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Don’t be afraid to move out of your comfort zone

Inflection number three: Moving from a bureaucracy to entrepreneurship

As I was handing in swathes of my PhD thesis to Melbourne Business School, some of the MBS faculty started talking to me about possibly moving to join them. Technically, it would be a lower-level role than the one I had at RMIT, though the dollars would be similar. It would take me in quite a different direction but build on the doctoral work I was finishing.

It would be a big stretch again, as it would mean shifting my areas of teaching and taking on some new ones. At RMIT my major focus was teaching postgraduate students about management and leadership. At MBS it would be teaching MBA students about technology strategy and management. Also, MBS faculty were not offered tenure back then, which I had at RMIT. Instead, you were offered a two- or five-year contract. It tended to attract and build a cohort of academic staff who backed themselves and had very good links to the business community.

It would be another case of leaving a professional area where I had built a reputation, to take my career in a different direction and, in some ways, start all over again. But what mattered to me most was choosing the best long-term move in terms of my own learning. Which role had a bit more of a risky edge to it? Where would I be stretched and grow the most?

I chose the MBS option. It was a good move, but not without its challenging moments. The students generally had very high expectations of themselves and therefore for your contribution to that. Many were making considerable financial and personal sacrifices at key stages of their careers.

Moreover, MBS worked at pace that was a quantum faster than the then more bureaucratic RMIT. My role involved establishing a Key Centre for Technology Management and a new Master of Technology Management degree. What took five years to get started at RMIT took five months at MBS.

My colleague Peter Weill (now at MIT) and I did some ground-breaking research that investigated how organisations investing in technology-enabled business developments could get the most value from those developments.

I also learned that travelling for work is very stimulating as you have access to different people, businesses and a whole range of perspectives.

Inflection number four: Taking on a commercial Pty Ltd

In what turned out to be my seventh year at MBS (well, on my first tour of duty there), there were a number of career options opening up: I was being put forward to head the school’s Executive Education, and also for a full Professorship. I also continued to get a number of invitations to consider working elsewhere, but I knew I did not want to work at any other business school—MBS was the best, at least in the Pacific region.

Peter and I grew our academic publication record, won an international Best Paper award, had an article coming out in the Sloan Management Review, and a book under production with Harvard Business School Press.

I have learned over the years that I don’t like to repeat things year after year. Once I have achieved my own goals, it is time to take on a different challenge. Certainly, leading Executive Education at MBS would be a big challenge, but I had also been approached a couple of times by the US-headquartered technology advisory services firm, Gartner Inc.

My initial response was that I did not want to work for an IT company. After all, I was not primarily a technologist—rather someone who was able to bridge the gap and bring business issues and technology capabilities together. I spoke enough of both languages to be useful at a time where there were few hybrids around.

Then Gartner approached me again with a different proposition and I had come to realise that Gartner was a professional services firm, not a technology company. This time the role was leading the relatively new Executive Program for Chief Information Officers in Australia. This meant moving fully into the commercial world, running a real P/L, working with sales people on business development, and being accountable for service delivery to some very senior executives.

Clearly, I was a risk for Gartner as there were a few things in there that I had not done before. In my conversations with the Gartner executives, I explained that we dealt with a group of client organisations at MBS. In fact, there were probably about forty globally who were participants in our research and development, and executive education.

For our part we shared our findings and insights with them as part of them providing access and/or funding. We ran many two- or three-day executive education programs, our favourite being ‘IT for non-IT executives’, which was sometimes funded by one of the technology firms. And our centre certainly had a budget, which had to balance, and revenue and expense streams. But those were rather basic statistics.

Heading to Gartner was a risk for me too.

I would again be leaving an environment where I had built up a strong reputation, both locally and internationally, to go to the ‘dark side’; that is, commercially focused research, which had different drivers and balance. The research had to focus closely on what would resonate with clients, and not so much on what we thought was important (though, in our case, the fit was usually good anyway).

