My corporate gig

I don’t actually have a lot of corporate experience but the experience I got was a valuable one. I spent about three years working with Rio Tinto in my home town of Perth. While I was there I learnt about Lean and continuous improvement and I worked in one the few full time scenario planning and strategy teams within corporate Australia. Eventually Rio and I had a falling out about values. Unsurprisingly, the espoused values weren’t necessarily the lived values and once this became undeniable I realised I needed to leave.

Like many breakups, my initial reaction was wholesale rejection. I didn’t want anything to do with corporates and I didn’t want to do anything like the work I did there. In hindsight this was kind of petty and stupid. I got to do some amazing work at Rio and the skills I honed there are now being used to support organisations where I have a much higher level of values alignment. Mostly now I just wish it didn’t take me a best part of a decade fucking around before coming back to the strategic foresight and strategy work I did at Rio.