It was 2020.
I’d just finished my PhD. Started a new procurement role managing billions in project value. And someone asked if I wanted to teach at a business school.
Part-time. Evening classes. MBA students.
Every signal in my career said: don’t do it.
Teaching wouldn’t get me promoted. Wouldn’t expand my network in the company. Wouldn’t make me visible to the executives who decided advancement.
It was a side track in the corporate game I’d been learning to play for fifteen years.
I said yes anyway.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that decision marked the year I stopped optimizing for titles and started optimizing for something else entirely.
The Game I’d Been Playing
By 2020, I knew how corporate advancement worked.
You volunteer for high-visibility projects. You ensure senior leaders see your contributions. You network strategically. You make yourself promotable by being visible, not just competent.
I’d watched it work for others.
The person who presented well got promoted over the person who did the analysis. The one who knew the right executives got opportunities before the one who solved the hardest problems.
This wasn’t corruption.
It was just how organizations work when there are more qualified people than available positions.
Visibility became the tiebreaker.
And I’d been trying to play that game—attending the right meetings, building the right relationships, positioning myself for the next level.
Then someone asked if I wanted to teach.
And something in me was tired.
The Decision That Made No Sense
Teaching would take 10-15 hours a week.
Time I could have spent on high-visibility projects. Or building relationships with senior procurement leadership. Or making sure the right people knew what I was delivering.
Everyone I asked for advice said the same thing: “Great experience, but don’t let it distract from your main career.”
The subtext was clear: teaching was fine as a hobby, but it wouldn’t help me climb.
They were right.
Teaching wouldn’t impress anyone in procurement. Wouldn’t get me invited to strategy meetings. Wouldn’t accelerate my path to senior roles.
But I’d just spent four years doing research. Learning how to think systematically. How to build frameworks that actually explained complex systems.
And I was curious whether I could teach people to think the way I’d learned to think.
Not for my career.
Just because it felt like work worth doing.
So I said yes to teaching.
And then I made a second decision that compounded the first.
The Tool No One Asked For
At work, I started building something.
A procurement risk forecasting system. Technical. Systematic. The kind of deep methodological work that takes months and produces something most people wouldn’t understand without explanation.
It wasn’t visible work.
No senior executive would walk past my desk and see impressive progress. No steering committee would naturally hear about it.
It was craft for the sake of craft.
I spent evenings after teaching preparing lectures. Weekends building forecasting models. Time that could have been spent networking or positioning.
My colleagues—the ones playing the visibility game well—were attending industry conferences. Building relationships with senior leadership. Making sure their names appeared in the right project updates.
I was building a risk tool and teaching MBA students about marketing strategy.
From a career optimization perspective, I was making every wrong choice.
What Started Happening
Six months in, something strange occurred.
A project manager in another division reached out. They’d heard I was working on a procurement risk model. Could I help them think through their supplier exposure?
I hadn’t mentioned the project in any official channel. Hadn’t presented it to leadership. Hadn’t made it visible.
But someone knew. And they wanted the help.
Then another request. And another.
Not because I had a title.
Because I’d built something that solved a problem people actually had.
Within a year, the tool I’d built—was being adopted across divisions.
First-year impact: Achieved double-digit € million value through proactive risk mitigation.
Leadership noticed. Not because I’d made it visible. Because the people using it made it visible by solving problems that had been expensive before.
The Paradox
Here’s what I didn’t expect:
Stopping the pursuit of visibility made me more visible.
Not through positioning. Through impact that was impossible to ignore.
The teaching gave me something too. Not credentials—no one in procurement cared that I was teaching MBAs.
It gave me clarity.
When you have to explain strategy to people who ask innocent questions, you can’t hide behind corporate language. You have to actually understand what you’re talking about.
That clarity showed up in my day work. In how I framed problems. In how I explained complex procurement decisions to non-procurement stakeholders.
People started asking me to join meetings I hadn’t volunteered for. To explain things to senior leaders. To help think through problems outside my direct responsibility.
Not because I had the title.
Because I’d become the person who could make complicated things clear and build systems that actually worked.
The Person Who Got Promoted
About eighteen months into this shift, someone I’d worked with got promoted to a senior role.
Good person. Competent. Had played the visibility game well.
Three months later, they called me.
“I need help thinking through our supplier strategy for the next program. The framework I inherited doesn’t account for the risk scenarios we’re seeing.”
I spent two hours walking them through how the forecasting model worked. How to think systematically about supplier risk. How to structure the analysis so it would hold up under executive scrutiny.
They had the title.
I had the expertise they needed to succeed in it.
And that’s when I understood what had shifted.
The Uncomfortable Realization
I’d spent fifteen years trying to optimize for the next title.
And in doing so, I’d been optimizing for permission.
Permission to do interesting work. Permission to influence decisions. Permission to be taken seriously.
But the work I’d done over the past eighteen months—building the risk tool, teaching, going deep on methodology—had given me something titles never could:
Indispensability.
People didn’t call me because of my job description. They called because I could solve problems they couldn’t solve themselves.
The title would have given me authority.
