To Change the World

My life mission had been clear from the very start. In high school, I knew that I could have chosen several different paths, any of which might easily have led to success, both financial and emotional. My options were all quite appealing: Music Performance or Education. This was the path where I had the most professional backers. My music teachers in school urged me to go there. They wrote letters. The military sounded good. I liked the benefits, the clearly-defined path to advancement, the early retirement. The requisite career choices for "smart people": Engineering, Medical School, Law School. I considered the ministry, and thought about diving into government and politics. Or maybe, learn a skill like piano-tuning, and build it up into a practice. 

Any one of these had promise. They each could virtually guarantee that I would not want. And I would arrive with the resources to do a lot of good in the world. 

But I wanted to "change the world."As a post-Watergate 1970s teenager, I knew that ethics were going out of style, and I wanted to do something about it.

In the late 1970s, the MBA was just coming into vogue. It was a new type of professional path being chosen by many bright young people. This was a path that a lot of people discouraged me from taking. The business or corporate career places too many demands upon you, that require you to compromise on your principles. You would be expected to put in a lot of "face time," leaving little time for family, community, or church. You would be subjected to the ugliness of corporate politics. 

But in the first eighteen years of my life, I felt I had traversed those challenges rather successfully, unscathed by the world and it's unforgiving standards. "No, you don't want to go into business." This became like a dare to me. Maybe it's what I should do, because it's what people think I shouldn't do?

I believed in changing the world, one person at a time. If the world needed changing, (and it does), then why not lurch yourself into the belly of the American Corporate Beast? With my likability and creativity, I would get first a BA, and then an MBA; go to work for a Fortune 500, and begin to change the world, one department, one division, one company, at a time.

If the corporate world was such a bad place, then it was exactly where I wanted to be. To keep my intentions as pure as possible, I completed a BA in the Liberal Arts (History), and by 1985, had earned an MBA from Texas Christian University (even that seemed to lend an air of ethical competence to my credentials). 

Thus armed with professional cred, I set out to land my first job in a corporation. I targeted an innovative company that was a world leader in its field; an intensely technological company; a scientific culture; a growth industry. And best of all, it had a reputation as a nice company. 

I began working for Nortel Networks in July of 1988, in their Richardson, Texas facility. For the next three years, I would develop as a manager, via the rotational Marketing Management Program.

However, at the time, I was not aware of a major impediment to my life and career advancement: an enormous, invisible boulder that prevented my forward movement. Two closely-related events in 1980 placed this boulder in my path. From then forward, my own choices and actions would intertwine with the world and it's ways - - - enlarging the boulder, making it more invisible, placing a target on my back that, over time, like the boulder, grew rapidly. 

Next: A Slap in the Digital Face

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