ZIP!

I recently learned that an old friend – I’ll call him “Joe” - will be retiring.  Joe has spent his entire career at our company – 42 years.  That number astounds me (although, other, smaller numbers have astounded me in years past, only to find that they eventually seemed much smaller when I surpassed them.)
 
Joe was one of the very first people I met when I joined this company, fresh out of college.  He was the Assistant Manager of our department.  As a newbie insurance underwriter, I reported to a supervisor, who reported to Joe.  He was, and is, a great guy.

Joe knew his stuff.  We all respected him, and he, in turn, had our backs.  Although I may not have realized it, years later when I became a manager, Joe was among the early influencers who helped to shape my own style.  He stood up for his people, and we would have jumped in front of a bus for him.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

Joe came from humble beginnings, a solid blue-collar family of first-generation Italian-Americans.  He speaks with a fairly thick Boston accent.  With no disrespect intended (quite the opposite,) he reminds me a bit of Boston mayor Tom Menino (known, affectionately or derisively, depending on who does the knowing, as “Mumbles” for his accented, occasionally slurred speaking style.)  Tom Menino has been, and continues to be wildly popular among his constituents, and for good reason – he knows how to get things done, knows every inch of his city, and does what he believes is best – always – for his people. 

Back in the day, Joe seemed to know everyone in our company – no small statement, considering that we worked at the headquarters of a Fortune 500 corporation.  If you needed to get something done – to cut through the red tape, go to the source, and just get it done – Joe always knew how, and could usually call in a favor if necessary to grease the skids. 
 
A friend and I went to Joe’s house, many years ago, to hash out an idea: we were going to lay plans to start a risk management consulting company.  By that point in our careers, we had amassed some industry credentials and relevant experience; and we were, after all, in the middle of the booming, Reagan-era 1980s.  Anything seemed possible. 

Our plan never got off the ground.  The usual reasons – inertia, fear of the unknown, lack of time to commit, the siren call of the “safe” corporate pay package – prevailed.   I don’t remember any of the details of our so-called plan, but what I do recall vividly about our visit to Joe’s house was his three young children.  They stood out to me as some of the most polite, well-mannered, respectful kids I’d ever encountered.  They came into the room, excused themselves, and offered us something to drink.  At that point in my life, I hadn’t had much experience with children, but even I knew that they were remarkably well raised.  They were special.  Joe, it turned out, had a pretty good life outside of work.

At work, as years went by, the story unfolded differently.  Joe’s career seemed to hit a plateau at a certain point.  I knew from our conversations that for him, the thrill was definitely gone.  Younger, less experienced, sharply dressed, fast-talking, MBA-wielding “suits” had taken the reins.  There had been a change of the guard at the top, and the corporate culture followed suit.  “Lean and mean” were valued.  Loyal and competent, not so much.  Joe, and many others like him, lost ground.  Some were shown the door.    

I had, by then, moved around a bit, and no longer worked at headquarters; so my own personal experience was, thankfully, somewhat distanced from the carnage.  But we felt the ripple effects in the hinterlands nonetheless.  The entire company was changing, evolving, shedding its skin and reinventing itself, repeatedly, like a snake.

Years passed, then decades.  Joe soldiered on.  I’m sure he had opportunities to move on to greener pastures, but for reasons that I think I understand – his family, including his elderly parents who had moved into the in-law apartment in the beautiful, new house that Joe and his wife had built along the way; the “golden handcuffs” of a pension plan, 401(K) and generous (though ever less so) benefits  – he stayed.

Now, after 42 years, Joe’s moment has come.  He has much to look forward to: spending time with his wife and children, now successful adults; and with the grandchildren he adores.  A Disney trip is in the offing.  I hope, for his sake, that there will be many more.

I spoke with Joe the other day.  I asked him about his retirement party, which I didn’t want to miss.  His answer saddened, but didn’t really surprise me.  He doesn’t want one; he just wants to fade away.  It turns out that his departure, though voluntary, has left a sour taste, for reasons I’m sure he would not want me to detail here.  This is not the way a 42 year relationship should end; but, equally true, it’s par for the course these days, in the parallel universe we call corporate America.

One could take away any of a number of lessons from Joe’s story.  I choose these: 

·         Family comes first.  Always.  By the yardstick that is his family, Joe is a rich and successful man, with every reason to reflect with great pride on the last four decades. 

·         Companies, Republican platform planks to the contrary notwithstanding, are not people.  Loyalty to a company may or may not be rewarded; the outcome is random, not unlike, say, that of loyalty to a sofa.

