A Black Countryman in Exile (Part 2)
So…5 weeks into my new ‘double life’.
The 4.45 a.m. alarm call on a Monday signifies the start of my working week. So its down to Sutton via the M40/M25/M3 and back home to Halesowen for about 8 on a Friday night. Actually I have managed to get back on a Thursday once and not gone down until Tuesday night on another occasion.
Aside from the obvious difficulty about being away from the family what am I learning so far?
1. Bid Management inside a corporate employer is a lot different from bid management consultancy as a freelancer or interim. It may be just the type of bids I am working on but the basic differences are a) the deadlines come thick and fast and b) corporate governance and process is far more important ‘within the company’ as opposed to as ‘advisor to the company’. The 2/3 week windows you have to complete bids in are actually quite liberating as (to date) you don’t have the sleepless nights associated with long-term complex bids and projects. The flipside is that perhaps as an individual you don’t get to iinfluence the bid content or perhaps more accurately strategy compared with when you are engaged as an advisor or consultant.
2. I can cook for myself (by ‘cook’ I mean place large quantities of pasta and accompanying ingredients and/or tomato based sauce, chicken, chili and herbs and place in a wok prior to freezing for future use)
3. Having time to blog/Tweet and update LinkedIn status is a challenge. Actually much of the stuff I am now working on is confidential in nature. After years of needing to promote myself and engage with folks on social media I suddenly find it difficult to say much about work.
4…so being in a large company whilst attractive in many ways does present challenges. I need to find a balance between doing the job well and not completely disengaging from past associates and colleagues. In the present climate I think everyone has to carry on networking, even if 9as for me at present) working relationships are primarily internal ones.
5. Southerners are surprisngly friendly. Actually I knew this already from a previous stint associated with Tribal in Stratford, East London. Mind you they are still clueless about travel outside of the M25 and good beer is an alien concept to them! I do hope to educate them in the coming months.
6. Being away from the public sector is at this time at least a very good thing. Whilst some of the bids I will be working on will be for public sector clients, the culture and client base is overridingly private sector. I am not one to believe that private is good, and public is bad…however when you spend much of your working life surrounded by people with their chins on the floor well, so you end up like that too. The public sector does feel besieged at the moment. For all the pressures of the private sector I am happy to be there.
