The Career RelaunchPodcast

Episode Interview Transcript

Teaser (first ~15s): We actually have a huge amount of potential that we just have no idea we’re sitting on. We just kind of look within the confines of our little job and think, ‘Well, this is about all I can do.’ I think it’s only in stepping away, being in this very uncertain space that I’m finally able to see that.

Joseph: Good morning, Kelly, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show.

Kelly: Thanks for having me.

Joseph: I am hoping to talk with you about a few different things today, including your time in the corporate world, why you chose to move on from your most recent role, and definitely about your leap of faith to leave one job behind without having another one lined up just yet. I was wondering if you could start by telling us what you’re focused on right now in this moment in your career and your life.

Kelly: In this moment, I’m trying to figure out what my next step is, but I’d say I have one guiding North Star to that. That is I want to do something that helps the planet, something in the sustainability or clean tech just because I’m one of those crazy people that thinks that climate change is the biggest problem facing our planet right now. If I look back on my life—and I know that I wasn’t part of the solution, in fact I was part of the problem—I know I won’t be satisfied.

Joseph: I really want to thank you in advance for coming on the show, Kelly, because I know you mentioned you don’t have things exactly figured out. I actually think that’s really nice because I think it can sometimes feel like everyone else out there has their career figured out, but in reality, for many people, especially those listening to this show, the process of navigating a transition is really confusing. There are no clear answers, so I’m really looking forward to hearing you give a glimpse into the realities of a transition.

I was wondering if you could start off by just explaining what you were doing before this moment. I know you had spent many years being involved in the world of oncology drugs, where as I understand, your job was basically to help bring cancer drugs to market. Could you tell us exactly what you did during your time working in the pharmaceutical industry? Then we can move forward from there.

Kelly: I kind of fell into my career in the pharmaceutical industry. When I was in college, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I graduated, probably like lots of people, but I knew what I was interested in. That was biology and languages. There wasn’t a clear connection between the two. I was studying Japanese and Chinese and Human Biology, and people ask me, ‘Do you want to be a doctor in Asia?’ and I’ll kind of be like, ‘No, I’m just interested in this stuff.’

When I graduated, which was 2001, the tech bubble in Silicon Valley was bursting, and getting a job in that area was not going to be the easiest thing in the world. I thought, ‘Well, I do speak Japanese. Maybe I could get a job in Tokyo.’ I was lucky enough to go to a career fair for Japanese speakers, and I found a job in Tokyo in consulting.

I think when kids are graduating from college, they want to be ‘successful.’ In my day, the way to be successful was to go into iBanking or be a doctor, a lawyer, or consulting. People really didn’t think too much outside of the box at that point. Startups weren’t really a thing back then. In my desire to be successful, I thought consulting would be a good way forward, and I got a consulting job in Tokyo.

I quickly found that I wasn’t able to really use my biology background in that job even though I thought I might be able to. I found a job in medical market research very quickly after, in Tokyo, that allowed me to use my Japanese skills in market research and also learn about medicine through my job rather than, for example, paying to go to med school to learn about medicine. That was a really good fit for me that I kind of just stumbled into by following my interests.

Joseph: How did that experience compare to what you thought consulting would be like for you? Can you remember back that far?

Kelly: In my mind, in my naïve, little, new-graduate mind, consulting was this very glamorous career where you wore a nice suit, and you went to the client’s site, and you gave very erudite answers to business problems. When I finally got on the ground, I found myself basically being a body, kind of hired out on a project. It was interesting.

I remember one meeting that I went to in Osaka. I was in PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in Japan, so all my colleagues were Japanese. Clients were Japanese. I was staffed in the service and energy sector – basically big oil, big gas, electricity company, so I’m pretty far, at that time, from my interest as you can get. All the same, I was eager, and so I wanted to make an impact. I went to this meeting – one of my first meetings with a client, and I remember I had the audacity to ask a question at the meeting. I was never staffed on a project again.

Joseph: Wow.

Kelly: Yeah, it was about as demotivating as you could possibly get for somebody who feels like they’ve just got a really great education, and they’re fresh out of college, and they really want to put that to good use. It was that experience that told me that I had to get out of consulting very quickly. So I went to medical market research, which is kind of like an extension of consulting, but in my mind, based a lot more on data.