·         Loyalty to people, especially people who, for whatever reason, rely on you, is likely to be richly rewarding.  You may shape their lives in ways you will never know.  They just might jump in front of a bus for you.

Footnote:  The title of this post, “ZIP!” is meaningless to all but three people – Joe, me, and one other friend who may or may not remember its origin.  I hope that one day, Joe will come across my blog, and I want him to recognize himself. 

Advice to the G.O.P.

Here’s a link to Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal about, well, ostensibly about the many failures of the Republican Party, but, sadly in keeping with Ms. Noonan’s recent pattern of commentary, also about what she perceives as the inherent evil that is our President, Barack Obama.  The column does feature a worthwhile, if somewhat sardonic anecdote about golfer Phil Mickelson:

http://on.wsj.com/V5W5Pm

My take on this subject (lost among the hundreds of comments tagged to Ms. Noonan’s column at wsj.com):

The first half of Ms. Noonan’s column was the best she's written in some time. I was actually lulled into thinking the entire column would be free of her usual vitriolic, personal attacks on our President. Sadly, I was wrong. Nonetheless, she makes several excellent observations about the many points of failure within the current Republican party.

Listen up: if the Republicans truly want to become relevant again, they need to focus on the inherent truths in the first half of Peggy's column. They do look like "ants on a sugar cube." Here's how they can fix that:

Move away, far away from the DOA positions they embrace on "social issues." Safe, legal abortions are here to stay. The matter is settled. Deal with it and shut up about it. Americans are overwhelmingly fed up with the epidemic of gun violence that is unique to our sick, gun-worshipping culture. Stricter gun control laws WILL be enacted. Quit hiding behind the second amendment, which any thinking person understands has nothing to do with civilians owning AK-47's to hunt down Bambi in the woods. Grow a pair and be willing to stand up to the increasingly delusional NRA, and point out exactly where they are wrong. Get your nose out of people's bedrooms and accept the fact that Gay Marriage is, and should be, a simple fact of life. Move on.

Instead, Republicans, get back to the very basic "small government" principles that are supposed to constitute the essence of your party. Focus on fiscal issues, which really are your strength, and on which you will find widespread support from an overwhelming number of tired, spent, taxed-to-death hard-working Americans. Expose the long-term dangers of our ballooning national debt in terms that the average outside-the-beltway, apolicital non-wonk can actually understand and internalize. Put forth alternatives that will work (as opposed to your current, self-destructive, obstructionist and asinine ostrich act, in which "no tax increases under any circumstances" is the answer to every question.) Acknowledge that our current interventionist foreign policies are not only unwise, but unaffordable, and that the decade-old wars against ephemeral enemies have played a big part in arriving at this place of fiscal distress. Resolve to change course.

Do these things, Republicans, and you'll win the next election in a landslide - provided you float a candidate who understands the reality of real Americans enough to know better than to proffer a $10,000 bet during a debate.

The Typing Pool

Anyone who has watched Mad Men has seen a depiction of a corporate office that more closely resembles the environment in which I began my career than that of any current-day workplace.  This is perfectly logical, as the 1960’s were, in fact, chronologically closer to the 1980’s than the 1980’s were to the present day. 

Envision, if you will, the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  Subtract the in-office liquor cabinets and trysts, the pointy push-up bras and other 60’s fashion items, and the blatant racism/sexism/homophobia.  Keep the smoking, the rotary dial phones, the wide-open, cubicle-free “bullpen,” the occasionally drunken executives and employees (who imbibed at local watering holes, not infrequently involving three hour Friday “luncheons”) and the more subtle end of the sexism spectrum; et voila, you are picturing my first job.

In those heady days preceding adoption of the personal computer and e-mail in the workplace, “typing” (the term “keyboarding” hadn’t yet been coined) was a specialized skill, generally possessed only by female clerical (sorry, office support) personnel.  My work as a newly-minted professional involved a great deal of correspondence, which I wrote the old-fashioned way, putting pen to paper.  The most informal memos went out the door in that form – in envelopes, addressed in longhand cursive.  Everything else went to the Typing Pool.

Our Typing Pool consisted of five or six women who had worked for the company as typists, probably, on average, 20-30 years each.  During times when the workload wasn’t sufficient to keep them all busy, they would read magazines or knit at their desks. This was considered perfectly acceptable. They typed, and that was all.  Such was corporate life in pre-Lean-Six-Sigma days.

