In the spirit of Debbie's weekend blog entry, I offer Corporate Obfuscation, where the theme is "Executive Dismissals." Two tales are true, one story is false. Results will be posted on Friday. Guess early, guess often!
Tale #1 At Company Z, when someone in middle management was going to be deposed of humanely, that person would receive a promotion to the lofty position of "Director of Special Projects" (DoSP). An email went out announcing the "exciting change," but was cagey about what the project entailed. Meanwhile, the DoSP's staff and any projects they were working on would be assimilated by the VP of Development. To facilitate his concentration on the new challenges ahead, the new DoSP was moved to the window office whose view of the parking garage was bisected by a huge concrete pillar.
Junior staff would frequent the office for the first week, congratulating the new DoSP, perhaps hoping to extract a clue what he he was working on. Three or four weeks after the congratulatory email, the DoSP was rarely seen in the office. The cogs speculated the DoSP was traveling to exciting destinations, negotiating hard fought deals, fighting dragons, etc. In reality, the DoSP was interviewing for his next position, availing himself of the photocopier after hours.
By the second or third month, a followup email announced the DoSP "had decided to pursue other opportunities. We wish him well." The office was sanitized, ready for the next "Director of Spcial Projects."
As a cog, I had very little visibility into what Ray, our Senior Vice President of Marketing, actually did. However, because I shared an office with four other people in my group, all of whom golfed, I was, metaphorically speaking, a fly on the wall. With an unlit cigar in his mouth and a putter in his hand, Ray would drop by to talk with my officemates. The topic would always gravitate to some course they all played or, if Ray needed money for the vending machine, a challenge to a round of "office golf."
One lazy summer afternoon, an email went out informing us that the marketing organization was reorganized to report to the VP of of Development... except Ray, who would be assuming a new and exciting role of Senior Vice President of Special Projects. Ray now had eighty-nine fewer reports. Three months later, Ray had left to pursue personal opportunities.
Tale #2 - I joined a small web company that "wanted to eat its own dog food." (This is a colorful way of saying "use our own product.") My job was to take a beta software product (content management) on a beta operating system (Sun Solaris) using a beta programming language (Java) and build demos running in a beta browser (Netscape), hoping to convince customers -- which included web development shops -- that they'd be better off buying our solution than implementing it themselves.
I had been doing this six months before we hired a Vice President of Sales. At the time, Dennis was the only guy in the company over thirty (I think more like 50) and with gray hair, a rarity in those days. As my role had officially morphed into field sales, I spent more time with Dennis on the road, playing the straight man when necessary, but otherwise watching and learning from the master.
Dennis and the company CEO had an acrimonious relationship, often shouting at each other behind a closed door. It was sort of awkward since the company was small, but I tried to stay out of it the best I could, focusing on giving our devleopers feedback from customers.
We had just nailed a set of deals that put us 80% over our quota and were flying back to bask in our victory. Dennis was acting stranger than usual, but maintained his usual poker face. Meanwhile, our CEO was taking a rare week off to go skiing. Everything was dandy.
The next morning, the CEO calls in from the lift and fires Dennis, effective immediately.
Tale #3: I was hired onto Company G, which had been acquired by Company X (on the east coast) a few months prior. Just before the acquisition, the CEO of Company G cast a "+1 promotion" spell, and everybody was bumped up a notch up the career ladder. My manager, formerly the marketing collateral person, was now the VP of Marketing.
Both companies had weird products whose descriptions are unimportant now that the statute of limitations has passed, but we (Company G) were supposed to be functioning as an independent subsidiary. My job was to support Company G's field sales, providing all of the necessary technical and marketing wizardry they'd need to close sales.
Because we had a lot of financial customers with sensitive data, we weren't legally permitted to use our production environment for demonstrations. As our salespeople soon found out, customers are unlikely to drop big chunks of recurring revenue without seeing the product demonstrated. Thus, my first task was to build an online demonstration environment. For technical reasons, this required multiple machines.
My manager, the green VP of Marketing, did not have the forethought to budget anything outside of her familiar world of collateral and direct mail campaigns. Worse, she went on maternity leave my third week there. The interim person she hired quit after two days.
Although not having to report to a boss or write status reports would seem to be my ideal working environment, the fact remained that I had neither machines nor budget with which to buy them. I cornered two other VPs, but each weaseled out a back door previously unknown to me. Calls to the mothership on the east coast were equally fruitless: I could hear crickets chirping.
The sales critters were starting to act like caged wolves. I had an epiphany: there were several broken computer strewn about the office. I reasoned that they probably weren't totally broken, and odds are I could piece them together and build two or three machines out of it.
While I was playing electrical engineer, another interim VP of Marketing was hired. She initially started off with the right mindset, and found a way to take credit for my handiwork in conjuring a demo environment out of nothing. Soon, she was out of the office a lot, ostensibily at Company X "discussing strategy." I had jokingly speculated she was "lobbying for a full time job." One day, I happened to be on the phone with someone from Company X, and apparently they'd never heard of her.
The next week, Hallowe'en, it turned out, the Vice President of Human Resources, Company X, flew in and did her best Grim Reaper impersonation. I was bossless again. However, I had also been interviewing, because this company was obviously doomed.
Tale #1 At Company Z, when someone in middle management was going to be deposed of humanely, that person would receive a promotion to the lofty position of "Director of Special Projects" (DoSP). An email went out announcing the "exciting change," but was cagey about what the project entailed. Meanwhile, the DoSP's staff and any projects they were working on would be assimilated by the VP of Development. To facilitate his concentration on the new challenges ahead, the new DoSP was moved to the window office whose view of the parking garage was bisected by a huge concrete pillar.
Junior staff would frequent the office for the first week, congratulating the new DoSP, perhaps hoping to extract a clue what he he was working on. Three or four weeks after the congratulatory email, the DoSP was rarely seen in the office. The cogs speculated the DoSP was traveling to exciting destinations, negotiating hard fought deals, fighting dragons, etc. In reality, the DoSP was interviewing for his next position, availing himself of the photocopier after hours.
By the second or third month, a followup email announced the DoSP "had decided to pursue other opportunities. We wish him well." The office was sanitized, ready for the next "Director of Spcial Projects."
As a cog, I had very little visibility into what Ray, our Senior Vice President of Marketing, actually did. However, because I shared an office with four other people in my group, all of whom golfed, I was, metaphorically speaking, a fly on the wall. With an unlit cigar in his mouth and a putter in his hand, Ray would drop by to talk with my officemates. The topic would always gravitate to some course they all played or, if Ray needed money for the vending machine, a challenge to a round of "office golf."
One lazy summer afternoon, an email went out informing us that the marketing organization was reorganized to report to the VP of of Development... except Ray, who would be assuming a new and exciting role of Senior Vice President of Special Projects. Ray now had eighty-nine fewer reports. Three months later, Ray had left to pursue personal opportunities.
Tale #2 - I joined a small web company that "wanted to eat its own dog food." (This is a colorful way of saying "use our own product.") My job was to take a beta software product (content management) on a beta operating system (Sun Solaris) using a beta programming language (Java) and build demos running in a beta browser (Netscape), hoping to convince customers -- which included web development shops -- that they'd be better off buying our solution than implementing it themselves.
I had been doing this six months before we hired a Vice President of Sales. At the time, Dennis was the only guy in the company over thirty (I think more like 50) and with gray hair, a rarity in those days. As my role had officially morphed into field sales, I spent more time with Dennis on the road, playing the straight man when necessary, but otherwise watching and learning from the master.
Dennis and the company CEO had an acrimonious relationship, often shouting at each other behind a closed door. It was sort of awkward since the company was small, but I tried to stay out of it the best I could, focusing on giving our devleopers feedback from customers.
We had just nailed a set of deals that put us 80% over our quota and were flying back to bask in our victory. Dennis was acting stranger than usual, but maintained his usual poker face. Meanwhile, our CEO was taking a rare week off to go skiing. Everything was dandy.
The next morning, the CEO calls in from the lift and fires Dennis, effective immediately.
Tale #3: I was hired onto Company G, which had been acquired by Company X (on the east coast) a few months prior. Just before the acquisition, the CEO of Company G cast a "+1 promotion" spell, and everybody was bumped up a notch up the career ladder. My manager, formerly the marketing collateral person, was now the VP of Marketing.
Both companies had weird products whose descriptions are unimportant now that the statute of limitations has passed, but we (Company G) were supposed to be functioning as an independent subsidiary. My job was to support Company G's field sales, providing all of the necessary technical and marketing wizardry they'd need to close sales.
Because we had a lot of financial customers with sensitive data, we weren't legally permitted to use our production environment for demonstrations. As our salespeople soon found out, customers are unlikely to drop big chunks of recurring revenue without seeing the product demonstrated. Thus, my first task was to build an online demonstration environment. For technical reasons, this required multiple machines.
My manager, the green VP of Marketing, did not have the forethought to budget anything outside of her familiar world of collateral and direct mail campaigns. Worse, she went on maternity leave my third week there. The interim person she hired quit after two days.
Although not having to report to a boss or write status reports would seem to be my ideal working environment, the fact remained that I had neither machines nor budget with which to buy them. I cornered two other VPs, but each weaseled out a back door previously unknown to me. Calls to the mothership on the east coast were equally fruitless: I could hear crickets chirping.
The sales critters were starting to act like caged wolves. I had an epiphany: there were several broken computer strewn about the office. I reasoned that they probably weren't totally broken, and odds are I could piece them together and build two or three machines out of it.
While I was playing electrical engineer, another interim VP of Marketing was hired. She initially started off with the right mindset, and found a way to take credit for my handiwork in conjuring a demo environment out of nothing. Soon, she was out of the office a lot, ostensibily at Company X "discussing strategy." I had jokingly speculated she was "lobbying for a full time job." One day, I happened to be on the phone with someone from Company X, and apparently they'd never heard of her.
The next week, Hallowe'en, it turned out, the Vice President of Human Resources, Company X, flew in and did her best Grim Reaper impersonation. I was bossless again. However, I had also been interviewing, because this company was obviously doomed.
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