Early in my career I went and got an MBA at Stanford. It wasn’t exactly like I knew where I was going professionally, although I didn’t really say that on my program application. But I did know that I didn’t want to be a software development manager my whole career, not that there is anything wrong with that. I was curious about how businesses were actually led and run. Plus, I was living in Ohio and it was warmer in Palo Alto.
Like most of my career moves, this one didn’t work out precisely as planned. Stanford was a perfectly fine place to spend a few years, but a year after I graduated I was living in Detroit in a job where I was mostly dealing with glitches that other software development managers had introduced into software, rather than creating the problems myself. I was an awful combination of quite ambitious and quite stuck. Then something even worse happened. A year after my wife and I got married, the second marriage for both of us, her ex-husband filed for custody of my then 10-year old stepson and won the case.
He was a lawyer and, well, it was a long time ago and the details no longer matter much – the story has a happy ending, anyway. But in that moment, when we lost custody and shipped my stepson off to Chicago, both my new wife and I were in a real bad place.
I didn’t like my job, neither my wife nor I liked the suburb we were living in, and we were both totally bummed out about the custody case thing. Other than that, things were going really well.
We were in one of those life situations where pretty much any change would be a change for the better. I’m sure you’ve been there. So, I did what would have been unthinkable three years before when I left for Stanford. I went back to the small software company I had been working at in Cincinnati then, only this time in a different job. At least we were back in familiar territory.
My First Marketing Job
The job that I took back in Cincinnati was a director of marketing job. It would not be the last time I made a less-than-linear, less-than-sequential career change for reasons that had more to do with my life than my career. Several years later, it’s easy to see clearly that I knew almost nothing about marketing when I took the job; I could only get the job because the people who hired me already knew me and had worked with me before.
It’s also easy to see in hindsight that the job worked out great, both for me and for the company I went to work for. They desperately needed marketing help. When I asked who them who they were competing with, they named IBM and several other huge tech companies. I was able to help them focus and grow the company over the next six years. As for me, I needed to make the transition from a tech guy to a broader business management role, and no one else in their right mind would have given me the chance.
I had, quite accidentally, found a “zone of indifference” that advanced my career. If no one else would have hired me to be their marketing director, it is also equally true that I had very little competition for the job in that small software company in Cincinnati. The products that we built were well ahead of the curve, given the state of the tech industry at that time, but no one much cared. Except when we started selling them to Fortune 100 engineering and manufacturing companies.
The World is Full of Problems to Solve
The other thing I was learning is that the world is full of problems to solve. We had all kinds of challenges in conceptualizing and then bringing our products to market. The solutions we were building were only going to be bought by early adopters, who needed to them badly enough to take the risk of buying from a small software company that was still developing them. The tech infrastructure that we were using (an early version of Windows) was immature and buggy. Software development talent was at a premium (some things never change).
In summary, it was perfect place to learn and grow. Since no one really expected us to succeed anyway, mistakes didn’t seem like a very big deal. And to say that I had flexibility uncommon at such an early career stage would be an understatement. When one early customer demanded a 50% discount on our software; it seemed easy enough to me to double our list prices, since no one else had bought it yet.
Especially early in your career, we tend to ask ourselves, “what jobs are available?” Perhaps the better question is, “what problems are there to solve that no one else is working on?”. What are the zones of indifference that someone will let me work on, that might lead to valuable learning and results?
Innovation and Risk
The most fun that I ever had at work was to be part of starting a small division inside of a larger organization. It took us two years to get our revenues above $10 million, but while we were doing so nobody cared about what we were doing. We had a great team. It was only after we started to scale the business that all the “help” from the parent organization showed up.
I found another zone of indifference some years later. I went to work for a quite successful healthcare information company that had a brand-name customer base. However, before I took the job, I realized that all of their produce innovation efforts and resources were focused on incremental improvements for that customer base. No one was working on new products or expanding into new markets.
When I asked my boss if I could create a small group focused on innovation in addition to my day job, she said yes. I was really excited, since the company had a lot of talent and assets. But it was also easy to get permission to do this, since no one else wanted to take the lead on new market innovation. Because, of course, innovation is risky and, especially in larger organizations, not always rewarded to traditional ways (like getting paid more). Plus, I had another day job that I had agreed to do.
Over the next ten years, the new innovation part of my job got bigger and bigger and the more-boring day job got smaller and smaller. Refugees from the mainstream organization started asking me to work on new innovation projects. We got better at finding pockets of money for innovation, both internally and from our customer base. Some of our innovations got a lot of market traction, and others did not, but, in all cases, we learned more about our markets and customers.
I noticed that when I added the word Innovation to my job title, no one challenged me. My peers were perfectly fine with the failed innovation efforts sticking to me and not them. And I was also fine with that, since working on new innovation was always more interesting than my day job.
Zones of Indifference are Everywhere
There are, of course, many ways to have a compelling and enjoyable career. I’m certainly not suggesting that I’ve discovered the only one. What I am suggesting is that zones of indifference that can advance your career and your skills are almost always there if you look for them, and when you ask to work on them, you will often get the green light.
As far as I can tell, there is no risk that the world is running out of problems to solve, or people with ideas on how to solve them. It’s the people willing to take the time to understand the problems, and roll up their sleeves and work on them, that the world always needs more of.
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