Crystal

Well... I'm now standing at a free Internet booth at Changi airport, waiting for my flight back that's delayed.

The bottom line?

My future's away from the firm.

I met up with the Asia Pac chief architect. Found out that he did not have much background from the CMD.

I spent a good 45 minutes bringing him up to speed. I started explaining my predicament and I also told him that it would be nice if someone came up to me and said "yada yada.." (you know it already by heart by now, the comment abt zero sales target etc etc)

The ang moh firstly stated that in the consulting business, it is hard to have zero sales targets. The moment he said that (which obviously I have been expecting...), I nearly spit the coffee that I had in my mouth out. But obviously I did not want to purge coffee into Asia Pacific's Chief Architect...

Secondly, he said, with respect to exploring perhaps a 12 month career progression opportunity within the global architecture group, he said
1) Malaysia is pretty much out of the picture because of perhaps limited opportunities and the fact that the pyramid is perhaps filled up with that other dude from another race who already got promoted ahead of Picard there already
- China is a good opportunity that can perhaps make it for me >> but I told him I did not want to travel
- the only other opportunity he said was perhaps exploring this other unit that does SAP solutions, because of my SAP Netweaver experience

Given the limited opportunities, it was obvious that my best bet is still away from the firm.

It was a good conversation. He did not do any hard selling to make me stay. He understood my predicament and said that "sometimes, if you're not getting a fair shake out of the firm, it makes sense to leave"

True words of wisdom.

Now that this burdenesome decision has come to a close, I'm gonna look for some free X Box games to play at Changi...