Switzerland

I accepted a six-month internship at Philip Morris International in Switzerland. Within six weeks, they extended it to twelve. Thirty-three interns started the cohort. Budget cuts trimmed it to eleven. I was one of them.

The internship put me inside a massive agile transformation. One and a half months of workshops, an expensive consulting firm, and all the executives and managers in one room.

Until then, I had quietly put executives on a pedestal. High achievers, untouchable, a room you earned your way into over a decade.

Then I watched them argue like kindergarteners. Brilliant people, sharp instincts, and entirely human. Egos. Irritations. Petty moments. The same weather everyone else has.

And then there was Adriana Carrillo.

Director of Human Resources. The moment she opened her mouth, the room listened. Not because of her title. Because she moved the needle. Every time.

She did something the rest of the room did not. She met every person where they were. Their style of thinking. Their rhythm. Their need to feel heard. Everyone in that room had earned their place, but each in their own way, and Adriana was the one who understood that. She met each of them as themselves.

I left that workshop with a new compass for what executive leadership actually looks like. It is not rank. It is not volume. It is the person in the room who makes everyone feel seen, and still moves the decision forward.

Every boardroom since has looked the same to me. You meet each person as a person.

My manager, the head of the Project Management Office, asked if I wanted to take on something outside my contract. A SharePoint-based project management platform, bespoke to how the Swiss organisation actually worked.

I said yes. I had never touched SharePoint. I had never written JSON. I figured it out.

The hard part was not the tech. The hard part was the people.

Teams were protective of how they already worked. KPIs to hit. Projects to ship. A new platform looked like a threat. "Are you replacing how we work today?"

So I changed the approach. I sat with every department. I asked people to open their laptops and show me how they worked on a normal Tuesday. What they did. What annoyed them. What they had stopped hoping would change.

By the tenth meeting, some of them joked, "Eugene, not another meeting." A month later, those same people were waiting for the next one.

They felt understood. That is the only reason a platform gets adopted.

I shipped three months ahead of schedule.

Technology does not win adoption. Engagement does.

Switzerland gave me one more thing.

The mountains. The picture-book kind. Looking at them, I found an inner stillness I had not found anywhere else.

The work taught me how to meet people. The mountains taught me to slow down enough to do it well.

That is the posture I bring into every room now.