pcl case study
Carefree Risk Type Simon has had a varied career path. He started life as a Chartered Engineer with a good job in an oil company but he threw this all up in the air when he decided to leave to set up his own contracting company. His colleagues were amazed at this decision; how could he leave such a good job for such an uncertain future? But Simon felt there were more certainties in life if he had control over his destiny than if a board far away in Texas was deciding his fate. This way, he felt he had more autonomy and influence. Since then, Simon has left that world, travelled to India to be ordained as a Buddhist and now teaches meditation, while also working as a coach specialising in mindfulness and he is a nonexecutive director for a couple of organisations. Simon is aware that he does take risks at work; for example, when he is in coaching mode he thinks most people would describe him as badly prepared. However, he likes to respond in a more fluid way to what is going on in the live coaching session. Simon admires people who are what he calls ‘deep and narrow’ whereas he would describe himself as ‘broad and shallow’. He knows a lot of things and has insights from many different perspectives and he is good at synthesizing this information from a variety of sources i.e. from Buddhism, psychology, business practice and engineering. However, he would say there is rarely a situation where he has some mastery of a subject. There is an unconventional theme that runs through Simon’s life. In his personal life, he was married when quite young and had a traditional church wedding. More recently, although he and his wife are still together, they have ritually dissolved the marriage because they felt the institution of marriage was not a sufficiently broad concept for their relationship. Similarly, at work, he does not readily put himself in an environment that is rigid, hence he works freelance. He feels it is important for him ‘to connect with values rather than protocols’.
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