Facing Down Loneliness, Fear, Frustration and Self-Doubt

My first week on the job was frustrating. I didn't know any of the staff. I didn't know any of the vendors. I didn't know the interactive marketing industry or its terminology.

At Corporate Express, when someone talked about delivery problems or FIFO and LIFO costing, I could speak that language. At Innovation Ads, everyone was talking about campaigns, enrollment management and lead generation. I didn't know what they were talking about. People were giving me projects, saying, "We need this client to be able to do a co-reg, but they're also driving an affiliate network." I was scribbling down notes but I had no idea what they were asking me to do. That was scary.

There were times when I wondered, Oh my god, what if I make things worse? What if I can't do this job? I imagined the core system crashing for five days and the company losing US$10 million. What would I do? I didn't know who my go-to people were. I didn't know if my staff was going to accomplish what I needed them to accomplish.

In my previous role, I had a lot of people I could ask for advice. I had known them for a decade, and they were always happy to talk things out with me. Here, I had no one to ask. I had to rely on myself and do what I thought was right.

Getting the Lay of the Land, Finding a (Temporary) Go-To Person

Innovation Ads was so different from Corporate Express.

For starters, Innovation Ads, which launched in 2002, is privately owned. It's driven by speed, progress and growth, while Corporate Express, as a public company, is burdened with compliance, regulations, reporting and controls. I always thought that when I became CIO-wherever that was-that it would be very formal and hierarchical, much like it was at Corporate Express, where you have to have "gray hair" to be promoted to executive management and where every executive has a front-row space in the parking lot. At Innovation Ads, everyone on staff is my age or younger. There's a music studio in the office for employees. It's a substantially different environment and not what I expected, though I must say it's certainly no less effective or lucrative than Corporate Express.

I tried to adapt to my new environment, and I resolved to do my best. I came in early. I worked late. I read up on open-source technologies such as Apache, PHP and MySQL, since they were new to me. I also started reading books, news articles and white papers on online advertising, e-mail marketing and behavioral targeting.

To get my arms around my new position and employer, I found someone on the IT staff to be my go-to person. Whenever I got a task, I talked it over with him. I asked him what he would do and what the company had done in the past. I selected my go-to guy on the basis of his tenure. Out of the five people on the IT staff when I joined, he had been at the company the longest-a year.