Brunch with Nicole - Leading, Learning & Leaving Room for Wine

Yeah.

So as a growing kind of leader in your organization, is there anything you would have wished you would have known when you were just starting out or, you know, maybe a couple of years in your career?

Well, I started my career thinking it was like a waypoint.

I was coming out of doing lab work in grad school and like super deep science.

And I was in labs with animals by myself for 12 hours a day.

I was like, this is not for me.

I'm more of a social person.

I'd rather be more collaborative in what I'm doing.

And so management consulting was like, I don't know anything about business.

I can get the crash course, entry level.

They'll work me hard, but I'll figure out like, I'll learn some things and maybe then I go into industry or something.

And here I am.

18 plus years later still doing management consulting.

So at the beginning, I feel like I didn't take advantage of the benefit of a large consulting firm as much.

We always say your career is yours to own and you build your path and at a organization as large as mine, there are so many different paths you can take.

I kind of came in and I just stayed on that path like very linearly for the last 18 years, which is fine and I've had fun and I've been very successful.

But there's doors that I just kind of thought about but never took the step forward to create something wholly new within the bounds of my company because we've got consulting and technology and operations and all these things.

If you're creative and have the ambition to do so, you can really build something new and my company would support that and put money behind it if there was a business rationale.

So I feel like I took a very... linear path and it might have been more interesting to like do some entrepreneurial experiments within the bounds of a massive

company like mine yeah my dad told me once when I was really frustrated at one of my first jobs is like don't think of it as them using you but you using them and it's like what do you want to learn what do you want to get out of like be inquisitive yeah Like go into the CFO's office and ask how they, you know, how are they measuring success? Yeah.

So that's, you know, a really interesting point.

I mean, you had a massive company with lots of different paths, but even in like a smaller business, like there's still business development, marketing, accounting, you know, all those like functions.

New product idea.

Yeah,

exactly.