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Three Ways to Keep the Dream Alive

Career getting too predictable? We profile three security execs who found ways to keep their jobs exciting and their careers moving forward.

June 01, 2006 — CSO — The inimitable Boz Scaggs sang "Once a story's told/it can't help but grow old," and though the '70s pop icon was crooning about love, the same could be said for your career. Even the greatest jobs, over time, can turn into a grind.

A sizable part of this issue of CSO has been devoted to dream jobs&mdashwhere and how to find them, and ways to keep them. This story is a logical endgame: how to reinvent yourself once time has dulled the luster of a dream job. In essence, what do you do to maintain a dream career?

Mind you, we're not talking about people whose dream jobs, through some catastrophic security event, become nightmares, but rather people whose jobs just become, well, unrewarding. Boring, or different from what they started as, or worse, mind-numbingly the same as when they started.

Building a security department from the ground up, for example, may be a dream job. But once that's done, it can leave a person with the feeling you get after finishing a great book, a feeling of "Now what?" Or perhaps the opportunity to work in a specific industry or with a specific team is what made a job enticing to start. Then, the company was acquired, or management changed. The dream is over. Likewise, this growing pile of regulations that security officers face can turn a dream job into a monotonous management millstone&mdashCSO as audit jockey.

"You could find a long-term home, I suppose," says Ken Stephens, a self-described "mover" who recently left GE Healthcare to become CISO of Fair Isaac. "But there's also a certain amount of swimming forward you have to do. You have to keep going, otherwise you get stuck and stagnant and then you're not nearly as productive."

Dreams aren't always forever, so you have to make new ones. Here we address those of you who find yourselves in roles that have outlived their excitement, who sometimes stare out the window in a Walter Mitty state, imagining other security-related jobs that would make getting up for work joyful again.

We found three security professionals who have used three distinct strategies to keep their careers dreamy. These are their stories.

The Revenue Generator
Scott Hamrick, CISO, GE Healthcare

Career path: CISO, then a client leader for GE Consumer and Industrial

Dream aspects of his job: developing products, boosting revenue

In 2001, Scott Hamrick was CISO of GE Industrial Systems, one of the six subsidiary states that make up GE Nation, and he was frustrated. "It started out fun, but it got so tiresome," he says. The role was "ops focused," he says, and "the only time we talked about the bottom line was when we were figuring out how not to take stuff out of it."