I don't ask for much, but I want my life at Greenbrier Parkway to be worth something and so -- thanks to a "going away kegger" a few nights ago -- I am following through with a request to find a url or pdf to resurrect the lore of the Summer of '04.
Working for a large company wasn't what I thought it would be. The lore of opportunity — quarterly bonuses, affordable insurance, mentors and nice chairs — seemed to have been lost under the haze of textured acoustic ceiling tiles.
After three years of trying my best to act professional and pretending to appreciate a good reengineering when I saw one, I left for a family-owned business where my first companywide meeting was listening to a raised voice across the room. The president wanted to know whose upside down chimichanga landed in his tuna salad.
By the time I realized my stock options were not going to make me rich, my already big-company employer got six times bigger overnight. It was acquired by an entity owned by an international power located somewhere across the Atlantic.
Whatever the company gained in size, it lost in personality.
After the purchase and a period of transition that will always continue to transition, the local company culture — the DNA behind decision making, communication, reward and recognition, and what people say during happy hour — was altered just enough to make me wonder if I could keep ignoring the mumbling in my brain.
Efforts to blend company cultures were mostly communicated by monthly e-mails supposedly written by a president and CEO I'll call "Bert," who worked 1,000 miles away. Bert wrote about how great it was to be part of a $1 billion technology company.
He thanked and congratulated us. He assured us our contributions were adding up. No matter how meticulously crafted Bert's passages appeared, they never delivered the brevity I was looking for: "OK look, shareholders own me. No layoffs for now. Can't say more than that."
Without getting into the details of what I think about public companies' end-around approach to creating long-term value, Bert’s attempts at keeping us in-the-know magnified the disconnect between what was happening in the board room and what was going on inside the head of a marketing analyst clicking between a project Gantt chart and monster.com.
I was patient. For a while, I took comfort in knowing I wasn't a number. I was a semi-colon. I was a piece of punctuation few people knew how to use.
My post-acquisition role reminded me of a friend who answered phones while temping for a Spanish-language newspaper years ago. He'd answer, "Welcome to Mundo Hispánico, how may I direct your call?"
For three days, he'd listen to Spanish on the other end, and respond "no hablo Español." Just like me, he was apologetic, tried to help, and wondered what it would be like to be paid in pesos.
I was given a role I had little interest in or knack for.
There were times when the company's new ways of doing things were so tenuous and inefficient, I felt like I was wasting everyone's time, including mine. The restructuring also led to a project-approval process modeled after a Pandora's box. I was told to own projects and rely on departments in three different time zones without any authority to tell anyone what to do.
My days had become all e-mail, planning and scheduling, talking on the phone, making up acronyms and sitting in meetings. It got to a point where I'd enter conference rooms telling myself, "If you can't listen to what they're saying, at least concentrate on how they're saying it."
With thousands of mergers and acquisitions around the world every year — a roughly $2 trillion trade in 2000 — I would expect the success rate to be better than 40 percent. It's not. According to a 2002 Business Week report, acquirers lose value in 61 percent of all mergers. A study by international accounting giant KPMG puts the failure rate as high as 83 percent.
Looking at an acquisition from the outside in, it appears the initial due diligence and legal and fiduciary smack down relies on too many people with the same taste in clothes: investment bankers, lawyers and accountants. I know exactly what you're thinking. Why leave it up to people who are least able to empathize with the human condition? I don't know why.
"Companies need to have a sense of humor," says Cindy Rockwell, the first human resources expert I found who didn't wince when I mentioned I'd been "working for The Man." She runs Lusix, a Portland-based consulting firm for tech companies needing advice on anything employee-related — including the province of bringing cultures together. Not once did she use the words "human capital."
"The reality is that no two deals are alike," Rockwell explained. "The direction to take is as unique as the people involved. I know this sounds simple, but a smooth transition boils down to keeping people informed."
Whether or not my former employer's effort to communicate the transition and lift spirits was strategic or spontaneous, its execution fell short. The company's first move was to let all 3,174 employees know we would be called associates.
A few months later, we were asked to pick up a "company-logo transistor radio headset in Shipping." By spring, we had a "name the intranet" contest, which predictably ended with something so predictable and memorable I decided I didn't need to remember it.
The message is clear. While the possibilities for ideas are endless, the ability to pick good ones gets mired in the lowest corporate denominator.
If this is a big-company problem, maybe the first step is for shareholders to acknowledge the backflow caused by hosing down the same company culture that created the innovations and sales channels they sought in the first place. A megalith without a heart and soul is fine for employees who revel in spreadsheets and whiteboards, but what about the rest of us who yearn for a life without lanyards and security badges?
"You could be in a large company and always feel connected," Rockwell reminds me. "How the company is structured makes a huge difference. When you get down to a couple dozen people, all you need are a few ground rules. Generally speaking, small groups tend to find good answers on their own."
It's common sense, of course. One of the intangibles for staying as long as I did was the people I worked with every day, including my boss. I have fond memories of him looking over my shoulder watching me leverage my deliverables. Even now I realize how much it takes for a manager not to gloat when 350 percent of my schedule was booked until March 2006. He excelled at not gloating.
Yet there was always someone above someone else who decided what I should be doing, how much I'd get paid, and from where I might be out sourced. It's an arrangement that prevents any unnecessary loyalty.
Happily, I'm now in a good place. There's a direct correlation between action items and productivity. I work in a corner building where meetings are a matter of rolling chairs together. I'm talking more, e-mailing less. It's a company where I can't rely on anonymity to avoid responsibility. It's good for me. Next time my lunch drips into someone's tuna salad, I'm definitely going to step up.
©2004 The Oregonian Publishing Co.