As is typically the case with any team, some of the typists were, well, better than others.  We, as their captive clients, had no control over which typist handled our work.  It was the luck of the draw.

Kathy was the best. Her work was fast and accurate. Helen was… well, Helen had issues.  An older woman with a severe hearing impairment that made communication extraordinarily difficult, she had a few, shall we say, personal hygiene challenges (picture a lipstick-cheeked Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest” who smelled bad) in addition to being a shitty typist. Manuscripts that went to Helen typically came back bearing globs of liquid “White Out,” clumsy attempts at masking the small subset of mistakes that she was actually able to identify on her own.  They may as well have gone into a black hole.

Alternatives to using the Typing Pool were few.  None were sanctioned.  On rare occasions, when I really, truly needed to get something typed up quickly and accurately without risking losing my work to the black hole, I had two options: ask a personal favor of our manager’s secretary (sorry, administrative assistant) who happened to be a crack typist; or, as a last resort, find an empty desk that was equipped with an IBM Selectric typewriter (the kind with the little round letter-ball; they were state-of-the-art machines, and there were a few around for various specialized purposes) and – slowly, clumsily, carefully – type it myself.

The foregoing is an historical account, to the best of my recollection. Only the names have been changed. The story that follows is fictional.  Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The year was 2013.  At Sharon’s company, and across corporate America, constant evolutionary change had long been the norm.  This year was no exception.  The deck chairs had been rearranged yet again, this time fairly significantly, and Sharon hadn’t fared particularly well.  Her team had been disbanded, the scope of her authority curtailed.  Worse, it seemed to Sharon and her colleagues that the trigger had been pulled prematurely.  Projects were on the drawing boards, but were not yet shovel-ready.  It appeared that senior management hadn’t quite figured out what to do with these folks, and many others like them, in the interim. 

They considered taking up knitting.

Fortunately, or so it seemed, a short-term assignment came along.  The band of misfits would be busy for awhile.  It wasn’t exactly challenging or intrinsically satisfying work.  The main task was data entry – or, as it would have been called thirty years ago, “typing.”

For weeks, Sharon and her co-workers sat at their desks, copying information from printed spreadsheets into a truly god-awful, poorly designed application.  Working, as they did, in the software development industry, they recognized bad design in a heartbeat: to create a new record, they had to first create a fully-populated “shell” containing hundreds of subordinate records, then delete the ones that were not desired.

In English: imagine walking into a supermarket to buy a loaf of bread.  But the only way to accomplish that is to remove every loaf of bread from the store shelves, load up several grocery carts with all of the loaves, wheel each of the carts to the checkout line, one at a time, then, finally, select the particular loaf that you want from the cart in which it resides, and hand it to the cashier. Having done all that, you must then bring your newly purchased bread out to your car, put it in the trunk, turn around and go back into the store, and repeat the entire procedure to obtain a quart of milk.  The process was just about that inefficient, slow, and frustrating.

As a result, the short-term assignment that had originally been estimated to last a few days dragged on for weeks. The performance of the application was so poor that minutes would pass between transactions.  Sharon and the rest of the crew found themselves staring at the little “please wait” spinning-beach-ball icon, really, most of the time. Their minds wandered.  They exchanged instant messages to pass the time:  “Thank God for my iPod.”  “Shoot me now.  No, really.”  “I’ve lost the ability to blink.”

Eventually, the wheels of corporate bureaucracy began moving again.  Sharon was able to move forward with a project assignment that, while nowhere near as challenging or satisfying as her old job, at least provided her with an opportunity to think.  Her colleagues, similarly, landed on their feet in various roles, still cogs on the giant, impersonal corporate wheel, albeit positioned differently.  The Neo-Typing Pool was no more.

In 2013, virtually anyone with an ‘office job’ has access to technology and tools that would have made Don Draper’s head spin, even when sober.  Yet it has always been, and remains true that people are the ultimate determinants of the success or failure of an enterprise.  The socially acceptable, yet at times tremendously counterproductive and even harmful office behavior of the 1960s’ Mad Men; the unabashedly rife-with-waste and, by today’s standards, highly manual processes of my 1980s office job; and the demoralizing underutilization of our fictional friend Sharon in the supposedly enlightened, “lean,” highly competitive, hurry-up-and-wait world of 2013 – all share the basic fact that there is clearly, always, room for improvement.  The best of us will continue striving to bring that about, despite circumstances that may render our efforts difficult, thankless, and sometimes futile.

And one day, sooner or later, we will move on.