There is a rubber duck on my desk and her name is Ava.
I mention her first because she is the only element of this story that never changed. Everything else did. CEOs, CTOs, budgets, org charts, whether the job I was doing had a name. Through all of it: a small yellow duck, sent to me by a partner, sitting there with her opinions.
My actual words about her, in writing, to a colleague, unprompted: “I LOVE LOVE LOVE my duck. She’s amazing and cute and always knows just what to say when I’m stuck.” Which is a sentence a grown man in Grand Rapids typed and then sent, on purpose, from a work account.
I went back through the emails. It is stranger than I remembered.
August 2024. I am doing data architecture work. Not AI work. Somewhere in the pile there is an early Copilot proof of concept, scoped at five to ten users, which is the kind of number you write down when you want to be able to walk it back.
December 2024. The AI work quietly moves into my VP’s org. There was no ceremony. Nobody said “you’re the guy now.” It was a handoff in the way things get handed off in large companies, meaning it appeared in a slide and then it was true. If you asked me for a start date, that is the closest thing I have.
June 2025. I send an email. In it, I propose that we “begin creating/curating AI training and education materials for all associates.” I did not know at the time that I was writing the origin document for the next two years of my life. I thought I was volunteering for a side project. That is how these things always go: the sentence that reorganizes your career looks like every other sentence in the paragraph.
August 2025 is where it gets funny.
I put four hours on my calendar labeled “AI Training Heads Down.” That was the entire methodology. Block the time, close the door, build the thing. I delivered the first session on August 18 to three people. Three. I could have driven all of us somewhere in one car.
The next day, August 19, I briefed the MillerKnoll Leadership Team in a session the CEO organized. Roughly eighteen executives.
Three people on Monday, eighteen executives on Tuesday. Same slides, mostly. I have never fully recovered from the whiplash of that particular forty-eight hours, and I still think it explains everything about how this program grew: nobody planned the sequence, the sequence just happened, and I was too busy to notice it was absurd.
On August 28, 2025, my VP wrote a document laying out my objectives for the coming year. In it, in the field where a role would go, he wrote: “role name TBD.”
A full year in. Curriculum built, sessions delivered, executives briefed, and the job still had no name. TBD. Three letters doing the work of a job description.
Then things accelerated in the way they do right before they fall apart. An award in December, in a category called “Think big and be bold,” which I am contractually obligated to be embarrassed about and privately pleased by. A CEO recognition award in April 2026. Europe in May. Fifty-plus sales leaders in a room in London in June.
And then June happened.
I described it in an email at the time and I cannot improve on it, so here it is:
“A few weeks ago, we got a new CTO (a boomerang, but the guy who hired me here a long time ago, so a delightful friendly face). Past CTO back into Chief Strategy Officer. Then our CEO resigns this past Monday, 97% out of nowhere. But she also takes former CTO now CSO with her, and that sucks. New CTO was still getting his bearings back, and now said bearings are probably rocked for a little bit.”
Ninety-seven percent out of nowhere. I want credit for the three percent. I do not know what the three percent was. A feeling, probably, the same one you get on a run when the sky goes a color you don’t like.
What that meant for me, practically, was one line: “I’ve got to let the dust settle a bit before I can ask for curriculum money.” Two years of building toward a moment where I could ask for real budget, and the moment evaporated in a week. That same month, a two-thousand-license Microsoft deal fell through mid-week. Not at a quarter boundary. Not after a review. Wednesday.
And then, July 2026. The title arrived.
Not with an announcement. Not in a meeting. It landed in the week right after the team offsite, quietly, the way a package gets left on a porch. Nobody sent an email. I noticed it in my own signature block, which is a genuinely strange way to learn something about yourself.
The graceful version of this would have me shrugging about it, and that version is a lie. I wanted the title. I had wanted it for eighteen months. I had thought about it on runs, which is where I do all my least dignified thinking. Waiting a year and a half to have your work named is not nothing, and anyone who tells you they were above it is either a saint or fibbing, and I have met very few saints in enterprise software.
Every single one of those org chart events was loud. A CEO resigning is loud. A CTO boomeranging back is loud. A two-thousand-seat deal collapsing on a Wednesday is loud. A title landing after eighteen months, even quietly, is loud inside your own head for about a week.
And not one of them changed what happened in a room in Copenhagen. Or at Portal Mill on a random Tuesday, with a dozen people and a whiteboard and somebody finally admitting out loud that they had been pretending to understand this stuff for months. That room did not know who the CTO was. That room did not care what was in my signature block. The work was real before it had a name, and it would have stayed real if the name never showed up.
Do the job. Let the org chart catch up if it feels like it. Sometimes it does, quietly, in a week nobody was watching.
Ava, for the record, has no position on any of this. She sits next to a plush pigeon (band name?), a duck lamp, and a Danish Little Bird, in an arrangement I have never once been able to justify to a visitor.
No, you’re weird.