Robbery or Flattery

I'm trying to figure out which one of these situations I am experiencing...

Five months ago I was catching a flight to California and I looked up to see a National-level executive from my firm, Norm Thompson, standing in line to get on the same plane. This guy has always taken a personal interest in me and was involved in the decision to hire me and put me in my current position, but he often seems to be full to the brim with BS (business slyness).

On top of that, our company employs quite a bit of posturing and revisionist history which conjures up the feeling of living through the novel "1984". Sometimes the government changes the objective for the country, and whoever the enemy turns out to be this week, you are supposed to fervently oppose and hate them. If it happens to change to the exact opposite situation tomorrow, you aren't even supposed to question the sudden change in direction, and the fervency of your allegiance shouldn't wane. (I LOVE BIG BROTHER!--Right before the bullet smacks you in the back of the head...)

Aside: Words which were looked up in the previous paragraph (fervency, allegiance, wane. Misspelled (<--which I also ironically got wrong):allegiance (allegience), wane (wain), and probably should have used "fervor") Looked up in a dictionary which I received from one of my friend's mom on June 4, 1988, for graduation and for which I never wrote a thank you note because I'm an ungrateful a-hole who forgot this one gift because she gave it to me while I was at work at a grocery store. Another note on this very generous woman--she was my mother's roommate in the hospital when my brother Don was born, and my mom totally ripped her a new one because she woke up at 4:00 AM and started packing to leave, which woke my mom up...then, 10 years later, we moved to a new neighborhood and I became friends with her other son, who was my age. Perpetually awkward. Funny. Serendipity (not looked up)).

I learned the corporate culture immediately: I was given a computer loaded with a report generation program that was the "baby" of Norm Thompson--apparently he was the one who commissioned the writing of this software (rumored to have been done by a buddy of his), which is definitely the most user-unfriendly piece of junk I've ever been cursed to work with, and sold the idea to our corporate leadership. And all employees have to use it about 5-10 times per week. So, after a couple of weeks of trying to get it to work and having it crash unpredictably, print crazy lines instead of my reports, and generate random numbers, incorrectly add columns (!), and several other untold errors, I mentioned to Norm (not knowing his allegiance to the software), that the software didn't seem to be very refined. He responded, "Well, the people that tend to have problems with it are people who are relatively uneducated when it comes to computers." OUCH!

Since I really knew that that wasn't true in my case, I decided to lay low on the topic--I was the new guy, actually the "golden boy" because I was successful almost immediately, so I wasn't in a rush to trade in my bon-bons and roses to fight the good fight for the lost cause. In our weak underground opposition to "the virus" (Mike D.'s nickname for the software), I've even seen fellow employees go out in frustration and find off-the-shelf report generation software that does a beautiful job, only to be viciously shot down and insulted.

I guess I should have gotten a clue to the corporate culture, but I tend to be sympathetic to management's need to put up a positive front. People make mistakes, and employees tend to have lots of fun highlighting these mistakes. But those of us with a memory kind of resent that revisionist history nonsense.

Just so you know...We employees remember when we are told "The Company is instituting a new bonus program in April", and when we ask when it doesn't happen, we resent being told by you: "We said we might 'change things' in April"... When we are hired, we assume we are being told the truth when you say, "your commission rate is xx", and get very confused when add it up and it turns out to be xx minus 1/2 percent, and it bugs us...

Back to the flight to California.

So Norm somehow got the guy sitting next to him on the aisle seat of the exit row to trade me for my middle seat in the sardine-can row--I don't know if he used that date-rape drug or what to get this guy to comply with moving, but I wouldn't have ever changed if I were him...During the flight, Norm asked me if I could share any ideas I had about our company's direction, and what my ideal job would be.

