Sitting at Starbucks and sipping on a caramel late I glance outside at a beautiful harbor. It could be just like any other Starbucks in Toronto, Vancouver, or New York, but it is not. This Starbucks is actually in another part of the world, far far away from Toronto. I’m actually sitting at Starbucks in Hong Kong, the city which I’ve been calling my new home for the past three and a half months.Before I jump into telling you more about my life in Hong Kong, let me share with you a bit of my background. I was born in Moscow Russia, where I lived until the age of 16, at which point both me and my dad moved to Canada. After a year of Canadian high school I enrolled into a Computer Engineering degree at University of Manitoba. That in turn led to a relatively uneventful four years of school and put me squarely on track for a career in IT. Fortunately, at that point I was brave enough to admit that IT wasn’t the right field for me, and after taking number of Project Management courses I decided to pursue graduate business education to help me switch into Finance. So long story short, after working couple of years in IT sales and then in Product Management I decided to take a plunge and go get an MBA.
As a bit of a side note, I find it really funny that my pursuit of education is perfectly aligned and correlated with the global recessions. Well, to be more precise it actually precedes them by about one year. Let me elaborate: I started my Computer Engineering degree at the peak of the tech hype in 2000 and saw the whole bubble burst a year after, same deal with the MBA which I started in early 2007. Fortunately the second time around I’ve learned my lesson and chose to do a more intensive one year MBA instead, finishing couple short months by before the market collapsed in September ’08. Moreover, it seems the more serious my education gets the more severe the associated recessions, so watch out the world economy if I ever decide to do a Ph.D., cause by the time I’d be done that the world would not be the same, if its still around that is…
On a more positive note, Momentum program @ Pru has turned out to be everything that I’ve though it could and would be. Great people, awesome company and an amazing location. Doesn’t get much better than that, if you ask me.
After finishing an MBA mid 2008 is was really torn, I had an offer from IBM to go into their Project management training program in a smaller Canadian city, I was interviewing with Eli Lilly and Company for the pharmaceutical sales and had some discussions with boutique management consulting firms. But it all felt quite routine and didn’t excite me at the very least. I mean all of the positions were solid, but it felt like I had to sacrifice something in order to take each and every one of them. I would have had to settle if I was to take one of them, so I kept my fingers crossed and continued actively looking for an opportunity that would be a better all around “fit” for what I was looking for.
And I can tell you this: I wasn’t looking for a horizontal comfortable move. I was searching for a stretch opportunity that would be both interesting and challenging. And to my surprise I did find it, browsing through the Pru’s Momentum website. I remember reading about the Momentum and thinking… wow, this sounds exactly like a perfect opportunity for me. The second though was… is this really real or just one of those smart marketing tricks.
After the chance to meet with men and women of Pru including people who were already in the Momentum I was pretty convinced, this was not a marketing trick, the Momentum program was exactly what I was looking for and I desperately wanted in.
To be completely honest with you, I had always envisioned Insurance organizations as a bit of slow moving entities, unexciting, and such. But after getting to know number of people at Pru and chatting with the CEO of Insurance operations as part of my interview process I was absolutely sold. Apparently I was mistaken, insurance companies are not all alike and after 160 years of existence Pru is still very much alive and kicking [competition].
So three rounds of interviews later, I was in. I landed the job that I really wanted and was packing my suitcases in Toronto, Canada and getting ready for my cross Pacific move to Hong Kong.
Hello new world!!!
