Blindsided! Career disasters I never saw coming

Career dead end
Jerry Luftman had worked at IBM for 23 years when the company unexpectedly offered him an early retirement package in 1993. Under the offer, he would have to leave that year but wouldn't be eligible for benefits until 2000.

"The question was, could I get [another] job, and how much [salary] could I get?" Luftman says -- big questions for someone who had started with IBM right out of college and had stayed.

Luftman, who had been teaching at Columbia University and Stevens Institute of Technology, sought advice from trusted colleagues in business and academia. He decided to pursue an offer from Stevens to build the college's business and management training for technology students.

"I can say without any hesitation that the move I made was one of the better things I have done," says Luftman, who is now the associate dean and distinguished professor of Stevens' School of Technology Management.

The technology that got away
Like most executives, Subbu Murthy receives reams of e-mails, many from unknown sources. So in early 2003, when Murthy opened an e-mail from a small company promoting social networks, he gave the material only a quick glance. "Social networking was just coming up. We had 14,000 doctors in the network, and I thought, 'Does this apply?' And then I thought, 'Maybe not; it's another hype,'" says Murthy, who was then the CIO at a health care company that managed disability claims.

But in retrospect, Murthy wishes he'd paid more attention. "It turns out that it's a very powerful tool to collaborate. I just missed this trend," he says.

But he learned his lesson. "My advice to my CIO colleagues is to build some intelligence filters around what is really important, so you don't let good ones pass," he says.

Murthy, now president and CEO of USourceIT Pvt., a company that provides IT offshore services, is setting up social-networking tools for programmers to interact. He also takes part in several executive roundtables where he can talk and hear about various topics, including which evolving technologies are worth watching.

The report that bit back
As a group CIO at Bausch & Lomb in the 1990s, Dan Gingras helped evaluate the IT department at a company Bausch & Lomb planned to acquire. He reported finding several problems, including a failed ERP implementation. After delivering his report, he assumed his assignment was done.

But Gingras was soon surprised to learn that he'd been assigned to fix the problems he had outlined. "I thought I'd write this report and go back to my old job," he says. "I wasn't thinking beyond what I was doing. I wasn't thinking about the next step. I never thought I'd be asked to fix the situation." Despite his the lack of foresight, he got the job done. But Gingras, now a partner in the New England practice of consulting firm Tatum LLC, learned from that experience. "Now I know if I'm going to make a recommendation that I'm [likely] going to be asked to implement it," he says.

Pratt is a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, Mass. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net.