It’s Not Just Hard Work: It’s Knowing How the Company Works

I recently had the opportunity to talk about the strange trajectory and nature of my career, and how I went from point A to point L (we’ll save M-Z for when I hit retirement). Here’s the shorthand: I studied advertising at a leading school for the craft and ended up proofreading catalogs as my first job. Of course, I’m using a bit of hyperbole because that’s just the beginning of the story.

That beginning is important though. I can tell you that proofreading catalogs at a leading life science company was not what I envisioned myself doing after college. I imagined sleek pitches and presentations, and coming up with great ideas that would lead to golden lions. However, that vision was dimmed by an economy still trying to find its footing. Instead, I fully leaned into my “pre-retirement” period — that’s what I called the period from when I graduated until I started working. During this time, I generally hung out, golfed (badly) and binge-watched TV before binge-watching was even a thing. I was watching whatever was on TV without control because dinosaurs were still roaming the earth at that time.

Then, one day, I got a call from someone at a company called Sigma-Aldrich — asking me if I was interested in proofreading catalogs. Little did I know that my aunt had given my resume to one of her friends. Now, here’s what went through my mind:

• What is Sigma-Aldrich?
• Proofreading catalogs? I’d rather watch glue dry.
• No more lazy life?

The next step in my process was to solicit my parent’s opinions. My dad summed it up quite eloquently and, in his typical form, with an engineer’s very dry sense of humor. He said, “Jeffrey, you have two choices — you can ask people if they’d like fries with that or you can go to St. Louis and proofread catalogs.” Anyone who knows me will tell you about my love for a Number Two at the Golden Arches, but that didn’t seem like the right next step so I went east from Warrensburg, Missouri to the “Gateway to the West.”

In this new job, I proofread catalogs for eight hours a day — looking at thousands of pages in multiples languages and currencies. I didn’t understand what I was reading but I quickly got a handle on looking for printing irregularities. I frequently asked if there were other things that I could help with when I finished my pages for the day. If I was going to be there, I was going to give my all. This was the first lesson: be interested and sponge up any and everything you can. That three-month experience led to my next role working with our trade show team, then as a marketing communications coordinator for our corporate communications (think annual reports, shareholders meetings, etc.). That was followed by supervising all of our printing (back to those 3,000-page catalogs) and then the train went off the tracks — or at least that was my perception at the time.

The great recession had set in and we were making changes to weather the storm, one of which included a role change for me into our procurement department. I thought this was the end of everything as I knew it. I was not a happy camper, but the situation was what it was. Thankfully, I was still able to work on a few things that followed me from my previous life, such as our global charitable work that I was fortunate enough to build with our CFO. If you asked my pod mate, she would tell you how much I wasn’t thrilled about wheeling and dealing for chemicals and reagents daily, but then the second lesson came — and it was the most important lesson of my career thus far. Learning how our company does what it does was a game-changing experience for me. Without my stint in procurement, I would never have the intimate knowledge of what differentiates us and our operations from others in our industry. 

About a year into that experience, reprieve came in the form of Global Citizenship. I got back to a place that I felt I could really make an impact, which was then strengthened because I could work on building strategies that took into account not only what some may call “marketing fluff” but also how our business actually works. This helped lay the foundation for groundbreaking tools like DOZN™, the build out of our green chemistry product platform from scratch, and getting the company recognized by CDP, The Global 100, Newsweek Green Rankings, CR Magazine’s Top 100 and many more. We were able to build a culture of credibility because of operational understanding. As both our business and my responsibilities have transformed and grown, I’m able to take that understanding of our operational process and apply it to making changes to the packaging and labeling of all 300,000 of our products that are produced at 60 manufacturing sites around the world…all because of a dreaded career change to procurement.

As I reflected on the unpredictable zigs and zags of my career, I thought back to that very confident (my mother would have said way too confident) and dare I say naive 22-year-old, and I’m still in awe of where I find myself today. My worldview, desire for inclusion and appreciation for experiences have grown. Although, a few things haven’t changed, including my belief that the power of possibility can be limitless, desire to be quicker and an unquenchable thirst for more information to power change. As a friend and colleague recently said to my team during an off-site meeting in York, U.K.: “It’s not just hard work, it’s knowing how our business works that leads to success.” In my mind, truer words have never been spoken, and that all started proofreading catalogs.

Jeffrey Whitford is head of corporate responsibility and branding for MilliporeSigma.