The craft gave me something harder to replicate: genuine expertise that people actually needed.
Here’s the uncomfortable part:
I realized I’d been confusing advancement with impact.
Assuming that the path to doing meaningful work was climbing to a level where I’d finally have permission to do it.
But the people doing the most meaningful work weren’t always the ones with the biggest titles.
They were the ones who’d gone deep enough on their craft that their contribution became indispensable regardless of their formal authority.
What Changed
I didn’t stop wanting advancement.
But I stopped optimizing for it as the primary variable.
Instead, I asked a different question: What would I build if no one was watching? What would I learn if it didn’t have to be immediately relevant to my next promotion?
The answers were:
- A systematic way to forecast procurement risks
- The ability to teach strategy in a way that actually helped people think
- Deep methodological expertise in how complex sourcing decisions actually work
None of this was designed to be impressive.
It was designed to be useful.
The impressive part happened as a side effect.
The Meeting That Crystallized Everything
Two years into this shift, I was asked to present the risk forecast model to a steering committee of senior executives.
Not my direct leadership. Not even my division. People two levels above me who were deciding whether to adopt the methodology across the organization.
I walked into that room without the title that would traditionally grant access to it.
But I walked in with something else: a system that worked. Results no one could argue with. Expertise that had been tested in practice.
The presentation lasted twenty minutes.
The questions lasted an hour.
Not challenging questions. Genuine curiosity. How did it work? How could they apply it? What would it take to scale?
Afterward, one of the executives pulled me aside.
“This is the kind of thinking we need more of,” he said. “Not just in procurement. Across the organization.”
Then he asked: “What would you need to develop this further?”
Not: “When are you getting promoted?”
Not: “How does this fit your career plan?”
Just: What would you need to keep doing work like this?
And I realized: this was influence.
Not the kind that comes from title or hierarchy.
The kind that comes from building something undeniably valuable and then being generous with it.
What I Learned About Craft
Focusing on craft instead of titles didn’t mean ignoring career development.
It meant redefining what development actually meant.
Instead of optimizing for the next rung on the ladder, I optimized for:
Depth over breadth. Going deeper on procurement methodology rather than spreading across visible projects.
Systems over solutions. Building frameworks that could scale rather than solving individual problems impressively.
Teaching over positioning. Helping others think clearly rather than making sure they knew I was thinking clearly.
Impact over optics. Creating results that spoke for themselves rather than results that needed my explanation.
None of this was noble self-sacrifice.
It was strategic—just on a different timeline than the corporate advancement game.
The advancement game optimizes for the next twelve months.
Craft optimizes for the next ten years.
What Actually Moved Forward
Here’s what happened paradoxically:
My influence grew faster after I stopped chasing it.
Not because I’d discovered some trick. Because I’d shifted the foundation of my value from positional authority to demonstrated expertise.
The teaching expanded. Highest student satisfaction in the faculty. Not because I was performing teaching well, but because I’d figured out how to actually help people think differently.
The risk forecasting tool became organizational infrastructure. Not because I marketed it well, but because it solved expensive problems.
My role evolved. Not through promotions I lobbied for, but through people pulling me into problems that needed the kind of systematic thinking I’d developed.
And yes, eventually, the titles came too.
Not because I’d positioned for them. Because the work had created a track record that was impossible to ignore.
But by the time they came, they mattered less than I thought they would.
The Question I Now Ask
When someone asks for career advice—and they do, more often since I started teaching—I ask them a question I wish someone had asked me earlier:
“What would you build if no one was watching?”
Not: “What looks good on a CV?”
Not: “What will impress your boss?”
Just: what would you create if the only measure of success was whether it actually worked?
Most people hesitate.
Because we’ve been trained to optimize for visibility. To confuse activity with progress. To chase titles because they seem like the destination.
But titles are just permission structures.
Craft is what you do when you already have permission—from yourself—to do work that matters.
What I Still Believe About Advancement
I’m not anti-ambition.
I’m not suggesting everyone should ignore career development and just hope things work out.
Advancement matters. Titles matter. Compensation matters. Authority matters.
But they’re outcomes, not strategies.
The strategy is becoming undeniably good at something valuable.
The advancement follows—sometimes in ways you planned, often in ways you didn’t anticipate.
The people I’ve seen succeed most sustainably aren’t the best at playing the visibility game.
They’re the people who built genuine expertise, were generous with it, and trusted that value finds its way to recognition eventually.
Sometimes quickly. Sometimes slowly. Always more sustainably than the alternative.
I still teach.
Not because it advances my career—though it does, in unexpected ways.
Because standing in front of people who ask sincere questions keeps me honest about what I actually know versus what I’ve learned to perform knowing.
I still build systems.
Not because they’re visible—though they become visible when they work.
Because making complex things clear and systematic is the craft I care about, regardless of who notices.
And when someone asks me now how to think about career advancement, I tell them what I learned in 2020:
Stop chasing titles.
Build something undeniably valuable. Go deep on your craft. Be generous with what you learn.
The titles will come.
But more importantly, you’ll have built something that matters whether they do or not.