Mark parlayed his experience with the Mossad and CSIS; along his ability as an adolescent to replicate the laugh of former Prime Minister Joe Clark to get started in IT in the BC Government...... Okay, the truth is more mundane, it was my dreadful handwriting that got me a computer as a child and then having to develop my own software (along with lots of adolescent hacking). This led to my seeing computers and software as integral tools to daily life and helped me land my first job in the BC Government, which was supposed to be a stop gap before doing something more interesting.
After getting repeatedly thwarted for trying to drag a Stone Age organization onto the bleeding edge where I got in trouble for setting up the first web site in the BC Government and told that this Internet thing wasn’t going to go anywhere; I escaped to work for more interesting organizations where my creativity and innovation would be appreciated.
This led to my being seduced away from the public sector with the promises of riches and glamour to help setup a public sector focused consulting practice for a big telco. On my first day my practice director quit, and I learned that the bureaucracy and senescent decision making was even worse at the telco than in government. I then went out on my own as a consultant for 8 years focusing on education and health related projects. At the same time in order to not disappoint my mother for not going to medical school, I got a doctorate in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
My desire to get married and start a family trumped the penury of being an alternative health practitioner and so I returned to the BC Government. There I got the opportunity to hone my project management skills on truly massive projects and rescuing projects that had gone badly off the rails. I continued to move up through middle management and was thrown in to be part of the negotiating team for a large deal on behalf of the province. This then carried me deeper into middle management, where I came to realize how little control you have over your life, especially when you work for an executive who built his career on being a bully, and would brag about bullying his wife and children. This gave me the push to get out of the comfort of being in the middle, to go for a position as a CIO in an interesting and challenging organization. I put my heart and soul into every aspect of the competition and got it.
While my work is hard, being able to provide direct supports to allow important and meaningful work to get done, helps me to show up at the office every day, ready for the challenges and learnings that will come with it.
Along the way, I learned about neurodivergence, first as a parent and then in myself. I got to understand that I am not weird, I just live in a world where most people aren’t like me, but that those differences have made me who I am. My goal on Medium is to write about my experiences and interests, while having the opportunity to do deep research dives into the subject of the moment that has caught my interest.
