Looking forward to work

As I write this, the end-of-year hol­i­day va­ca­tion of 2008-2009 is draw­ing to an end. Be­cause New Years was on a Thursday, those of us in NIBR Cam­bridge (and many oth­er parts of No­vartis) had al­most two weeks off around the hol­i­days. Work starts again on Monday morn­ing.

My fam­ily and I didn’t go any­where. Some­how, we didn’t have any re­l­at­ives vis­it. We didn’t host any parties. It has been fant­ast­ic.

We cel­eb­rated Christ­mas with stock­ings by the fire­place, presents un­der the tree, a Christ­mas din­ner, too many sweets, and end­less hours of games. I spent a lot of time in kid mode, ap­pre­ci­at­ing my kids for who they are at these par­tic­u­lar ages. (The girls are 7, while An­dre just turned 10. They’re still a lot of fun, and I’m all too aware that we will reach a point where they aren’t.) I tackled dozens of home pro­jects that had been queueing up over the year. I’m go­ing to be end­ing this va­ca­tion (again) with a sense of re­gret that I didn’t get even more done - I think I may NEV­ER get around to put­ting up more fam­ily pic­tures on the walls…. I read half a dozen books. I wrote some code (for GPS file man­age­ment) and got reac­quain­ted with the cur­rent buzz on the net. I spent a lot of time plan­ning next year’s ad­ven­tures - pos­sibly back­pack­ing in Alaska, Heli-board­ing in Utah, tak­ing the kids to Switzer­land, and kayak­ing in Guyana. We’ll see how those work out. I made a lot of notes for work plan­ning. I did a lot of think­ing and re­flect­ing, and a little bit of noth­ing.

So it’s been a great time of re­new­al… a gift of time away from the crazy, driv­en, fast, go-go-go, no-time-to-think, fo­cus-on-pri­or­it­ies, world of NIBR in 2008. I must say that I’d love to be able to just shift from this va­ca­tion in­to per­man­ent re­tire­ment, nev­er head­ing back to work. I bet I’d en­joy that for about two more weeks, and then I’d start to go crazy. Be­cause, after about 10 days of be­ing at home, I’m really look­ing for­ward to head­ing back to work.

Here are my top 5 reas­ons why:

  1. Con­tri­bu­tion. Like most folks, I like to have a sense of pur­pose about what I’m do­ing, and work has al­ways provided that for me. Moreover, giv­en the state of the world, I’d rather be do­ing some­thing that I think is con­trib­ut­ing to the eco­nomy and to glob­al im­prove­ment rather than oth­er­wise.
  1. See­ing every­one. I’m look­ing for­ward to catch­ing up with friends and col­leagues that I haven’t seen in 2, 3, 4 weeks. It’ll be good to hear hol­i­day stor­ies, catch up on the latest plans, and be­gin to get that lar­ger sense of activ­ity and stim­uli that pushes and con­tex­tu­al­izes.
  1. The chal­lenge. This year, as I de­scribed in the NIBR town hall, the con­text for NITAS as an or­gan­iz­a­tion is a chal­lenge. Can we con­tin­ue to move up the im­prove­ment curve? Can we over­come the bar­ri­ers to pro­gress and con­tin­ue to im­prove the di­git­al en­vir­on­ment for NIBR? Can we strike the right bal­ance between stable pro­cesses and flex­ib­il­ity? What im­pact will changes in tech­no­logy, in NIBR, in No­vartis, and in the world have on us? I have some per­son­al goals - be­ing more ef­fect­ive, im­prov­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion, and not over­work­ing to the max - can I meet these? It’s go­ing to be a chal­len­ging year. This is good. Oth­er­wise, it would be dull.
  1. Res­ults from the ini­ti­at­ives. Last year, we moved ahead in many areas, we de­livered im­port­ant sys­tems, and we built a lot of ground­work. We have ini­ti­at­ives and ma­jor pro­jects in four key areas: data, the web, com­put­ing en­vir­on­ment, and sci­entif­ic soft­ware. This year, we’re go­ing to make ma­jor pro­gress in all of these areas, and it will make a dif­fer­ence for NIBR. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth­while.

  1. Mak­ing a dif­fer­en­ce. My fam­ily and I went to a Christ­mas party last week­end, where sev­er­al fam­il­ies with chil­dren of com­mon ages were gath­er­ing to share a meal and let the kids play. These are friends of my wife and my kids. Thanks to work and travel sched­ules, I hadn’t had a chance to meet most of them yet, but I’d heard many stor­ies. I knew that one of the moth­ers we would be meet­ing is a can­cer pa­tient. A couple of years ago, she was dia­gnosed with a skin melan­oma, and had gone through in­tens­ive treat­ments. By early 2008, her doc­tors thought the melan­oma was in re­mis­sion, but by fall, it had come back with a ven­geance. She’s not ex­pec­ted to live more than a year. My wife had men­tioned this be­fore, and I un­der­stood it in­tel­lec­tu­ally… but meet­ing her kids and see­ing them play with ours … that made it really hit home. It tears your heart out. I couldn’t watch for long without go­ing out­side.

    This wo­man came up to me dur­ing the party. She had heard I work for No­vartis. It turns out that she’s just re­cently been ac­cep­ted for a Phase 1 tri­al of a No­vartis drug that may make a dif­fer­ence for her. She just joined the tri­al in a Bo­ston hos­pit­al in the last month, so it’s too soon to tell how things are work­ing. But there’s some small reas­on to hope now, when be­fore, there really wasn’t. We chat­ted about the drug, and the hos­pit­al, and her chances. She’s real­ist­ic. I was glad that I was, in some very small way, as­so­ci­ated with some­thing that was giv­ing her hope. I watched the kids run by, and wished that I could do some­thing more.

I have friends who write soft­ware for Mi­crosoft. They get to see the product they helped cre­ate on the shelves at Best Buy and on-line at Amazon. This is really mo­tiv­at­ing to them. For us in NIBR, the product that con­sumers buy is so far de­tached from what we do - both in time and in de­cisions that hap­pen in De­vel­op­ment - that it’s dif­fi­cult to draw as­so­ci­ations between what the con­sumers see and what we do. For those of us in sup­port func­tions, such as in NITAS, it’s even farther away. We rarely con­trib­ute to spe­cif­ic ther­apy pro­jects, but, rather, we con­trib­ute to the in­form­a­tion sys­tems that help all drugs. Mo­tiv­a­tion­ally, that gets pretty ab­stract.

And yet, it’s also true that be­cause of things we will do this year, there will be kids run­ning around in some hol­i­day party five years from now that won’t have the po­ten­tial of their moth­er’s death to dis­ease in the next year loom­ing over them. They’ll just be play­ing. And if we do the best job we can, that time will be soon­er than five years, and the num­ber of kids will be lar­ger.

That’s why I’m look­ing for­ward to mak­ing my way through the Bo­ston com­mute on Monday morn­ing.