You've mastered the fundamentals. Now how will you exercise real influence?
Advanced Career Intelligence is not about climbing higher-it is about operating wisely in more complex terrain.
Whether you are stepping into project or program management, launching a consulting practice, leading teams, navigating executive politics, building a startup, or sharpening your ability to make high-stakes decisions, this book provides the integrated framework required for advanced professional life.
In this second volume, Silicon Valley innovator Ray Blasing moves beyond foundational career development into the realities of influence-how decisions are made under pressure, how organizations function (and dysfunction), how innovation survives, how reputations are built, how power is exercised responsibly, and how success is defined beyond title alone.
This book does not isolate strategy, entrepreneurship, culture, negotiation, or work-life sustainability. It integrates them-because at advanced levels of responsibility, these forces do not operate separately.
Blasing explores the architecture of advanced professional influence, including:
- Authority & Executive Judgment: How leaders think, decide, mentor, and balance vision with execution under real-world pressure.
- Entrepreneurial Architecture: Clarifying motive, building durable ventures, securing capital, protecting ideas, assembling teams, and navigating risk.
- Strategic Influence & Negotiation: Mastering persuasion, conflict resolution, partnerships, and power dynamics in complex environments.
- Innovation & Competitive Edge: Turning ideas into protected value through invention, timing, neurodiversity, disruption strategy, and disciplined execution.
- Organizational Design & Culture: Crafting mission, values, DEI and ESG alignment, accountability systems, and environments where performance and authenticity coexist.
- Operational Mastery: Leading projects, programs, portfolios, and cross-functional teams while balancing cost, time, scope, and governance.
- Navigating Toxicity & Political Reality: Handling narcissists, corrosive leaders, incompetence, and cultural dysfunction without sacrificing your integrity.
- Sustainable High Performance: Managing stress, workload, mental health, work-life integration, and long-term executive endurance.
- Legacy, Citizenship & Meaning: Philanthropy, corporate citizenship, retirement, and redefining success beyond compensation and title.
...and much more.
Whether you are scaling a startup, leading a division, advising founders, or preparing for the boardroom, Advanced Career Intelligence provides the strategic clarity and human depth required to lead with both power and principle.
Your influence is expanding.
Now expand your intelligence to match it.
Ray Blasing is an engineering leader, technologist, inventor, and serial entrepreneur. His expansive career charts a course from spacecraft antenna engineering to spearheading the development of the now-ubiquitous millimeter wave full-body scanner, a recognizable security fixture at airports worldwide. Recognized through more than 40 patents, Ray's work spans industries and demonstrates a lifelong dedication to innovation. His expertise in founding and leading tech startups, mentoring and coaching diverse teams, and navigating the intricacies of space, military, commercial, and consumer electronics provides him with profound insights into the domains of engineering innovation, product development, and high-tech leadership.
