Day 2 - Ambiguity

Today I felt some of the pressure I've heard many MBA interns talk about - ambiguity.

For my project I'm supposed to help different groups within engineering and operations design career ladders for individual contributors. This will help answer the question "Where can I go next?" for software and IT guys.

At the beginning of the day I felt like I had nothing. I was reading up on book passages and articles I thought were related. Midday I got to hear from the general manager for LinkedIn India, Hari, who was pretty interesting. Apparently LinkedIn India is growing like gangbusters and he's been at the center of that growth. He was the first LinkedIn employee hired in Asia (less than 3 years ago) and he won the India's Hottest Young Executives award.

At LinkedIn if you've been around for more than 2 years, you are a veteran.


I finally got to the scheduled meeting with some of my colleagues who shared more about the project, who I'll need to talk to, what's been done so far ...

It's a little frustrating to not know who needs what and how they feel about it. I haven't met a single person I'll be doing the project for yet. It's hard to know if I should just seek them out myself or wait for an introduction (I elected to wait, I'll get introduced to the first team I'm designing the ladder for tomorrow). But, this is part of the process - figuring out how to maneuver. Who do you talk to, who do you get buy-in from ...

I still feel like I don't know anyone, but I guess I can't be too hard on myself on day 2. I'm slowly meeting more and more people.

Tomorrow I have my first all hands meeting (where the CEO speaks) as well as lunch with some other people in HR. Should be fun!