Both roles, Executive Education at MBS and the Gartner role, came to a head at the same time. I took half a day off to sit at home and think about what I really wanted to do. I drew up a one-page business plan for the first twelve months in each role, and overlaid this with the usual questions: ‘Which is a bigger stretch?’ and ‘Where will I learn more?’

Gartner was the definite winner, but it was hard to share with my colleagues and more than challenging to explain to the Dean.

At that stage, Gartner was not a name known by many business people, even though I tried to explain that it was ‘the McKinsey of the IT Advisory world’. After some further negotiations though, I did leave to take on the next career challenge.

Build on existing capabilities

MBS had enabled me to build a base of capabilities for the future. Again, the role I was going to was a new role that I could shape—I hoped!

An acquaintance once commented to me about my career moves, ‘Somehow what you do is build on your capabilities and experiences in a way that gives you future options. You didn’t know what they were, but when the timing was right an opportunity came along and you took it’.

The hardest part was leaving valued colleagues and young students whose optimism often knew no bounds, and who were generally challenging and stimulating to work with.

It was also hard to tell my parents. They were proud of their daughter as an academic, considering their lack of formal education. I made a special trip to Sydney to explain to them the new challenge I was taking on. My mother was devastated and my father confused. It was only when I explained that if it didn’t work out I would always be welcome back as an academic that their concerns were somewhat lessened.

For the family it meant a lot more travel for me, but we probably didn’t realise just how much till well after I started. I also had some trouble explaining to the kids exactly what my role was. They could understand being a professor, but how could they explain this new role to their friends?

When I returned to MBS many years later, they breathed a sigh of relief, I think, as they could more easily understand and explain the nature of my work.

The challenge of repetition

I spent the next six years at Gartner moving into progressively broader regional, then global, roles. It was a fantastic experience, and, as expected, I learned a lot.

For many years I believed I had about the best job in the world—developing new and valued services, working with smart and collaborative colleagues, visiting clients in different countries and learning more about the diversity of industries, firms, and government agencies that I would have thought possible.

But in my sixth year at Gartner I started to feel that my role was becoming a bit repetitive. I had suggested to the then CEO and executive a number of other roles I could do, or businesses we could expand on. However, I was usually told something like, ‘No, we need you to keep doing what you are doing. You do it well and we can’t afford for you to do something else’.

Be wary about using the phrase ‘We need you to keep doing what you do’ with a valued employee. They are trying to tell you that they need to do something different, no matter how much you want them to continue doing the same role.

When it came time to start working on the next annual survey of CIO issues and attitudes I found myself saying, ‘Here we go again’. This triggered some reflection over the next few months about what I really wanted to do next.

I did not do any active looking, but I had a number of concurrent offers. One was a lucrative role working with a competitor and being based fully in the US. I went through the process, was offered a role and then realised I really didn’t want to be domiciled outside Australia. We might have done it some years earlier, but there were too many things now back in Melbourne that were important to us.

Paul Rizzo and Ian Harper at MBS had contacted me about returning to the school as Associate Dean and leading what is now called the Senior Executive MBA. I would be able to devote a day or more a week to consulting and applied research and, thus, rebuild those local connections that I had not spent much time on. I accepted this role.

I gave Gartner about four months’ notice, so that my successor could be revealed at the same time as the public announcement of my departure, and returned to MBS to lead both the academic and marketing roles of the Senior Executive MBA.

Working with mature executives in an intense program meant that you were often explaining how things needed to work to people who were used to being in charge of their organisation or line of business.

Quite a few found it difficult to return to this type of study—in four residential four-week blocks—over a period of about sixteen months. No matter how we explained to them that they would need to hand over the reins of their business role to someone else while doing a four-week module, some did not believe it till part-way through.

Meanwhile, I was proud that the team that I had grown and developed at Gartner continued to be regarded as high performers and remained largely intact for quite a few years.