Leading on the Edge: Extraordinary Stories and Leadership Insights from The World's Most Extreme Workplace

Chapter 2      

Very few decisions in life are irreversible, so make some!

It was only upon graduating and getting my first job in PR that I realised I really didn't like PR at all! My first job out of university was with a government agency. I quickly found the work to be deeply annoying! Looking back, I realise PR itself wasn't the problem; I simply didn't have the maturity to work in that field.

Convinced by an act of grace

In any government agency, much revolves around your minister. It's your job to keep them interested in your portfolio, up-to-date with the latest goings-on, and to give them opportunities to shine in front of their staff, the media and the community. A big part of our role was to create events for the minister. We would work for weeks and weeks, often very long hours, to schedule, plan and conduct fantastic events for our minister. More often than not, and primarily because we were a reasonably low-profile and small agency, the minister wouldn't attend. We would get a call from his office the night before the event to say that ‘something has come up’ and he had to reprioritise to attend to more urgent matters on the day, which meant all our preparation and planning was wasted. At the time I found this deeply demoralising, but later (after working in and with government for 15 years) I realised it's often not appropriate for politicians to attend a launch or ...