When I formally started my career in HR at the headquarters of Philip Morris Europe in Switzerland I knew this was going to be one of those sliding door moments that would determine the course of my life.

And it did. I embraced a profession, the HR profession, that I love; I pursued a demanding and dynamic international career with multiple relocations that I am very grateful to have had; I worked with an incredible array of leaders, colleagues, peers and team members that I respected (in all fairness not all of them!); I was appointed and promoted to high level roles that I took with a great sense of responsibility.

In time, I realised how dramatically the world of work was changing and yet how static we were as leaders to adapt to the change and propose new narratives about talent and the workforce. “We want your loyalty and in return we will invest in you.” “People are our most valuable assets”. Well, not quite. Not anymore. And not as much.

This became evident especially when in 2013 I entered the frantic “buy or be bought or be forgotten” merry-go-round of the Healthcare sector! In 7 years, I rotated in and out of 5 companies: Baxter, whose Bioscience unit became Baxalta, which was bought by Shire which in turn was bought by Takeda and in between these last two transactions there was a pit stop at Servier when Shire divested the Oncology business and I was leading that project as Head of HR for their International business. I transferred with the assets; i.e. with the products and colleagues linked to that unit.

And that’s when the penny dropped.

We, the humans, are transferrable goods bound by legal clauses and business agreements.

Yes, we are all unique; yes, we want to create inclusive & diverse cultures; yes, we need to develop our leaders and make them authentic, empathetic and relatable; yes, we need to invest in mental health; but at the end of the day, business is business. “It’s not personal”. That’s what we say. But, it is personal. Because we have done a superb job throughout the years in mingling things up and confusing people with mixed messages. We first praise their uniqueness and unquestionable value and then fire them or demote them at the next re-organization.

So besides the change fatigue and this uncomfortable feeling that we were no longer credible as a People function and as business leaders, there was also the fact that my life priorities started to change. Time was becoming more precious and I realised my creative spirit had been relegated to the dungeons! My music verve and vibe was no longer there and especially my creative thinking was tainted by corporate language which by definition is sterile and institutional.

I invested in my own higher education. I pursued a Master in Songwriting and Music Business, a Master in Curatorship Studies, I became a Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Hypnotic states, I completed IDEO’s training on Innovation & Business, Harvard’s training on Entrepreneurial-ship. I felt I had to immerse myself in other realities, meet different people, open my mind to different ways of thinking.

My experience has been that once you start on that journey of exploring what else is out there, you don’t go back. And if you couple this with the need to give voice to your other personas and professions, then it’s just a matter of time before it matures into a vision and a reality!  So exactly 25 years after the first sliding door moment, I decided to move on and walk through another sliding door. And I never looked back.

This is my story. What’s yours?