Rotating Bosses and other random happenings

During my interviews for the DA position at athena, I was interviewed by 4 people in my department. Kim, Jeremy, Minna, and Michael. When I was interviewed, Kim was going to be my official "manager" though Minna would be my day-to-day supervisor. By the time I started, Kim had been promoted elsewhere and Jeremy was now my manager (Minna still day-to-day supervisor) and Jeremy reported to our CEO. About two months ago, athena hired a new COO and Jeremy began reporting to him. Roughly one month back, Minna was promoted to manager (reporting to Jeremy). This week, Jeremy announced that he was moving to a completely different department to help them work through some of athena's largest operational challenges. This resulted in our department moving back to Kim's sphere of control, so Minna's still my manager, but Kim is responsible for our department again.

What does all this mean? It means that in the 4.5 months that I've been at athena, I've had 3 different managers (all of whom interviewed me) and 3 different people who my manager has reported to. On a day-to-day basis, Minna's been my superviser throughout and all of the people involved are definitely good to work for, but it's still an interesting thing to consider how much athena seems to change organizationally. I guess it's a good thing I picked up Openness to Change at Olin, huh?

I'm definitely enjoying things though and I'm being challenged - particularly with regard to time/task management skills that I think have been a little rusty for a while. I'd say I'm making progress, but it's definitely a little tricky.

In other news, I went home for Thanksgiving and had a great time with friends and family - lots of good food and a decent amount of dog petting. I'm heading home again for Dec 23 - Jan 2nd - the Thanksgiving visit seemed too short, so I'm hopeful about this one being long enough that I can actually relax instead of just running around and seeing people for small snippets of time.

Working on trying to do more things beyond work and slacking at home. I went to a video/discussion thing at Babson yesterday about Social Entrepreneurship. Incidently PBS' The New Heroes video series seems pretty good. I think I might buy a copy. It actually had a piece of the main score to Civ IV (or they both used the same base music) which I thought was pretty cool. On Wednesday, I went to an event at the Kennedy School of Government on Darfur and different policy options there. There's another panel on Monday about the issue of intervention, so I think I'm going to try to make that one too.