An Outsider on the Inside

Though my blog topics may not reflect it, a fascinating component of life in Basel is going to work.  I’ll save the daily grind disparities for another post. In a marked departure from my old life where the majority of each day was spent firefighting, I don’t have any daily responsibilities in Basel.  Similar to consulting, I’m an outsider brought in to solve a specific problem.  Unlike historical consulting, I have a Novartis badge, boss, and team even though I technically work for an am ultimately responsible to MIT.  Lou Gerstner, former IBM CEO, lifted IBM from near bankruptcy to a perennial computing powerhouse by being an “outsider on the inside” which affords you a certain level of emotional detachment from the company’s challenges.  We interns clearly have big shoes to fill!

Novartis has a public, high-level strategic partnership with MIT that has bred a palpable reverence for the university amongst employees.  When my bespeckled, white-haired advisor visited earlier in the month, you would have thought the President had arrived.  Though I don’t carry Dr. Welsch’s level of clout, I’m still amazed that I get to spend my days learning through asking people of all levels intrusive questions in the name of research and sitting around brainstorming. 

However the MIT besottedness is not without its drawbacks.  I learned the hard way that people take my spoken stream of consciousness thoughts literally when they tried to immediately implement one of them.  Since then, I’ve learned to process thoughts silently and asked my team members to cease introducing me as the MIT guru. 

On a lighter note, just like work in Boston, I’ve found myself in the roles of English tutor and reigning generational explainer.  As the only native speaker on my Basel team of ten, I’m called upon to proof presentations and contracts, decipher foreign email correspondences, and explain colloquial expressions.  We had hilarious conversations last week about the difference between guinea pig and piggy bank and the real meaning of “that’s what she said”.  In addition, I’m the youngest by at least fifteen years and have tried to shed light on the differences between and uses of twitter, facebook, gchat, linkedin, etc. 

As much as things change across oceans, plenty of things remain the same J  

Where I work below ... more to come on the reason for beer and balloons