I made a comment in my last article on Built-in marketing that when a work environment is strong, new or junior employees tend to level up because the context itself becomes a teacher.
As The Next Us reaches its 20th birthday next month, and as I reflect on a 30-plus year career, I think often about the enduring impact of formative early work environments—what they gave me, and what I want for the current generation entering a very different economy and job market.
A quick professional biography, focused on the earliest steps:
- Resonance and challenge. I graduated from the University of Virginia in 1995 with a degree in English Literature, passionate about the arts and skeptical of technology. I took a grant writing job at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, where my boss John Unsworth quickly addressed my tech concerns, pointing out that Plato (in Phaedrus) had made many of the same arguments about books. In a year, I wrote many grants and used my training as a close reader to ask questions, and learn quickly, about technologies that otherwise would have been hopelessly arcane.
- Sanding the floor. By 1997, I had moved to San Francisco and taken a job at Ikonic Interactive writing business proposals for web projects. Ikonic, compared to most of its peers, had an unusually deep background in CD-ROM and iTV—technologies far more complex than brochureware web at the time. I wrote dozens of proposals in an environment where the relationships between coding, production, design, IA, and content strategy had already been figured out and operationally normed. Writing proposals meant threading a needle: each had to win the business and be executable. I had to understand each function’s concerns well enough to address tradeoffs planfully—and build enough trust that they knew I wouldn’t sell them down the river to close a deal. When I later moved into project management, it was a step up in responsibility but an easier role. I’d already lived the hardest part many times over. The proposals were my simulation.
- Rising to early responsibility. By 1999, I was at Adjacency, a beloved boutique web agency that quickly merged into Sapient, where I became a Director of Program Management. My career accelerated because I was by then one of few program managers with deep experience in what was sometimes called “multi-disciplinary design”—bridging engineering and creative services, which often tended to be separated by friction and mistrust. Sapient was an extremely well-run global firm, and I picked up things organically that still serve me in running The Next Us today: the discipline of separating sales pipeline from signed work; the felt experience of working in a values-based performance management system with objective behaviors tied to each value; a generally high bar for business and operational acumen.
In short: I was lucky. My early career gave me formative time in healthy systems. These became my reference point—so that later, working in environments that lacked such systems, I knew what was missing.
A parallel from my personal life. I didn’t cook as a kid—my parents didn’t frame it as a shared activity in our household. Cooking remains a second language for me, something I learned as an adult. But through relationships, I came to see what it looks like when someone did grow up in an environment where cooking was central. A French boyfriend who made his grandmother’s dishes from memory. A Tunisian boyfriend who made something delicious almost every day, in a flow state. They didn’t just know how to cook individual dishes—they knew how to create a kitchen, and how to cook full stop, because their earlier environments had taught them something portable.
Portable knowledge
This is what I want for younger colleagues entering the workforce now. Tunisian pastries hopefully, but also: time in environments where the systems teach.
Many organizations, particularly nonprofits, get this backwards. They think of the organization as the people under their employ. They treat culture as the operating system and introduce process only at the pace the team can assimilate.
But organizations run on systems, not people. And a dependence on individuals prioritizes sustainability at the expense of scalability. When Joe leaves, all his institutional knowledge, and all the bespoke processes built around him, leave too.
Paradoxically, when the organization focuses on keeping Joes onboard by putting culture before process, Joe is in fact more likely to leave—because non-scalable processes create management debt, which increases the cognitive load individuals must carry, which slows skill development and dampens morale.
A healthy organization eventually recognizes:
We owe it to our investors, our customers, and our staff to create a work environment that maximizes each team member’s long-term professional potential.
That mindset shift—from culture to process, from team alignment to task alignment, from staff retention to staff empowerment—is one of the most impactful moves a leader can make. For the team they have today, and for each individual over time.
And for the next generation, who deserve formative professional experiences in environments that make them sharper, clearer, more capable and prepared.