Some friends had been involved in due diligence before the Avention acquisition and assured me that my job was in no trouble. In fact one of the reasons D&B bought us was that they liked our ability to mine alerts from the news. And suddenly being part of a huge company was thrilling and exciting. I continued to get good raises and had lots of opportunities to work with new people. I’d never been with a company bigger than a hundred or so people before (except Tufts, long ago), and now I was in a 5000-person company. In some ways, the 4½ years between our acquisition by D&B and my retirement was one of the most challenging and at the same time rewarding periods of my work history. I was able to improve my part of the business, integrate news and Triggers into more and more processes, add to my own commercial, technical, and inter-personal skills, and help share knowledge within the company and with our customers. I was paid well and respected.
But working through the Byzantine intrigues of a large company was stressful, and there were many bad decisions by people in charge. Dun & Bradstreet has been around since 1841 and has employed four people who went on to become U.S. President. But everyone knew that there was rot in the company, and a lot of the questionable decisions came from trying to deal with this. Some people had worked for the company for 30-40 years and no one really knew what they did, but management didn’t want to find out by laying them off. At the same time, essential people were laid off for no reason with drastic results. In the time I worked there we had a string of different CEOs and presidents, and went from public to private and then back to being a public company. There were constant re-orgs, sudden blood-lettings, and incessant harping on moving away from old processes and toward new ones, usually blindly.
D&B was very good about treating us with respect. They told us that they’d done acquisitions before and, though several of us might be laid off, we should not be scared. This would not happen right away, and if and when it did we’d get severance pay. We should all calm down and continue doing what we’d been doing. They maintained all our benefits as-is through 2017, which was a huge thing for some people. And though “the Concord office” was now a small outpost in a company headquartered in Short Hills NJ, and most technical work got done in their office in Center Valley PA, they were very good about having people travel back and forth to get familiar with each other.
D&B people were eager to understand our technology and Boss8 and I were eager to communicate it to them, and maybe learn new things from them. We did an online presentation for the whole Center Valley office soon after the acquisition and were one of the first groups in Concord to feel fully integrated with them. We got two people from Center Valley added to our department, now up to 6 people instead of just me, and picked up responsibility for the legacy news-to-product-feature process they had. We were assigned to a well-positioned top-level manager (Boss11) and got a new department title, “News and Events.” I got the title of Program Director and the funny thing was that for the next few years I’d get about one email an hour addressed to the Events Director … they wanted me to rent tents or something.
Soon though, D&B did start trimming. There were big parts of what we did that were duplicative of what they did, and there were parts of our business that they didn’t want to continue. They also had an office in Waltham MA that had lots of open space, and soon many people were laid off (with good severance packages), many other people were moved to the Waltham office, and by the end of 2017 the remaining programmers, IT people, and content people were collapsed into just a corner of our large office. Our old finance department was there too, but they knew that they were on the list to be eliminated, as soon as our legacy contracts could all be expired or transferred to D&B paper.
Boss8 and I found ourselves in some R&D meetings and these were very fruitful. We were on a team with a woman in Center Valley and a guy in the D&B Austin TX office, and what we came up with was a way to route Triggers through a machine-learning program to enhance information in them. These were then sent through an interface for one of our third-party partners in the Philippines to vet. The results were then routed back into our products and to the D&B mainframe for use in other areas of the organization. We all were very excited about this in the planning stages, while realizing it might never see the light of day. And the four of us got along very well also, we were like Dorothy and her companions on the yellow-brick road. This was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever been involved in, we were mind-melding with each other and working to create a process that would actually move our huge behemoth of a company forward.
In the middle of all this the other shoe finally dropped, and we were moved to the 610 Lincoln Street, Waltham office ourselves. This is right off route 128, in the middle of Boston’s Silicon Valley. It was sad to say goodbye to the building where I’d worked for nine years. When you’ve been in a place that long it becomes very comfortable for you. I walked all of my lunch-time routes one last time, went to our cafeteria for one last quesadilla day (my friend the grill cook gave me lunch for free), and waved goodbye to the volleyball court.
I was glad to move to Waltham, as it was a slightly shorter and less stressful commute (again, I always took back roads, never the rush-hour highway). They had a very modern layout, where we all had simple desks that could move up so we could stand, or down so we could sit, and that were crammed together and surrounded by group working spaces of all different sizes. Our desks had very little storage space and we all had laptops rather than desktop computers. No one had an office (supposedly), we were all thrown together and expected to be able to move quickly and to collaborate. We had headsets hooked into VOIP phones and team software, and for many meetings we all just stood/sat at our desks and met virtually, since some attendees were in other offices and/or other countries.
Our office managers were great and had bagels for everyone in the kitchen each Monday and snacks all day, as well as fantastic cold-brew coffee (hard not to get addicted to this). There was a very small cafeteria where I almost always picked up my desk lunch, though I soon learned to just stick to their salad bar. We were near a couple of other fine places for lunch, and there were suburban neighborhoods and construction sites to inspect on my walks.
Our R&D team called a summit meeting of the product people our new process would benefit and our top-level bosses and presented this all to them, complete with simple diagrams, the staggering quantity and quality improvement figures we’d gathered, and a few cost estimates for running this outside of a test-tube. None of us four was prepared for the negative reactions we got. Basically, the product people were disturbed to learn that what they had thought was good data from our department could be improved that much, and so was faulty to begin with. And the top-level executives were nasty. They wanted us to move into the 21st century and here we were proposing a new process that involved even more people than before!?! We were getting ready to ride the Wizard Of Oz float in the D&B parade, but the wheels fell off before we’d even left the garage.
And while this was going on, my Dad’s health was failing. He turned 90 in October 2018 but had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He published a book of poetry in his last months, almost all of his relatives visited him for his birthday that Fall, and we had a beautiful event on the Ithaca lakeshore in fine Fall weather. I drove out to visit him over the Winter and Spring (sometimes through some of the worst weather I’ve ever driven in) and I was just one of many supporters. He soldiered on in the nursing home of Kendal at Ithaca, but he finally didn’t wake up one day. His last words to me had been, “I love you,” after a struggle to get the words out. To my mind, his last great accomplishment after a lifetime of them.
My department was shrinking again, and then we came in one morning and everything had changed. Boss8 *and* Boss11 were both laid off suddenly. This was really cruel and really wrong, the worst decision ever. There was no replacing Boss8, though I took over some of what he did. This meant that the improvements in functionality we’d envisioned were not going to happen: we no longer had enough people to do them, let alone manage the changes and communicate benefits up the chain in manager-ese. I’d mentioned rot in D&B? Boss8 had been on the verge of digging out some of this rot, but now all his work was gone.
This started a sequence of explaining what I did to new managers. Most people were nice and professional, but it was Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill until the new managers finally understood, “Oh, that’s what makes this important!” … or not. And then I’d get a new manager and have to roll the rock back up the hill.
But I liked working on my new team. It had a bunch of middle managers (Boss12 was my direct manager) reporting to one young guy (Boss13), and a gaggle of mostly very young programmers reporting to them. I was a totally odd duck in that group, I was over 60 and didn’t speak Python. But I resurrected the presentation we’d done for Center Valley back in the early days and did a presentation for the new group, which went over well. They realized that though I didn’t speak Python, I was indoctrinated in the dark secrets so was ok. We went on outings, since we were (almost) all young people who needed entertainment. We had a great bowling and pizza party and later all went to the new Star Wars movie as a group.
Boss12 and Boss13 latched on to what I was doing pretty quickly and it’s always fun working with smart people. But what they needed was visualizations. They were new school managers and needed some dashboard-available reports where they could look at my work and say, hmmmmm … looks like he’s doing an excellent/good/fair/bad job. Then they’d be able to manage my process. For years I’d never had anyone looking over my shoulder, except Boss8, who was so curious he didn’t need visualizations, he could read the raw data.
So I learned Power BI (we were a Microsoft shop) and whipped them up some visualizations. But what I was really trying to tell Bosses 12 and 13 whenever I got the chance was that there were bigger issues that they needed to deal with. I was doing the tactical stuff and trying my hardest to deal with strategic stuff, but there were strategic decisions coming up that needed to be planned for now and were over my pay grade. We had vendor contracts that were going to run out and we needed to plan if we should renew them, or if we should go in other directions, and how to get this decision accepted by our users (the product people). Before the recent developments, I’d depended on my managers to do this but could not now. Maybe I could do it, but I needed a lot of back-up from my managers and … then who would do the tactical stuff that also needed doing? I tried my best to explain this and eventually they got it and we had a basic outline of a way forward, but I had a sense of dread too.
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