Redesigning Career at Scale
Over the last two days, I have spent two hours re-watching this interview by incumbent Microsoft CEO - Satya Nadella at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and there are so many takeaways from the entire segment. One of the points that hit close to home, and one that I have struggled with off late is to identify whether to stay in a small team or to move on to a bigger team work-wise?
Satya, when asked about this, makes a very compelling argument - to join a large scale organization with teams across the world, since it gives one an opportunity along with the responsibility to make a change throughout the world, at scale! Even though one may feel that they are a small part of a larger machinery, the capacity to make a difference that one has in these organizations is unfathomable unless one actively sits down to think about the imprints that they may unknowingly leave on people's lives.
I started off my career with one such organization, and I personally noticed how little everyone believed that they were genuinely making a change in the world, including me. Even though I took up a course that briefed me in specific, which part of the organization I belonged to, I still refused to acknowledge until very late that I was, indeed, making a huge difference with actions that I took each day. At some level, it became clear to me that like most of my team members, I was looking at instant gratification.
Since then, I have worked in almost all sorts of organizations - big, and small, to medium sized, to ones gunning for IPO. After listening to Satya, and analyzing how it panned out for me so far, I believe that one of the important things to understand and analyze when aiming for career shifts is to figure out one's own belief - in terms of whether to go for a large organization, where it may take years to truly see the marks that you leave on people's lives, AND be fine with the delayed gratification, OR, to go for a smaller to mid-sized organization, that may grow at a faster pace, with much more tangible results in short term as compared to large scale organizations, and have instant gratification.
Obviously these aren't a one size fits all situation, and differs from person to person, and company to company, yet, there is some truth to it. That being said, the other critical factors remain in terms of pay and benefits, or job titles, and responsibilities, along with the comfort, along with the bureaucracies and politics that a team member of these varied organizations may face. There are so many factors to consider outside of these as well. However, for one that comes from a sense of purpose, it makes for a good argument to have when identifying whether to go for a large, mid, or small scale organization basis one's own personality and gratification levels.
