I have a theory about the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve weren’t cast out ..they blew it up themselves. When I first arrived in Santa Barbara, I felt like a kid at summer camp. Our offices were within walking distance to the beach ..or the university. I found that I could develop computing systems in my head while sitting on the bluffs overlooking the ocean. I had a talented group of co-workers ..and an account manager named Sherry who was our best promoter. We were at the top of our game ..none of the other consulting groups won as many contracts ..or contributed as much to the revenue stream. Nobody screwed with us. I went out on medical leave in 1999. While I was gone, Sherry retired to Arizona to take care of her ailing husband. With her gone, people from headquarters saw a need to take-charge. They stepped into a foreign culture. They brought in a manager named Pete. The ‘talent’ bailed. Pete immediately set out to demolish our relationship with local customers. Pretty soon they were complaining to headquarters that they were not getting the service they were accustomed to. When I returned in 2000, headquarters asked me to step-in and help since I was the only one left after the exodus. I talked to the customers. They told me they had awarded us contracts worth millions of dollars, and were waiting on bids for several more. They said it felt as if their requests had fallen into a black hole. They were frustrated. So I sat down with Pete, but he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I started thumbing through a stack of official-looking folders on his conference table ..saw one that said ‘Supply chain link’ and went “Hey Pete ..here they are ..!?” He said he had no idea what they were asking for, so he wasn’t about to take any chances assigning them to someone. He also didn’t like me snooping around ..so he handed me a virtual ‘broom’ and told me to get busy. Pretty soon I was bumping into other people sweeping a virtual floor. I asked Pete why everybody was sweeping the floor. I got swept up into a ‘smart-ass remark investigation’. Ahhh, the wheel had turned and paradise was gone. I stuck around and met some of the new people ..then ducked-out. Shortly after that, CSC lost several big accounts and were forced to shutdown the Santa Barbara branch. Ironically, they put Pete in charge of dismantling everything ..including his job. He actually called me up at home one day to ask me how to do that. I just said good luck. I felt we had everything we needed ..and blew it up.
2 comments:
It's amazing. Loved the story. Too true. I've been told it's the age of incompetence. Just heard yesterday that a important department in my company was disamanteled and outsourced to enable one of the bosses to promote someone he was sleeping with to take the place of those who knew how to do the job...it still haunts the company profitabilty years late...It's much easier to work as an authority over people who don't know what they are doing from a power standpoint...everything suffers except the main man's egos. How do these guys get the lead? Most of the time , it seems to be "Image". My former boss says it take an economic slow down before companies call in the "Old gray hairs" (people with experience who know what they are doing.) Ah, well. To quote an old Jackson Brown song
"Sometimes it's what you look like not who you are..."
reminds me of the law of thirds ..in any group of people, one third knows what to do and cares enough to do it ..one third knows what to do but doesn’t care ..and the other third doesn’t know and doesn’t care. I just wish they weren’t so malicious about it
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