Honestly—I’ll tell you a true story—for the same project, one of my superiors and I, we’ve been asked a business question by the client. We went to a bookstore and found a book and started pulling graphs out of the book to answer the client’s questions. That’s how much we knew, and you’re getting paid for that.

Joseph: That is so funny. We didn’t talk about this before, Kelly, but I actually started off my career in the business world at a health policy consulting firm in Washington D.C. I remember one of my first roles, when we went to client meetings, was to just take notes. That was literally my role: to take notes. When we did need to speak up and say something, it was stuff that I had literally just looked up the day before.

I found it to be a really strange dichotomy between coming in supposedly being an expert but also not really knowing much about the thing that you’re talking about. You get really good at talking about things authoritatively that you really have no clue about. That’s interesting.

You spend the next chapter of your career, I know you spent several years, many years, working in healthcare and oncology from that point on. At what point did you start to think that you wanted to do something else? When did that begin for you?

Kelly: It was gradual. The beginning of it I think was actually when I moved to China, and I saw how much damage our modern economy was really doing to the environment.

Living in Shanghai, I remember I would wake up in the morning and open the curtains in my high-rise apartment and wonder how far I would be able to see down the street. I lived in China for about four years, and I began to be able to count on my fingers the number of what we called blue-sky days in a year. They were very rare. You just came to take it for granted that the day would be gray and ‘overcast,’ but it wasn’t really clouds. It was actually just smog.

That’s when I started becoming very concerned about what we were doing to the planet – of course in China specifically, because that’s where I was, but also just in general, knowing that, really, that’s what we’re doing to the planet all over. What happened in China didn’t exactly stay in China. Winds travel. It blows all over the place.

Joseph: One of the things you said in your bio, Kelly, was that you would have major regrets if you spent your whole career in the corporate world. I hear you saying that there was this environmental concern that you had about the planet. Was there also something about being in the corporate world that you felt was contributing to this? I’m reading between the lines a little bit, and I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but was there an aspect of what you were doing that you felt was not exactly helping the cause?

Kelly: Thanks for asking that. I think that there were two things obviously. The first was just seeing what business as usual was doing to the planet, but then in terms of me being a part of that business as usual, in the pharmaceutical industry—

Honestly, I don’t feel like it was even that bad when I first started, but over the course of my career, I saw the companies getting greedier and greedier. I saw cancer drugs that were truly innovative and truly helped patients, the prices be jacked up a hundred fold in the course of my career. That technology wasn’t new. It’s just that the company has realized that they could charge more for it.

I found this more and more unconscionable, and I didn’t like that I was a part of helping develop these drugs that offered small, incremental benefit at huge prices that would at least make Americans probably have to remortgage their house to be able to pay for it. I just didn’t believe that was right.

Joseph: Can you remember how long of a time period there was between when you started to feel this way and when you decided to leave? How long of a period was that?

Kelly: I wish I could tell you it was instantaneous, but it was a long lag. This is something I’m not proud of, something I look back on with a sense of regret but also a sense of I don’t know how I could have done anything differently knowing what I knew then if you understand what I mean. Looking back, I can be like, ‘Oh, I should’ve done this or that,’ but when I was in it, I really did feel quite stuck.

I finally got to the point where I was really sure that I wanted to make a change about four to five years ago.

Joseph: We’re talking about years, then, when you were feeling this way. Why didn’t you leave sooner? I’m asking you this because I’ve been in a similar position where I wasn’t really feeling it with my job, and I didn’t feel proud of what I was doing, but I still hung on to it for longer than I expected.

Kelly: God, I hate to answer this question, but the honest answer is two things: fear and money. Those are the two things. I was afraid to leave. I was afraid to get off that corporate treadmill. I’d even had people say, ‘If you take some time out, there’s a gap in your CV, and that looks terrible,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, no. I want to be successful. I’m an over-achiever. I can’t have a gap in my CV.’ There was that.

There was a lack of creativity on my part, a lack of maybe belief in myself that there was much else that I could do. There was also—Joseph, I know you and I have talked about this—the proverbial golden handcuffs. Every time I thought about making a change, and I actually did try to, about twice, I had another carrot dangling in front of me with a better title and a higher salary. You think to yourself, ‘I’d be silly to not take that and give it a try, see how it goes. Surely, it can’t be that bad, get a bit more money.’ That’s the other thing.

