What Tower Running Taught Me About Career Agility in GBS

Why the Best Global Business Services Leaders Climb with Curiosity, Not Just Strategy

Climbing Is Not Always About the Top

In 2024, I participated in my third tower race. That’s a vertical climb up 49 floors of Wrocław’s Sky Tower in Poland. The format was as simple as it was demanding: no elevators, no music, no cheering crowd. Just a silent staircase and the weight of your own decision to keep moving upward, floor after floor. Somewhere around the 30th floor, when breath and body settle into a kind of strained rhythm and time becomes elastic, I found myself reflecting not on the race itself but on what it represented.

That narrow stairwell repetitively designed, offering no external view reminded me of the stages we go through in leadership, particularly in Global Business Services, where roles change shape, strategies evolve, and we are often climbing without a clear view of the summit. There is no applause in those moments. No awards waiting on the 32nd or 45th floor. There is only the silent climb.

What I’ve come to realize is that the value of the climb lies not just in reaching the top, but in what we become along the way. The effort itself, the small adjustments, the ability to stay focused through discomfort and uncertainty, these are the same capabilities that matter in GBS and in global leadership. It’s not a metaphor I arrived at once, maybe that's just something that reveals itself floor by floor, step by step.

There Is No Map, Only Movement

There was a time when we could talk about five-year plans with confidence, when progression followed a predictable sequence like from analyst to manager, manager to director, perhaps with a couple of international assignments and a gradual broadening of scope. These frameworks thrived in eras of stability, where markets moved slowly and organizational change was incremental.

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