Lessons in IT Transformation: Technology Expert to Business Leader

Change Is Uncomfortable

I once heard someone joke that the only people who like change are babies! Human beings are creatures of habit. We like to live in our comfort zone even when it might not feel comfortable anymore.

When I first got married, my wife and I moved into our first apartment in Queens, New York. I started taking mass transportation into Manhattan every day and started seeing the same faces on the bus each morning. One of the people I met was a nice man who lived on my block. He worked for a bank in lower Manhattan and we soon hit it off and began to become friends. As I got to know him better, he began to share with me his level of unhappiness at work. He felt boxed into a dead-end job in an organization that didn't recognize or appreciate his talents. Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a person of action. If you come to me with a problem, my focus is to try and fix it (a quality that has not always served me well in my marriage!). So naturally, when my friend started sharing his unhappiness with me, I went into “fix-it” mode. My first response was that I was pretty good with pulling together resumes and that I would be happy to help him update his. He thanked me for my offer but never took me up on it. A couple of weeks (and many negative job conversations!) later, I offered that I knew some people in executive search and perhaps I could introduce him to their counterparts who focused on financial positions. Once again, he thanked me but never took ...