I remember, at one point, I set this target. I was like, ‘All right, when I have this much money in my bank account, I will take a break, go traveling and figure everything out.’ That amount came and went, and then it was a new number. I was like, ‘How did I ever think that that would be enough money for me to give up my job and let go?’ The goal post always moved every time.

Joseph: There’s always a carrot dangling in the distance it seems. Even when you reach that carrot, then there’s another one that dangles in the distance. That’s interesting.

What ultimately was the tipping point for you?

Kelly: Just to take a step back, what I did was, in order to allow myself to be able to stay, I decided to apply to business school. I did the executive program at London Business School for two years just so I wouldn’t feel like I was living groundhog days, so I felt like I was moving forward with my life and learning again as opposed to doing the same, old job, day in, day out, that I was already so bored by.

The purpose, the ostensible purpose that I told myself for doing this MBA, was to be able to transition to clean tech, to finally do something that I really was passionate about.

While I was doing the MBA, I took every entrepreneurial course that I could get my hands on and really tried to pursue some clean tech ideas that I had, thinking, ‘Maybe when I get out of business school, I’ll start my own venture. Maybe I’ll find something during business school that seems to have legs that I could pursue after graduation, and that will be my transition.’

Unfortunately, two things happened. The first is I didn’t find such a project per se during my time there. The second is that after working full-time in a demanding job and studying full-time, because even though they call like an executive or part-time MBA, it’s pretty much a full-time study with a full-time job. I was pretty burnt out.

What I decided to do was to leave that job upon graduation, which I’d always planned to do, but rather than jump into a brand new job and a brand new field when I was feeling pretty tired, I decided to go traveling and to use that time to recharge and hopefully to figure out what it was I wanted to do next. I took a belated gap year and traveled for about nine months and enjoyed myself immensely, but I didn’t still figure out what it was I wanted to do next.

Joseph: I know you’re in a transition right now, and you decided to leave your most recent job to move on to something else. How did it feel to move on from your job without having another one lined up?

Kelly: I’ll be honest. It’s scary, and at the same time, it’s very exciting, totally for the same reason – adrenaline.

When I got back from my travels, I had lined up a job in my old career, pharmaceutical consulting, because it was easy. Once again, it was another carrot that was dangled in front of me, and oh my goodness, the conditions were perfect. It was a 10-minute walks from my house. It was with a great company, and it was with one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with. The conditions were ideal. It was a dream job if that were really the career that I still wanted.

I’ll be honest with you, pretty much from Day 1, I was absolutely miserable. That was a big warning sign that it was completely the wrong thing for me to do.

Joseph: What was miserable about it?

Kelly: It’s just I had no motivation. I didn’t believe in what I was doing. In fact, no, I despised what I was doing, which is really horrible. Every day felt like such a struggle just to get into the office when it was only a 10-minute walk away.

Joseph: Was it the nature of the work that you’re doing or was it the service or the product that you were trying to market or both?

Kelly: All of the above, it was just I didn’t believe in the work that I was doing, and so much of it felt so meaningless – working to come up with the best ad for a drug that might never go to market or a drug that you knew wasn’t that great to begin with or trying to figure out a clever way to trick doctors into using this drug that wasn’t that great, that sort of work, when I’m looking at the big picture and going, ‘Wow, the plant is on fire. Somebody ought to do something about that.’

It’s interesting, because when I was in China, I saw what we were doing, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, this isn’t good, but I’m sure the adults will sort everything out, will enact some kind of legislation. Somebody can sort this.’ Now, at the ripe, old age of 42, I realize, ‘Hey, wait a second, I’m one of those adults that I was always waiting on to do something. If I’m not going to do anything, who is really?’

Joseph: What do you think has been the hardest part of this transition for you? I know you’ve moved on from something that you didn’t like doing, and yet I know that, having done this myself, because I’ve left a job without having another one lined up, I know it can also be a little bit anxiety-generating. What’s been tough for you about the transition?

Kelly: The tough thing is just not knowing which direction I’m going to go in. I’ve got a few leads. I’ve got a lot of things I’m interested in, but when you’re midcareer, and you’re trying to parley your experience in a completely different field and a new direction, it can be difficult to get buy in from people.

