From the Corner Office to a Cubicle — and Back Again

What if the boldest move of your career is the one that looks like a step backward?

We're re-releasing one of our earliest and most-requested conversations. Dr. Karen Murphy, PhD, RN, graduated high school, got married eleven days later, and had her first child before most people had declared a major. Fifty years into that marriage — and a career that took her from ICU nurse to hospital CEO to Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health — she's still not done.

Karen spent three decades at Moses Taylor Hospital in Scranton, working, as she puts it, in every department but one, and ending as President and CEO of the system. Then she did something almost nobody does: she left the corner office, the executive assistant, and the title to work out of a cubicle at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. She calls it one of the most gratifying stretches of her professional life. It humbled her, surrounded her with people half her age, and reminded her that the denominator kept getting bigger — from one patient at the bedside, to a community, to the nation.

This conversation is about drive, but it's also about the scaffolding underneath it: a grandmother who said you go, I've got them, a husband who never once called to ask what time dinner was, and two male mentors in 1980s Scranton who pushed her forward when almost no one was pushing women anywhere. Karen is direct about what that support made possible — and blunt about how much harder it is without it.

She's also blunt about money. Her story of interviewing a brilliant young woman who went ten full minutes without asking about compensation is the moment most listeners tell us they replay. And her advice for anyone stuck? Stop trying to change the room. Get out of the department.

Now Karen is staring at what she calls a blank sheet of paper — and instead of dreading it, she's building the next purpose on purpose.

In This Episode You'll Learn:

• Why leaving the corner office for a cubicle was one of the best career decisions Karen ever made
• How a job she hated became the turning point that sent her back to school — twice
• What her father told her about CEOs that changed how she saw her own ceiling
• Why she believes women systematically under-ask for compensation, and how that gap compounds for an entire career
• How to tell the difference between stress you can control and stress you can't
• Why the support system around you determines how far your ambition can actually go
• What she'd tell any woman labeled "too aggressive" at work
• Why "get out of the department" is better advice than trying to fix a broken culture
• How to build a new sense of purpose when the one that defined you ends
• The one book she tells every aspiring leader to buy — for about five dollars

Resources From This Episode:

• The First-Time Manager — Karen's go-to recommendation for leaders at every level
• The Way We Were (1973) — Karen's pick for the character she'd most want to be
• Risant Health
• The Steele Institute for Health Innovation, Geisinger
• CMS Innovation Center (CMMI)
• Pennsylvania Department of Health

Keep Sparking

If this conversation resonated with you:

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