Which way is up?

Been rather quiet again here lately.  Not sure if I am loosing interest in blogging or it is loosing interest in me.  One standard excuse for letting your blog go to weeds is that you’ve been to busy with other things.  The last half of the year, that was certainly true.  I was coaching 2 different volleyball teams (one came in runner up in their tournament), getting ready for the holidays (we hosted Christmas this year for the family – I think it went great), brewing beer, canning things from the garden and generally enjoying the time I got to spend with my family and not on the road traveling for work.  In retrospect I am glad I took the time when I had it available, because January 1st, everything changed (when it comes to ‘free’ time anyway).
A little over a year ago, I was given an opportunity to make a major career path change and I took it.  I had been working with software partners for more than 5 years and I was in a rut.  My boss gave me a shot at running a new dedicated online marketing team and after thinking about it for a while (OK, about 1.5 seconds) I took him up on it.  Fifteen wonderful months later and I am presented with another opportunity: do it all again, this time for the division.
A short lesson on the structure of Siemens: first there was Siemens Corp which begat three sectors: Industry, Medical and Energy.  Industry then begat 6 divisions: Industry Automation, Drive Technologies, Building Technologies, Mobility, Industry Solutions and OSRAM (known as Sylvania here in the US).  With such a large litter there was bound to be some complications and indeed Industry Automation and Drive Technologies came out as conjoined twins.  This was to be expected as they had originally been one group in the prior Siemens Structure, the venerable Siemens Automation and Drives.  As the surgeons have tried to separate the twins, departments that had once been singular for the twin were now doubled for the new children.  In all of this Industry Automation had the time to begat a few business units, including the one that I was in until recently, Siemens PLM Software.
So. now that the genealogy is straight, the simple part of the story is that my boss was asked to do everything he’s been doing for the Siemens PLM Software business unit for the Industry Automation Division.  And then he asked me to so the same (not what he had been doing for PL, what I had been doing for PL).  So now I find myself as the head of the online group for Industry Automation.  My small team of 10 in business unit has now grown to 26 to handle the needs of the division.  My small travel budget that would let me get to Plano once a quarter has grown to enough to let me get to Nuremberg every three weeks for the next I don’t know how long.  And my 250 ct. bottle of aspirin has magically transformed into the mega-lo-mart 1000 ct. jar.
The next weeks, months (and years) will be a journey no doubt.  I will learn more about myself and the people around me than I know now.  I will be part of some tremendous success…and some spectacular failures.  In the next few weeks it will be easy to become fearful for all that I don’t know and that’s lurking “out there to get me”.  But the more I scrape and dig and scratch the more bring to light and I find that there is a lot of greatness buried right under the surface.  And that’s good enough for now to let me know that there is great potential and possibilities.  Now to figure out what to do with them both.