I thought it was the wrong move.

Somebody decided I needed P&L experience. That's how I ended up in procurement. It was supposed to be a short rotation. It turned into thirteen years, a move across the Midwest, and roles at two different companies.

I built my whole early career on the technology side. I was a product geek. Still am. I chose a technology major but found out fast that I did not like coding. After graduation I went straight to the strategy and program management side of it, which I loved. That was the plan. Stay technical, keep climbing the technical track, and become the person who runs big technology programs.

Then my mentor told me I was going to procurement. The logic was sound and I could not argue with it. I was moving up, my background was heavy on technology, and I had never managed a P&L in my life. Procurement would fix that. Go get some financial experience and come back to IT in a leadership role.

My initial reaction was “nobody likes working with procurement.” They just create roadblocks. How was this going to help my career?

What I had not counted on was the view. Technology had me deep in one function. Procurement put me across the entire company, because every function spends money and all of it came through us. I saw how R&D actually worked, and manufacturing, and the labs, and legal, and where we were losing money in each of them. I learned more about how a company really operates in those first eighteen months than I had learned in all the years before it.

The variety is what got me. I get bored. Procurement never let me get bored.  The categories changed and the problems changed and the people changed. I got to be a beginner several times a year without leaving my own job.

The rotation never ended. It took me across the Midwest, through two companies, and into everything I am doing today.

A manager I know told me about an exit interview she still thinks about. A top performer resigned after two years. The company had mentored him, invested in him, and promoted him. He was on the fast track to the boardroom. During the interview she asked him what they could have done to keep him. He said nothing. It was never a forever job, and he felt good about what he built while he was there.

He was not running from anything. The work was going well and he was well regarded. He left anyway. Most people never give themselves that option. Everybody understands leaving when it is going bad. Leaving while it is still good looks ungrateful, or reckless. Like you are throwing something away.

She had been counting tenure as a metric of success. He was counting what he built while he was there. The median American worker now moves on before year four, yet companies still treat tenure as a headline measure of success. There is a whole employee reward system built around it.

I have watched people treat one assignment like a life sentence. They take a job at thirty and they are still explaining it at fifty. They are good at it. They are also finished with it, but they will not say so, because saying so would mean the version of them who chose it got something wrong. So they stay. The cost is the years spent defending a choice they already outgrew.

You are not a tree. You can move. Even trees gets replanted sometimes.

Birth and death are the only two things about your life that are settled without your input. Everything between is still open for discussion. Some people know from an early age what they are built for, and I am happy for them. Most of us find out by trying things along the way, and sometimes the thing you least expect ends up being the thing you enjoy the most.

The view from my technology seat told me procurement was the wrong move.

None of this requires quitting. Being sent somewhere counts. Volunteering for the project nobody wants counts. Building a second thing inside the company you already work for also counts.

When I started my own firm, I was certain about what I would be known for. The work my resume pointed at. I built the whole company around it. Then someone asked me for something I had never sold before and offered to pay me for it. I said yes and figured it out. It worked, and they came back, and the business started drifting toward what people actually wanted from me instead of what I had planned to give them.

Your last title is not a fence around what you are allowed to become good at.

So think about the thing you are in now. The function, the title, the lane you have been in so long that you are known for it.

You are allowed to be done with it. You can leave it while it is still going well and call that a good ending. Or, you can stay where you are and become someone different inside it. You can also get moved somewhere you never asked to go and find out that it suits you.

What are you still doing today that was decided a long time ago, and when did you last check whether you still want it?

Tell me the move you would make if you never had to explain it to anyone. Hit reply. Your replies decide what I write next.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh