My new job

Two friends of mine retired recently in their early 50’s. One was a long timer with Apple. The other spent two decades at HP. I was sitting next to one of them at breakfast Saturday and I mentioned that I had heard that he had taken the alternative (retired).

He smiled. “I worked for money,” he said. “I have enough now.”

I asked him if he could imagine consulting or contracting. His face darkened.

“No,” he said succinctly. It was the same “no” I had uttered at lunch Friday.

I remembered my chance to retire in my mid 50’s after cashing in a whole bunch of stock after the company I was working at went public. You have to wait 6 months but then you are free to sell. I sold but after 9 months of doing little or nothing, I was lured back in with part-time consulting work that lead to full-time contracting work. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I did. But it was never-ending. It went on and on and finally I ended up going back inside for 15 months and after that still did some more consulting until I drew the line in the sand and said “no more”.

No More…

I am a runner again. http://siliconvalleywarrior.blogspot.com/

Actually I have been a runner for 44 years with 25 years of competition. I stopped racing in 1995 but never stopped running. I just stopped training.  But now I am back at it trying to reach respectability in my age group. This is my new job.

I am doing it for free. Who would pay me anyway?

Any other work is a million dollar job. You’ll have to pay me a million dollars (50% up front) for me to do it.

I am beginning to re-associate myself with the running community. It is strange to be going back there. Some of my closest friends coach high school cross country in the fall and track during the spring. They have made it their full-time job. I help one of them part time but it will not be my vocation. At best it is my avocation.

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Be The Hunter

When I am hunting for my next gig, I make it my business to know what jobs are moving in the job marketplace. Not some of them. If possible, all of them. Since most jobs are filled through internal referrals, only a small number are posted on job boards or company websites.

What you see is perhaps 20-30% of what is actually open.

More mature companies do post jobs but by the time zoo animals see them, the jobs already have a viable candidate. Someone has already gotten there before you did.

“That’s not fair!” I have heard people (zoo animals) shout in indignation.

While you were worrying about what was fair, some job hunter was already moving through the tall grass of the veld.

Since this is called a job HUNT then it must actually be like real hunting.  You know where the game a actually tries to evade the hunter.

Okay.

Fairness isn’t part of it and I am not talking about race, religion and gender. I am talking about hunting skills.

During World War One (the Great War), pilots only received credit for knocking down an enemy plane if it was witnessed by either another pilot or friendly troops on the ground. Frank Luke shot down a plane and almost didn’t get credit for it. After that he started to leave notes saying that he was going to torch observation balloons. Back in the Great War shooting down balloons counted as a kill because they were so difficult to bring down. Anyway, Frank got the hang of the game. It wasn’t fair. So he played by the rule of making sure people saw him shoot down what he said he was going to shoot down. It was about the only rule he played by and he was shot down within about two weeks of his first kill. By then he had shot down 14 balloons and 4 enemy planes.

Frank Luke 1897-1918

Frank understood the game right to the bitter end. His plane went down in a small French town. He was still alive. he tumbled out of his craft and went down to a creek to scoop some water up for his parched throat. German infantrymen swarmed the area yelling for him to surrender.

“Come and get me coppers!”

Well, he didn’t actually say that but he didn’t surrender either. He shot it out until he was hit by a bullet which killed him.

The point being, if you are on a job hunt, BE THE HUNTER! No one is going to release birds right in front of you so you can shoot them down in large masses a la Dick Cheney.

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My first job out of college

My first job right out of college in 1967 was with 3M. Last year they did 27 Billion in world-wide sales.  I worked in the Microfilm reader division in Redwood City. Yes, it was back in the days when microfilm was the method of storing and transmitting data. Very crude by today’s standards but state of the art back then.

You know, it’s funny. The building is still there. It’s a car dealership these days. But it is the same building.

Every mistake a person could make, I made in my first job. First of all I got it through an employment agency. Back then you had to give one-third of your first three months salary back to the agency.  I figured if I was there for several years (yeah! right) I would more than make back the agency fee.

My role was in management training starting with the order desk. The guy who had the job before me was leaving with only a days notice. So training, such as it was, was almost nil.

In my first month I had made several critical mistakes.

I made a great many errors on order sheets. Customers would call in, place an order, I would fill out the sheet and send it in an overnight pouch to the Santa Clara Warehouse. My error rate was something like 12%. In out division we were dead last.

Secondly, I refused the homosexual advances of our assistant manager who used to call me “ducky”. He liked to give me neck rubs until I told him to stop. Then he became my enemy and made a big point of making sure that I had my nose rubbed in that high error rate. The fact that I had almost no training didn’t count. I was quickly on my own.

After the first month I befriended the order desk guy for the nearby microfiche office (right next door) and he helped me to get things right. I kept track of my error rate and knew by the end of the second month that I was down around 3% which would put me in the top of the division. But Ducky didn’t come to my office and show me the report. He said that it was unimportant.

By this time I had found out that we had customers who were not getting their orders in a timely manner. Some were waiting for bulbs for their readers and other were waiting for microfilm. No bulb, no film, no ability to use our products.  I found out that we had demo bulbs and film in our storage closet. The sales guys used it. I went to several of the sales guys and asked if I could use some of the supply to help our customers. I could get the sales guys to take it to their customers and then replace the inventory by ordering it from the warehouse.

My God, you would have thought I had an affair the general manager’s  wife. He went ballistic as did Ducky. I explained that several key customers including United Airlines were unable to use their equipment and that they were thinking of changing providers.

No good. I was told not to do it again.

I was now in my third month on the job. The sales guys loved me and Ducky and my boss were not saying good morning to me anymore. I went home and related the events to my father who had years of business experience.

“What’s going to happen, Dad?” I asked.

He minced no words even though he was as kind about as he could be.

“You’re going to get fired,” he said. “So you have a choice. Leave now and stick it to them or stay and go through the experience. It’s good to get fired at least once. It makes you tougher.”

Little did I or my Dad know I would get fired 2-3 more times in my career.

So every day I went to work, did my job, further lowered my error rate down to below 1% and expected to get fired.

One day my boss called me in and told me that it wasn’t working out. I stood up shook his hand and said I would clear out my desk. he looked at me pleadingly.

“Would stay for a week and train the new guy?”

“Oh, so he won;t have to go through what I experienced I said with a laugh?”

I think he believed I was about to shove his job up his ass. But I didn’t. I said sure.

So I stayed a week. The sales people went ballistic  over my termination. The head of purchasing from United called me and offered me a job. I asked everyone to stand down.

“I appreciate your support but it is best I leave.”

I went quietly into that final Friday evening.

Even my father told me that I had handled it in a classy manner.

A year later I was out having pizza and ran into one of the salesmen who had stormed the GM’s office insisting that I be kept on. he was thew sales guy who had the United Airlines account.

He couldn’t remember who I was at first.

“Oh, yeah,” he said as some light came on in his brain. “You’re that guy who really screwed up.” As he went on I realized that he was talking about one of the guys who came after me but it made no difference. He hadn’t really remembered me at all. And after all, in a manner I had screwed up. Before I had decided to circumvent the system I should have chatted with the GM. But I would have lost anyway. Rejecting Ducky put me down for the count.

But I got one big bonus from the experience. After that I was never afraid of getting fired. My Dad was right. You had to go through it once (or twice or three times). It took away the fear.

Location of my first real job

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Seated at the table

A friend of mine is losing a job. Not because he wasn’t the guy. He was the guy. He was the right guy but he had a boss whose brain was the size of a good hard-boiled egg. His boss like the idea of HR more than understanding what HR could do for their company. But let’s face it. No one is really glad to see HR show up. I have had clients who later told me that they never wanted HR in their culture. It was part of their plan.

“We’ll never need HR because we will treat out people right,” was a common refrain. Of course they might add snidely that they hated HR is whatever company they had worked at in the past and that was a big reason too.

So it’s always nice if the manager (using a baseball analogy) tells the relief pitcher that they never liked the idea relief pitchers as they hand them the ball and ask them to get the hell out out of a bases loaded, no one out,  jam.

So back to my friend. he told me that hearing that he was the right person from others in the company hurts worse than the pain of his bad relationship with his pin-headed boss. I shot back that it was important not to care too much about stuff like that. The people who do get you will never put you in that position.

Self worth is exactly that. How does you value you. Not how others value you. I know i am being somewhat of a price about it but looking to others for validation is the quickest way into the box canyon of co-dependent behavior. I am not against success and recognition but HR people don’t often get those kudos. IMHO we are just stronger without the need for it.

I have another colleague who doesn’t get this as they reel from one company to another looking  to be accepted at the table of power. Look, whether you are at the table eating with the big boys (and girls) or you are a waiter. Either is okay but understand that you limit yourself by your behavior. You can’t demand that you be included.

“You are disrespecting!” me an employee once yelled at me. And that terminology caused me to lose all respect for the person.

“What, are you some union shop steward?” I shot back.

He had consigned himself to the scrap-heap. Later on I sent him there (making sure he had another job lined up first). He went down the same road in the next place and the CEO took him aside and told him to do an attitude change or he was history.

So my reeling comrade calls themselves top-notch and why doesn’t everyone get it. First of all why do they have to tell me their tops (they aren’t by the way) and why would they need to advertise their self validation?

The best HR people just do what is best for the company. They work hard and they help employees and managers and they act as stewards over the corporate realm. And if they are really smart, they get to that stratospheric  level of relationships in the company that allows them to influence change where it benefits the company. So they have courage too.

But they validate from within.

Most HR people are not really seated at the table plus the table is usually too big for them.

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The Jackal is Hunting

The Jackal is hunting. He means business. He knows how to find jobs. Like me, it is his core skill. His persistence is world class. Others try to calibrate their searches focusing on their resume and interviewing skills. That’s fine if it doesn’t slow you down.

The Jackal is different.He calibrates while he moves.

There will be blood.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Byron

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QUIT TALKING ABOUT IT! WE’RE BORED ALREADY!

Colleagues come to me all the time about new jobs. They are either out of work or they are in some dead end position in a company where their chances of going anywhere is nil. I have one friend who has been “promoted” 3-4 times but his title and salary never change.  He stayed at his first company way too long (17 years) and now has overstayed the time that his career can ill afford, in his second company. He keeps talking about leaving but that has gone on for years. He can’t jab and thrust. He is monolithic moving around the center of the fight ring throwing out slow jabs, covering up and taking a great many blows to his head and body. The other day he asked my opinion of a company he might like to work at. I had to hold back. It was an old school company, like the one in which he presently resides.

I had to hold back and not say the words.

Going to this new place was like marrying someone you didn’t find attractive and didn’t care about just so you could say you were married.

But this guy is a pure zoo animal. Works hard, toes the corporate line and secretly sizzles with anger and resentment.

He is a flyer and a damn good one too. But he can cross continents more easily than he can cross from one job to another.

I wanted to tell him to stop looking in the same old places for supposedly new jobs. They aren’t new at all. They are just another edition of where he already is at. Get a real job hunt going, I wanted to tell him. QUIT TALKING ABOUT IT! WE’RE BORED ALREADY!

But I kept quiet. You can’t tell zoo animals how to hunt. The concept is foreign to them.

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I Move In Between Thoughts

You will know if your job hunt is being effective by noticing the following.

1. You will feel humiliated by the fact that you are having to ask people for help

2. You will feel angry that you were ever put in this situation even if there is little or nothing you could have done about it.

3. You will eventually come to enjoy the process. The hunt should become the end product. The very thrill of it. Once you have brought down your prey (gotten a job) you will almost regret the end of the hunt itself.

Most people never get passed the first two. They feel unworthy and angry and fed up. Give them a million dollars and they would abandon the job search process altogether, so painful do they find it. But to be effective you have to get past humiliation and anger. But you have to go through it to experience what it feels like. Forget your pride. Just go through it.

If you can accept that humiliation and anger can be productively channeled into fuel for the hunt (the job search) you will have overcome one of the great barriers in finding work.

I have pretty much moved past the first two steps many years and many jobs ago. I go right to the hunt because I understand what it is. But that’s because I was laid off 4 times, fired twice and often got ants in my pants to move just to see what was over the next hill.  A good batter in baseball will get a hit maybe one out of three times they come to the plate. The other two times they go back to the dugout and sit down. You have to be okay with the process or the two out of three times you fail, will come to dominate your thinking.

Now me? I ‘ll do whatever it takes to get on base. I am not a power hitter but I am fast and so I use that as my weapon while my competition is thinking about their next move. I move in between thoughts. When you are mobile as I, you don’t have much choice.

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Doormats-R-Us

When I retired last year, I think I should have gone to some remote part of the mountains to really allow myself to transition from the world that was to the world that is.

But I didn’t and stupidly I assumed that my former colleagues would really understand my wish to be free from the career war that I had spent 33 years struggling in on a daily basis.

Except for a few friends, most of my former co-workers never learned or were really interested in learning from my experiences. They preferred the same repetition of stupidity that I went through over and over with a few exceptions. I really didn’t learn very well from those that warned me. It wasn’t always a warning where someone sat me down and said, “Don;t be a door mat.” Usually it was something I observed but didn’t really internalize.  Maybe purposely did not internalize.

Scenario….

In 1984 we hired a treasurer at a real estate investment company that I was working at. In one of his first staff meetings with the CEO, he was tongue lashed for something that he not only was not responsible for but that should have been handled in private. The next day he came into work and told me that he had informed the CFO that he was leaving. He didn’t have another job but he wasn’t interested in a transition. By the end of the day he was gone. He had simply said, “I don’t have  to put up with people treating me this way. Once they know they have you, they do it over and over again.”

Another finance consultant who knew all about the incident was approached as a possible back fill for the departed treasurer. He politely declined.

He told me privately, “The reason I am a consultant is so that I don’t get caught up in the politics.”

As I bounced along in my so-called career I was “had” many times and always tried to stick it out. Finally, unable to let myself off the hook, I went out and made some significant money with a start-up. Then and only then was I able to give myself the luxury of saying no. Looking back, I realize what a weenie I was. Most of my colleagues who have had bad job experiences stayed in their too and have paid the price.

They became doormats.

Eventually you begin to crave the distinct taste of shoe leather.

