And Now For Something Completely Different

Monday I'll go to work, answer some questions, sametime a few friends, have a couple of meetings, then shut down my laptop and end my career at IBM.  On August 8th I will become the newest Project Manager for the Digital Media division of National Geographic.

Photo of the Day: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

I suppose it's tradition to pick apart my career at IBM and explain why I chose to leave, but I don't want to.  I wouldn't be the person I am today without my IBM experiences, both good an bad.  Instead, as I pack up to leave, I can't help but think about a few important things I learned at IBM.

The highlight of my career was my Corporate Service Corps experience in Tanzania.  You can read about my team here (Tanzania 1).  No one knew this at the time, but this was such a dangerous program to send me on.  Here, I got a taste of what it would be like if I were doing something I loved and making a difference in the world.  I got to scale Mt. Kilimanjaro with Nathan, and watch the wildebeests move in unison across the Serengeti plains.  Yes, my love of travel, culture, language, and environmental change all swirled around and met in one place.  I wish I could have found a similar opportunity within IBM when I returned, but such amazing jobs probably don't exist.  I will be forever grateful for this experience because from it I was able to hone my life goals and begin forging a career path that would make me truly happy. 

I don't think Nathan would be a Park Ranger today (his undeniably perfect career path) if it weren't for IBM's flexibility.  They allowed me to work remotely from several parks, to take days off and work weekends, to basically do whatever I wanted as long as I got my work done.  Surprisingly, with that kind of flexibility, most IBMers end up working all the time and it took me years to figure out how to create my own balance.  That is a priceless skill and one that I'll be using for a long time.  Thanks, IBM!

Finally, I had some fantastic customers and some that made me glad they were located in another state.  I've worked on highly successful projects and disastrous ones (let's just say that I know how to keep my cool when a Vice President is yelling at me).  In spite of some real trials, our team was always able to pull off the impossible.  Of everything I gained in the past six years, the most important thing was confidence.  The confidence to trust my gut, the confidence to push past daily issues, and finally the confidence to do something when I realized IBM wasn't the right spot for me anymore.

It's been an awesome six years.  I'll miss IBM a lot, but instead of "Building a Smarter Planet", I'll be "inspiring people to care about the [amazing] planet" they already have.