Next Scene

As I had finished my ranting in my "Mad Mind" post, something happened in my life that I didn't necessarily foresee. You see, I was done with a certain project at work, and I had nothing to do, and I opted out of another project that everyone else wanted to do because of the travel involved. Anyone and everyone that knows me knows that I love to travel, but for some reason I didn't want to get into the minutia involved, even if it meant traveling.

I was given a boring, two-week audit that wasn't as bad as people made it out to be. I basically had to do research upon research for two weeks straight, mindlessly mind you. However, I was able to catch up on my favorite podcasts (of which I'll have to elaborate later) and after my manager wrote a well-written report and gave it to the executives, everyone praised it including our CFO who said, "It was so informative, I don't have any questions for you."

The next week, my VP and manager approached me with a new project as a "reward" for the boring audit (even though I still didn't think it was as bad as they thought) and because I had time. The new audit? The 2010 Risk Assessment for our company.

To preface, risk assessments are generally done at the manager or above level, and I am far from being a manager. What does a risk assessment mean? A risk assessment, well, assesses risks for the company. How we are doing this is we are interviewing every VP and above in our company (60 or so) and presenting the final report (my VP will) to our CEO. At first, myself, my manager, and our VP (the three on the project) were going to roughly interview between 15 and 25 each (skewed towards them having more). In the end, I will have interviewed 22 by myself and sat in about 30 more as a secondary interviewer - of the highest executives in our company.

It has been awesome and undoubtedly given by God (while no one at work would see it that way). Some of the highlights so far include meeting the EVP over Sales, Programming, and Marketing who was very friendly and down to earth (and one of two second-in-command executives). The Chief Marketing Officer stopped in mid sentence in our meeting, looked at me and said, "Nice Frames. Where'd you get them?" The EVP of Corporate Development was frustrated when we were going to be taking an hour of his day and asked if we could cut it into one. We agreed, and by the end of the meeting, an hour forty-five minutes later, he wanted to talk to us more. Being interviewed in confidence, the people are opening up to us, especially myself, more than I would have ever fathomed. Hearing the word, "risk" people close up and become defensive. Hearing us talk through why we're doing, most people become appreciative.

I have definitely learned a 360 view of our company and have gotten to know the intimacies and details of our company more than 99% of people in our company and am extremely thankful for that. I am now happy with where I'm at, and I am eager to see where I go. Who knows what it means in my life, but all I know is that I am a lot further along career wise than I was a year ago, and I only have One to thank.