therapy.

Increasingly, we are  told by career counselors and recruiters, that our utility to others will be evaluated not simply by fellow-riders on the elevator, but the friends of the friends of the friends of our fellow riders.  That is the beauty of networking. My accountant colleague used to say, “I’m an accountant”. But his pitch has evolved. First, it is more discursive, fuzzier. He begins with his interest in business consultation and teaching managers how to think both broadly and in detail about the numbers and rules that eventuate in the bottom line. “Sure,” he’ll say, “I’m a CPA with a CFA, but so is everyone else. It’s how my craft knowledge fits with your organization that counts.”

So, as a practical matter, with only 3 minutes, my accountant has shifted from a straight-forward pitch to a tag cloud. He’s presented a picture, compounded of multiple strands, for interpretive shaping by his elevator listener. And conveyed too, his ability to listen and to respond, which is at the heart of a networked world.

Addressing “how to” aspects of job search, the recruitment and career advisement professionals uniformly advocated the use of social networking. Future jobs, they said, would come not from recruiters, but from distant connections of workplace colleagues and their friends. Opportunity lay in multiple resources just outside the scope of anyone’s knowledge. It lay within the resources of unknown people, known by someone known to someone you knew.

The idealized picture was ripe with multiplicity just beyond reach; and LinkedIn was the prototype. Though individuals scratched their heads at the utility of “working” such a system: everyone had hundreds of connections online and no one knew what to do with them. The message was, “only connect”, yet how, for what, and how much to say?

The problem, as I saw it, was neither capability nor desire, but cultural orientation. The executives I spoke with hailed from lifetimes within corporate structures. However streamlined their organizations had been, routines and tasks been typified by a clarity of boundaries and rules. Protocols had existed both within organizations and between organizations for initiation and sustenance of contact. Recruiters and career consultants mediated the conversion process of movement from one occupational placement to another. And now this : the necessity of activating one’s own, self-constructed skein of contacts. The recruiters were telling the recruits to puzzle it out for themselves.

The problem was that where clarity and tight linkages once existed, a risky sense of looseness now seemed normative. Yes, it was necessary to maintain pristine clarity as one negotiated the job search, step-by-step, because a misstep or misstatement might derail a finely wrought, but delicate process; but the larger necessity of defining what was “out there”— the possibilities inhering in the environment: these were murky. So, while a loosely connected world of possibility has become the norm, where a clarity of boundaries had once prevailed, the same formal precision of goal attainment still holds: a very difficult tightrope to walk.

While the message remained upbeat, what remained unsaid was the subtext: comfort within a loosely coupled world would define the occupational survivor, once securely held within the tight interconnections of corporate structure.