I think a lot of the time, companies are eager to take on younger workers who they feel like they can train up from the very beginning. If you’re coming from a different background, you really have to do a lot of convincing to get people to understand that, actually, coming from a different background can be a strength because you have a different perspective, an outside perspective that can add a lot of value. Not everybody, at least initially, views it that way.

Joseph: I was watching your TED Talk, Kelly, entitled ‘Cancer: You could be the cure,’ where you’re talking about helping to cure patients with blood cancer through stem cell therapy, which I thought you delivered really well. I’m wondering how you go from talking so passionately about that to having this other, additional interest in clean tech.

The reason why I ask is because I know that, sometimes, people who are listening to this show struggle with either, a) letting go of what they’ve invested their energies in to date, and also, b) walking away from something that maybe to outsiders seems on the surface to feel noble but just isn’t really where you want to be devoting your energies any longer.

Kelly: It’s funny you mention that because I’ve talked to a lot of friends about me wanting to transition and trying to see if I could leverage any connections, and a lot of people go, ‘Oh, well, healthcare. You can do this or that in healthcare.’ I’m like, ‘No. No.’ It almost takes a lot of convincing to convince them that I could be good in something beyond healthcare, which is pretty funny. I think, at the end of the day—you kind of hit on it—what matters is passion.

Thank you for mentioning the TED Talk because saving lives through something as simple as stem cell donation is something I’m absolutely passionate about because it’s so easy, and it has such a profound impact that it can save somebody’s life. That’s so easy for me to talk about, but I’m also equally passionate about saving the planet. That’s the connection there: that desire for me to help make things better. I didn’t feel that passion in marketing an overpriced, under-delivered cancer drug.

Joseph: That’s really interesting. I think it’s a good reminder that you can absolutely have multiple interests and multiple areas where you want to be devoting your energy and that it can manifest in many, different ways.

Before we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned, you mentioned London Business School a second ago and how you did your MBA there. I was wondering if we could talk for a second about the LBS reunion, because that’s where you and I first crossed paths, when I was given a keynote talk there about career change. I’ve always found reunions to be fascinating from the standpoint of what I found to be inevitable comparison and judgment that comes up.

I was wondering if you could just give a glimpse into what it was like to go back to a reunion like this during a transition like the one you’re in right now. I’m assuming people are asking what you were up to, and you’re hearing about what other people are up to, including from people who are maybe doing quite well in their careers. What was that like for you?

Kelly: I’ll be honest. I had just left my job like a few days before the reunion, so it was still quite a transition period for me, and I was still adjusting to the fact of not having a job and not having one lined up. I found just networking with people I didn’t even know, there’s, ‘Oh, so what do you do?’ and I’m thinking in my head, ‘Nothing at the moment. How do I answer this? I can tell you what I’d like to be doing.’

I even went to a networking event, and people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ and I felt so embarrassed to have to say nothing or I don’t know that I just kind of came up with something on the spot. I said, ‘Oh, well, I advise clean tech companies on their pitches to investors.’ I literally made it up on the spot. Now, I’m actually kind of pursuing it as a business, as a service that I’m offering people. There you go.

Joseph: Very interesting.

Kelly: Necessity is the mother of invention.

Joseph: The last thing I want to talk about, Kelly, before we wrap up are some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way of your career journey. Is there something that you’ve learned about yourself during this transition? I know you’re in the midst of it right now, but I’m just wondering if you’ve had the chance to think about what you’ve learned about yourself through this process.

Kelly: I, through my life, have kind of followed my interests, having no idea how in the world they might connect. Looking back now as I’m making this transition, I can see in hindsight a number of things that I pursued along the way just kind of on the side, sort of out of interest that now are coming together.

For example, when I was at LBS, I pursued all of these entrepreneurial classes. Now that I’m looking to make this transition, I have this network that I can kind of plug back into and say, ‘Hey, I’m looking in this area. Is there anybody you can put me in touch with?’ For the last two to three weeks, I have been doing nothing but informational interviews, just meeting with people and getting ideas and getting other people I should talk to and things like that. If I hadn’t done that at LBS, I wouldn’t have had a network to even go back to to make this transition.

Another thing is, while I was in my last role back in medical consulting, I actually took a day off work and went to a biogas conference in Birmingham just out of interest, because one of my clean tech ideas was ‘what if we took all the food waste in London and bio-gassed it, turn it into electricity, and maybe I could start a company doing that.’

