Breaking the Silence

Well, as a few of you have observed, I’ve been kinda quiet lately.  Thanks to a few folks like Bill Kutik, Naomi Bloom, Paul Hammerman and Ron Hanscome, the word that I’d left Lawson has pretty much come and gone.  It was a great run and I wish nothing but continued success for the folks that will take up the meaningful work I’ve been privileged to do there for the past 6 years (almost to the day!).

Today is about change.  I was out Christmas shopping yesterday and came to a realization.  In the past 30 days, I have moved to a new home (condo in fact — and today’s snow was delicious in that I didn’t have t shovel it!), changed jobs and as of last Friday have to work out at a new gym.  I had a very specific morning ritual that started around 5:30 am which was to leave the house, head to the gym and go off to work.  All in pretty much a convenient straight line that never took more than 20 minutes door-to-door.  A commuter’s dream (ok, except for the 100+ days a year that I’m on the road).

This morning was different and the same.  I still got up at 5:30, but left the condo, headed south instead of north to my new gym (the old one that I paid $3/month at for the past 10 years went out of business — shocking!) and on to my new office near the Mall of America.  All different destinations, in the opposite direction but still 20 minutes door-to-door.  Phew!

I’m delighted to break the silence about my new position at Ceridian Corporation as SVP of Products and Technology.  I’m honored that the leadership team led by CEO Stuart Harvey has trusted me with the hard work of keeping thousands of customers happy while helping a gifted team of professionals chartered with advancing the old and reinventing the new.

It’s certainly one of the biggest challenges of my career and I’m definitely up for it.  I’ll own both product management and product development (a model I have always preferred in my career) and work with the wide range of constituents to help drive the business to new levels.  Ceridian has a world class core business that can just get better and the strategic partnership with Dayforce presents opportunities like I’ve never had in my career.  I’ve believed in the power of SaaS since Lawson acquired iJob in 1998 and couldn’t be more excited to focus on it so completely as I’ll be doing at Ceridian.  Good stuff.

The public details about my move can be found in our press release at http://www.ceridian.com/about_us_article/1,6266,17018-80125,00.html.  Today, for me, is speaking out ‘officially’ about it (I always find it a tad irritating when people don’t want to tell you where they’re going, and this time it was just necessary).  But more importantly, it’s also to thank the many people who’ve given me support in so many ways over the past months as I made this transition.  There are too many people to mention that have advised me about moving to Ceridian (positive without exception), my former colleagues at Lawson that have given me unqualified support for my decision and the welcome from my new team members at Ceridian that has been nothing short of humbling.

Those that know me well realize I’m a bit of a change junkie and this kind of stuff, while a bit stressful at times, energizes me immensely.  So while the trip into work was different but the same, there’s no business-as-usual for me at Ceridian.  I hope to continue to blog about relevant and interesting things that are going on as well as work to make a meaningful contribution to the HR Technology community through the Ceridian team’s work with its customers.  Stay tuned!