The price of courage is peace of mind.

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Next…..

Pursuit is the key to a successful battle. Great generals understand this. once you have the enemy running, keep ’em running so that they can’t regroup.

So the US takes down Bin Laden or Ben Layden as Donald Rumsfeld said the other evening on some talk show.

Now they have to go get the next number one guy in Al Qaeda. Just choose someone. maybe this guy in Yemen. Okay, you are it. We’re coming after you. Whatever it takes. Just go get them and then choose the next number one and go after him. Don’t stop until none of them are left of they cry uncle.

And as long as we are in Afghanistan we need to go into Waziristan and make life all hell for anyone who makes war on US soldiers. Oh, it’s in Pakistan? Too bad. We’re going anyway.

I hate war but half wars are worse. More soldiers (our soldiers) die that way.

Now we can just get the heck out (my first vote) but if we are staying then let’s actually try to win this thing. It will be terrible for the tribes people especially the innocent ones but that’s the breaks if they harbor our enemies.

Some of the Bin Laden family is complaining about the assassination of Osama.

Yes? Hello!

What seems to be the problem? If he wanted a fair trial he should have given up. Surrendered. Instead he sat in his holy fortress (well, a villa actually) and planned more evil things.

Of course we must ignore the Bin Laden’s. They should have told their father not to kill 3,000 people on 9-11.  Anyway, they are not important. They wear western clothes and enjoy the western way of life.

Here is one of Bin Laden’s sons who lives in the UK. Looks like he is really committed to the Middle East, doesn’t he? He feels his father didn’t get a fair shake.

Yeah..Right…

We need to get out of the Middle East. We have no present business there except for the sickening strategy of the likes of Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney and Rice.  The closest thing we have to real war criminals. Instead they show up on TV pontificating their sordid views.

But if we are going to remain there we need to take on number 2 and Waziristan. Heck, we can take the Pakistani’s with us. A joint effort. But the key is striking hard and continuously until the place is bombed back into the stone age. Oh, wait. That won’t work because they are already living at a stone age level.

Or we can get out.

That’s my vote.

Get out.

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The Secret of Success

Mark Caine, who wrote The S Man in 1960 had a different view of success.

The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.

Several times earlier this year I had a chance to do some work at Facebook. I was not working directly for the company but for a friend who was putting together some 3rd party stuff for them.

The building (soon to move) is on Page Mill right near El Camino Real in Palo Alto. If you want a lawyer you can literally turn left skip across the street and there is legal city. Palo Alto Square has several big high rises chocked full of lawyers.

But back to Facebook. The first thing that hit me was the vastness of the parking lot. Each time I came there I ended up parking somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole and had to trudge to the main entrance. Not a big problem. I am in decent shape but still, if ti were raining, you would need a change of clothes.

The building lobby was pretty standard. Nothing that didn’t look like a thousand other lobbies I have traversed on my way to some important task.  But once you pass though the glass door portals everything changes. The interior resembles a geek’s vision of the way corporations should design themselves.

In short while innovative it also had that HEY, LET’S WORK ALL NIGHT AND NEVER GO HOME look plastered all over everything.

Google has that look. So did Electronic Arts when I went to work there back in early 1989.

Let’s never have to leave.

Let’s be a GEEK even if we really are not!

And in a strange way, I get it.

It’s a cult. So is Google (or Zoogle as I call it) and so was Electronic Arts (EA) before some adults showed up to run the company. In the case of EA long time employees were always telling me that I should have been the HR guy in the years before i showed up. Something like 185 or 1986. I would have fit in better. They must have been right because I never fit into the quasi adult culture that was beginning to pervade the pace but then I didn’t fit into the  Geek-teenie booper let’s all go to Disneyland and then lay off ten people to pay for it culture that had existed before I showed up. I didn’t accomplish much while I was EA. But I stopped the annual layoff (think Logan’s Run) as a way to deal with performance problems activities. I don’t mind laying  folks off but no one understood why or how people were being chosen to stand in front of the death squad.  So every January this pervading fear would snake its way through the company cubicles suddenly grasping a seemingly innocent employee and hurling them into the darkness.

Why me meant nothing there. Not back then. Because the children had to play and playing couldn’t be interrupted by Why me.

But I stopped that part of the EA cult.

In any case, Facebook is a cult. Yes, it is a successful company as is Google. But to work within the confines of either company means that you have to buy into the culture. Every company has a culture but only some are a cult. And so back to my original Mark Caine quote.

The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.

But in these places you must  embrace the environment to be accepted and valued (and even then if they don’t like you they will still find a way to boot you through that same lobby door).

To be accepted you must sublimate that innovative core of your personality. The one that makes you separate and different. If you don’t care about being different then by all means rush to that same lobby to fill out the vaunted application or, what the hell, just leave your resume to be filed for future job openings.

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