It can be fun to daydream about reinventing your professional life. How might you step into a new kind of role, or even a new industry, if you really wanted to?

But for those who have been laid off, that daydream becomes an imperative. It can be scary, but clinical assistant professor Ellen Taaffe says it’s also a huge opportunity to redefine your career on your own terms.

Taaffe offers tips in a recent Insight article for how to reinvent your career after a layoff. And the advice holds true for anyone contemplating a job change. We’ll hear from her today. And because people aren’t the only ones who spend time thinking about what their roles should be, we’ll hear part of a discussion on how corporations are (or aren’t) redefining their obligations to society.

How to reinvent your career

Taaffe, who has been through a layoff and career reinvention herself, starts by recommending that you pause after a layoff instead of racing into a job hunt.

“For many people, their initial instinct results in a flurry of activity,” she says. To the extent that you are able to financially, try to avoid this. “Taking time to reflect, exercise, spend time in nature, or revisit hobbies can help you gain perspective and regain equilibrium.”

Here are a few of her other pieces of advice:

Understand your priorities: Take stock of what you liked most about your previous jobs and consider what matters most to you now. Taaffe recommends creating a top-10 list of your priorities for your next job. For example, you might be most interested in a particular kind of work, or you might value a shorter commute or a chance to develop a new skill set. A list will help you evaluate potential new jobs and remind you that no job is perfect. “No job is going to be a 100 percent fit—and most won’t rate more than 80 percent to 90 percent—but by using this exercise, you might recognize that some aspect of the job is an absolute dealbreaker,” Taaffe says.

Activate your network: Sure, we all know that we should never neglect our network. But we don’t all follow that advice. So, if you find yourself out of a job, and you want to reach out to contacts you haven’t talked to in a while, Taaffe advises that you acknowledge the gap and explain that you’d like to reconnect. She cautions to “avoid the dreaded question, ‘Can I pick your brain?’ This signals that you haven’t taken the time to focus your thoughts. You need to make it easy for busy people to know how to help you.” Instead, you can say that you would like to hear how their story and career moves might be helpful in figuring out your next steps.

You can read the full article with Taaffe here.

Are corporations “redefining” themselves, too?

Three years ago, CEOs at the Business Roundtable proclaimed their intent to redefine the purpose of a corporation. In their statement, the CEOs discussed their obligations toward other stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, customers, and communities, in addition to maximizing long-term shareholder value.

But what, if anything, has changed in those three years? Insight convened a number of Kellogg faculty to get their thoughts. Here are a few excerpts of their discussion:

José Liberti, finance professor: We’re talking about public companies, right? If they partner with an institutional investor or a hedge fund, and that investor or hedge fund wants returns, what are they going to do? What’s the average tenure of a stock owned by a portfolio manager? Three months? Six months? Two earning calls? The CEO may want long-term investment, but the only thing these investors want is returns.

Aaron Yoon, assistant professor of accounting and information management: In the summer of 2019, when the proclamation came out, there were serious concerns about a potential recession. Who would have known, at that time, that we’d have Covid in less than a year? For CEOs, their compensation is tied to stock price. So in order to hold that stock price up during a potential recession, there are incentives to engage in communication that is costless, nonbinding, and unverifiable. I think my colleagues are right to take a critical viewpoint here.

Bob Korajczyk, finance professor: A well-run firm that is focused on creating value can make everyone better off. Consider Costco. Their customers are ecstatic. Their employees seem to be happy. And they have created huge value for the shareholders. Their stock price has gone up by nearly 80 percent in the last three years and 215 percent in the last 5 years. But they first have to create value: make the pie bigger. That is their job. That value flows to the stakeholders.

Ravi Jagannathan, finance professor: The pandemic has caused a lot of problems and highlighted the importance of managing good and bad externalities. I don’t have a solution. I don’t even have an enumeration of all the problems. But if you think that businesses are going to solve all these problems, good luck to you.

To address externalities, like environmental and social issues, we have to set up a mechanism, an institution, that can collect everyone’s concerns and bright ideas, and then decide how to move forward. People must collectively act and come up with institutions that meet the demands of the time. … The CEOs of large companies are not the right people to make these kinds of decisions.

Carola Frydman, finance professor: [But here’s where corporations] do have a big say: in innovation. A lot of the innovation these days happens in firms. Think about the pandemic. Amazing firms that had been investing, in small and big ways, for a long time were able to create a vaccine within days. It took a while to manufacture and to get approval, but the technology was there.

The full conversation can be found here.