One Year Anniversary

July 7th marked the first time in my careers that I stayed for a full year with a company (not including the 4 1/2 years of my own business). To me that one year barrier is quite the personal accomplishment. It either says alot about my happiness at this stage of my life or Experian's high tolerance threshold for my bullshit (probably a little of both).

My first year at Experian has been one of constant change. I was hired as part of a new leadership rotational program. When I arrived, I discovered the head of the department (and founder of the rotational program) had moved on in the company - but was assured there would be no changes to the program. By month 2, the last managerial tie to the department moved on in the company and things began to become more ambiguous. By month 9, I was told that the rotational program was no more and that I would work solely in the Innovation Program. I can say it wasn't the structure I had hoped for coming out of school, but welcome to life in business; You have to make the most of your opportunities and this is the moral of the story I will share with you.

While our program was slowly disintegrating, my colleague (fellow Merage'08 Chris Ting) and I had a great deal of freedom and access to senior leaders in a large multi-national corporation. That is a great opportunity. During the confusion of months 3-8, we decided to start a project advocating an enterprise "social network". We hung legitimacy of the project on an off-handed comment a senior leader made to us in a meeting - That opened alot of doors. We were told that this had been tried a number of times and met with failure. To the credit of Chris and I, we kept pushing the issue (taking the "take action now, ask for forgiveness later" approach). Somehow, the pushing got us audiences with the right people and good buzz with other leaders (Maybe I shouldn't use the word "good" because we definitely ruffled some feathers with our awkward navigation of the political environment). The next thing we know, we were doing a fully sanctioned research project - but we were told it would never get funded.

I would like to say it was due to conviction, but I am sure a lack of knowing better contributed significantly to how we continued to push the project. I remember being told, "you have done good work but I don't seeing us funding it". Two months later the project was approved. Once we got beyond the research stage, we received the help of numerous other key individuals in the organization without whom this project would have died. More credit needs to go to them because often the project moved forward in spite of us as we learned hands on how to navigate Experian's waters. So while we can't take credit for the project's final approval, we can take credit for relentlessly pushing this idea to anyone who would listen and keeping the project alive until the experts got the final approval - and in my first year I will happily take that with all the practical learning.

Full credit also goes our to my partner in crime, Chris Ting. Without whom this project would have gone nowhere.

I guess the lesson is when you start working and work doesn't turn out to be what you had thought, roll with the punches, look for the opportunities, and attack those opportunities.

Now, I am back full time in the science of innovation. I am trying to find the best data to track and evaluate our efforts and finding the best models to move forward the right projects in a complex organization. At some point I will want to be more actively involved in the product development, but for now I am learning alot about the art.

MBA Career in Real Life

I've been at Experian for the past four months. By virtue of being in a "rotational" position and initially working in an area like innovation, I have been lucky to have a great degree of latitude on what I work on and amazing access to key individuals at the company. Of course when many high level executives are aware of what we work on, our names may come up in management meetings. That is what happened to me and my colleague this week.
We have been working on one project that we are particularly passionate about. It was sort of an unofficial, underground project which, when the opportunity presented, we tried to make the most. I guess we have been raising awareness because we were surprised that the project was raised in a meeting that our North American CEO was sitting in.
In a funny sense of timing we were scheduled to meet with him the next day. It was meant to be more of a "how are things going" meeting. After the CEO's meeting the day before he decided to morph it into a project pitch meeting and invited our project sponsor. We discovered this a half-hour before our meeting.
Adding to the awkwardness of the situation was that we had yet to show our sponsor our updated proposal, so he walked into the meeting completely unaware of what we were going to say.
The meeting started with introductions, a couple of light jokes, and then the CEO looked at us and said "Go ahead." Four months in, working on an underground project, without input from our sponsor, and we have to deliver an impromptu presentation to our NA CEO.
Welcome to the business world MBAs.
It was a tough lesson that when you are playing at this level, raising awareness throughout an organization, you need to be prepared to advance your causes at any situation.

Economy's Getting Tougher

The market has been taking it hard the last few weeks. Obviously, the banks are hurting which doesn't help Experian, but to Experian's credit the last few years they have engaged in some very smart acquisitions that broadened their markets, geographical reach, and enhanced their data assets. This will serve them well over the next few years.
The market has made money tight in the company. Chris and I are trying to get the company to adopt a social networking platform. I think we built alot of support for the initiative, but we need to find a way through the belt-tightening to get the final approval. Belt tightening also affected our plans for the Synergy & Innnovation group. We had a grand vision to fuel our cross-business unit innovation, but budget cut into that idea. The good news is that our leader has given us his vision for the group, so we can charge right at making it a reality.
I hope my family member's retirement funds are alright in this down-market. If you are still in stocks, no matter how nervous you get, don't hide your investments in cash or gold. The market has dropped almost 50% from its last peak, so buy low. Buy and forget about it, don't read about the market, just tune it all out and revisit your portfolio in 5 yrs. If you are retiring before then, you should have already had your money in low-risk investments, so stay the course and enjoy retirement.

Working For a Living is Different

After 21 months of working on numerous projects, analyzing processes, making recommendations for a variety of topics and companies, it feels somewhat unusual to continuously focus all my efforts on a single company. The great thing about this is that I will have the chance to make a real impact on my company by gradually building influence for some of my ideas.

To date, my job has been incredibly enjoyable. No large company is perfect, but there are a number of things to admire about Experian. It is efficient, has a nice collection of strategic data assets that few can match, and quality people. They have allowed me to slowly settle in by giving me only one project to focus on. This has allowed me to spend some time getting to better know the business and the company.

I am working on my project with another Merage colleague. We were tasked with recommending and implementing better idea evaluation tools into Experian's innovation process (oddly enough a similar project to the one I did in my experiential learning class). Through discussions with executives we have taken it upon ourselves to also recommend changes to the innovation process. So far, we have received a lot of support for our direction, but I can see a number of barriers that we will have to delicately tip toe if we want to improve this critical process.

It's turning out to be a real exciting project. I am not sure if many MBA's straight out of school get the opportunity to lead a project with such impact across a billion dollar multiple business line company. That makes the challenge fun.

Other than that just enjoying our appartment. On certain days the commute can suck (50+ minutes), but I get home on that patio and look at the ocean, a sense of relaxation comes over me (oh yeah, and its nice to see my wife too).