You either die a hero, or...

In the recent follow-up Batman movie, The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent uttered a view that "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Being a villian is often just dependent on the point of view, but I was personally intrigued about whether this thought could be applied to the corporate world with some modifications to capture a key part of career creation...

A very well known strategy to climb the ranks in the corporate world is to continuously keep moving. Often moving within a single part of the organization, or even the same organization, is not enough and if you want to turbo-boost your career, you should just jump from company to company and back again. A cynical person would say that if you look at the life cycle of a project, the organization climbers are most visible from the outset of the project. They hold the speeches and launch the projects, but soon afterwards they move onwards, leaving other people to deal with the shit.

If we consider Harvey's quote and remember that surprisingly many projects fail (i.e. are not fully succesful along the metrics that they are evaluated against), maybe the dynamics are that you should quit while being "victorious" (i.e. before you've been defeated, which is the same as moving on even before the first battles ensue) or if you stick around, you will ultimately fail. To elaborate: give a person, a job and enough time and eventually the person will fail in one way or another. And the more you fail, the more difficult it may become to justify promotions. Failures decrease momentum, and momentum is precisely the thing that gets you promoted.

On the other hand, if you actively switch jobs and pursue new challenges, you don't have the time to fail because you're already elsewhere. You seem very proactive, energetic, and dynamic (and a lot of other meaningless adjectives as well). It seems that you're continuously on the move and are able to make things move with you, and thus it is easy to get promotions. Additionally, once you've left, assuming that you didn't totally mess things up, time will take care of things and people will mostly remember the (small) accomplishments that you were able to achieve. Then when you come back, not only do you already, by default, have a larger paycheck and a niftier title, but because nothing is really ever taken away from you, it's all the easier to give you an even bigger paycheck and a corner office. If you had initially asked for both and suggested that you should jump a paygrade or few to your superiors, that would quite potentially have been met with a fair amount of skepticism.

So maybe in the corporate world Harvey's view is distorted into "You either continue to move as a hero, or stick around long enough to fail (and thus die)." Or something to that extent. People who are better with words can undoubtedly make that sound more sexy.