I saw it as a great opportunity to voice some issues that I had been thinking over for several months, and over about 30 minutes, with Norm's encouragement, I laid out a very constructive approach to revamping our company's design. Here it is in a nutshell:

Our company doesn't have a very good continuity from our engineering/manufacturing level through to the sales and support system. That's because most of the engineers speak Japanese and don't care what Americans think about what should be manufactured. And on our side, we often discount things that engineers build into our products as "uninformed" and not representative of the needs of the market (this is a classic dilemma in manufacturing). My idea was to create a liaison position that is a focal point of feedback from the US to the factory. The second and most critical function is to critically analyze all of the manufactured products and converge the technical and marketing data into one source of information tailored for each product, assimilating this into the market by presenting competitive selling techniques for each product's market, and working hands on with reps to make sure that we have a systematic model for selling each product in the line.

I'm sure this appears logical, but, unfortunately, this resource currently doesn't exist within our company. In fact, every member of the management team comes from the sales field, and there is a noticeable, almost superstitious de-emphasis on training. Our means of coaching new employees is to turn them loose in the territory after a couple of days of "ride-along" with a veteran salesperson (I know this because I'm the guy they ride with about 75% of the time). A coordinated training plan just seems to be too much of an investment, but my pitch to Norm was that our company can't afford to NOT consider it much longer--I thought that a training program with clearly defined goals and concepts that need to be mastered would enable us to "weed out" people that aren't technically proficient, which, unbelievably, we are unable to do at this point.

Also, by creating this training network, a communication system would be set up within the company that would provide a means of quick communication of product and competitive data throughout the company. Additionally, there is little accountability for production, daily activity, accuracy of information--there's a little too much autonomy, and many of us work from home with no supervision (I know someone who went on vacation for 10 days without telling anyone...). The weakness to this design is that, if someone is incompetent or even negligent, they can get away with it for years before the documentation process even begins. I mentioned to Norm that I would institute a subtle feedback system where people should be reporting their weekly activity via a short report, just to provide at least a semblance of accountability (I felt that the complete lack of accountability is dangerous because some people interpret this as "the company doesn't care if we work or not"). Revisionist history explanation: "we put a lot of trust in our employees to do their job correctly. We never want to micro-manage."

This liaison position requires someone with excellent communication skills and technical knowledge, and the ability to coordinate a team. I mentioned a guy named Dave, who is an excellent teacher with many years' experience, but who needs a little direction to be more effective at training. I told him that I would make him my right hand man and show him some techniques that I learned as the supervisor of a training department for several years at another company. One of the first things that I did when I got my current job was to write my own training program (written on the plane on the way to my interview)--I showed it to my manager and got his approval--it actually made the company accountable to ME, because when I got to the next level of training, I would call my manager and say "I'm at the point of my training schedule where I am supposed to learn about X. Can I attend the conference next month where this is highlighted?" As a direct result of this, I was fully trained in the product line in a record 9 months--the process generally takes 12-24 months for most employees.

After I laid this plan out to Norm, a very novel, aggressive proposal in light of our conservative corporate climate, he seemed overwhelmed. He smiled very big and shook my hand and complimented me on my ideas. I've run into him 4 or 5 times since then, and he has been very friendly, but didn't mention my ideas again.

Two weeks ago, our company announced a positive new step: The creation of a National Training Department headed by...Dave. Practically every idea, down to the weekly activity report, was instituted in one way or another.

I'm wondering if I should be flattered or pissed off. Dave's new position wouldn't have been a promotion to me, but it would have been nice to have the right of first refusal, or at the very least some type of notification that they are going to use my plan. It may have kept me out of trouble, though, because if Norm had told me that "this was the plan all along--I'm sure it was so obvious that we needed to do this that you just figured out what we were doing-it's been in the works for years..."-I would have had to punch him in the nose.

The bad part about this is that it is going to be a haphazard patchwork of my ideas instituted badly, imposed upon Dave, with the possibility of fading into beauracratic oblivion and ineffectiveness. The architect of the system, the champion, was snubbed. But at least I get a front-row seat to the train wreck.

I've been robbed! But at least it means that I had something valuable to begin with...