I literally went to Birmingham for a day just to attend this conference, just to kind of load that idea and see how feasible it might be. Now, I’m actually interviewing with an NGO that works in the biogas space that puts on that conference randomly. That just kind of came on my radar, and I had no idea that there was a connection, but there was.

A long time ago, out of curiosity, I had checked out from a library a book called Waste by Tristam Stuart and started reading it and learned about how much food we waste from grocery stores, basically in our homes and this and that and in the industry. Now, I’m interviewing with a company that works on getting rid of food waste at point of production.

There’s a whole bunch of little things that I did along the way that I’m now seeing results, whereas I never viewed it with an ulterior motive. I just did it out of interest before.

Joseph: What about something that you wished you had known that you now know about what’s most important to you in your career?

Kelly: I think my last role just showed me money isn’t what makes me happy. Meaning is what makes me happy. I wish that I could’ve had more confidence in myself to transition earlier. I wish I could’ve had more creativity in thinking of things that I could’ve done beyond what I was doing at that time. I think that—I don’t know if it’s companies themselves—corporate world puts people a little bit in boxes and almost makes you think this is about all you can do.

It’s really sad because I think we actually have a huge amount of potential that we just have no idea we’re sitting on, and we just kind of look within the confines of our little job and think, ‘Well, this is about all I can do.’ I wish so badly that I could’ve known that before. I think it’s only in stepping away and being in this very uncertain space that I’m finally able to see that now, but hindsight is 20/20.

Joseph: Finally, do you have anything you hope someone who’s listening to this will take away from this conversation, especially if they’re feeling misplaced in their jobs but don’t know exactly what they want to do instead and just not sure what to do about their situation?

Kelly: What I really hope people take away is the importance of pursuing those seemingly random outside interest, because I think that those are the things that really lead us down the path to being who we’re meant to be. So often, we try to put ourselves in these confines of what success means.

What that really means is we end up being just like everybody else, where the competition is fiercest. It’s when we really pursue those interests that are uniquely ours that we can become who we’re meant to be and add that unique value that we have to give the world. The world’s really missing out when we don’t do that.

Joseph: That is a really great reminder, Kelly, for us all – to not be afraid to explore and just dip your toe into another interest you may have even if you don’t know where that may lead you.

Speaking of additional interest, I want to wrap up with what you’re doing right now. You alluded to the interest you developed for clean tech during your time working in a different industry. Can you tell me a little bit more about your clean tech consulting service?

Kelly: At London Business School, there is an incubator for startups. When I quit my job and had some free time, I reconnected with some people. One of my friends is actually at a startup in the incubator, and he said, ‘Hey, could you come help me with my pitch? I’m pitching to some investors.’ So I took some time out, and I went and I helped him with his presentation, trying to figure out what his story is, the best way to tell it in the two minutes that he had. He seemed to find my feedback really helpful.

It’s something I quite enjoy, because in my line of work in business development, I’ve done a lot of pitching in my day. When I was in the entrepreneurial classes at LBS, I did that all the time, and so when I helped him, I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, this is a really great use of my skillset, and it’s something I really enjoy and I really care about.’

I started reaching out to other little clean tech startups, because that’s the space I’m really interested in, to offer pitching advice and just kind of general consulting services. Right now, it’s just to see what kind of demand there might be for this and to see what kind of value I could add. I’ve been really surprised at the reception so far, so that’s something that I’m just kind of looking into on the side as I also look at other opportunities.

Joseph: Very cool. It’s really great to hear you’re already jumping on onto that idea so quickly. If people want to learn more about you or your clean tech consulting service, where could they go?

Kelly: The website is www.SundryVentures.co.uk.

Joseph: We will be sure to include a link to Sundry Ventures in the show notes, Kelly. I just wanted to say I really appreciate you providing all of us with a good reminder that transitions can actually be very fruitful and provide a real opportunity to explore a wide range of ideas. Thanks so much for telling us more about the importance of stepping away from a role that’s not right for you, that that can really open up other opportunities for your life, and how you’re making the most out of your transition.

Best of luck with that, your clean tech consulting work, and I’m looking forward to hearing where you ultimately end up landing.

Kelly: Wonderful. Thanks so much, Joseph. I really appreciate it.