OneSource had grown out of Lotus, and had a long life with a lot of different parent companies. Soon after I started we were re-acquired by a company in Omaha NE, and then a few years later we were sold to a venture capital company in Chicago. They acquired another software company in Austin TX, and that changed things a lot for us. We were told that they were going to be producing a new flagship product. I asked Boss7, “Shouldn’t we worry about this, aren’t we the Product division?” She couldn’t really disagree, though she tried to. Soon she’d been laid off and the guys from Austin were showing up and deciding which of us they wanted to keep. I’d been working on evaluating vendors of IT information to be incorporated in our products at that point, and I think my write-up that argued none of them would work for us was part of the Austin guys deciding I wasn’t one of the ones they wanted to keep (though my recommendation proved to be correct).
They couldn’t really get rid of me because no one else could do what I was doing. But they told others that they were going to re-do everything, including automating the process of managing our business taxonomy and producing Triggers. But they didn’t tell me, and this really pissed me off. They didn’t even have the decency to tell me they were going to try to do what I was doing better, they just considered me soon-to-be-roadkill. They made a real enemy there. But they were never able to do it and I just kept on and on, doing what I did. They complained behind my back that my signature still called me “Product Manager,” which was wrong since they were doing product now. But I never heard about a new title from HR and so kept using the old one.
I was on Boss7c by then, the head of development, but then they brought back an old employee (who’d been a VP) to manage Content. Another colleague, was also put in our new department and we hired an intern full-time. Suddenly what had been just me, though I was also on other projects, was a 4-person department! We made some great advancements in tagging news and producing Triggers during that period and my new manager (Boss8) was great to work with, one of the best managers I’ve ever had. He brought an analytical, curious mind to what I was doing, and we had many great discussions about work, 70s movies, and geography.
Somewhere in there (early 2014 as I remember), the company had brought in a new slew of marketers, and they figured that we needed a major re-branding. We had a huge event at a hotel at Logan Airport to announce this, flying in executives from our offices all over the world. The big announcement was that from now on we wouldn’t be called “OneSource” because that was such a common name. From now on it would be “Avention,” and we got a new batch of t-shirts. A manager who came on board later from a competitor told us that they all laughed when they heard OneSource had changed its name. We’d suddenly gone from being the most recognized name in the area of sales enablement (yup, that’s what we did) to the least.
The new marketing types decided that our office needed a severe facelift as well (they were right about that), and spent a lot of money on doing that, including moving us all to a swap space elsewhere in 300 Baker Avenue. The funny thing was that when our office was most discombobulated, our owners in Chicago apparently decided we weren’t performing as they expected, and they brought in a new president (Boss9) to clean house. He wasn’t a data guy, but was a good guy at running a business and quickly got rid of the new marketing stuff and their off-focus projects, re-named our flagship product back to “OneSource,” and eventually fired the guys in Austin who were so full of themselves and hadn’t produced a lot.
The company was doing pretty well at that point, and we apparently were doing enough growing to satisfy our Chicago owners. Then early one morning in January 2017 we were all told that there’d be a company-wide meeting in a half hour, and I noticed that one of our conference rooms was filled with guys in suits. “We’ve been sold!” I announced to my friend at the next desk. And I was right. Dun & Bradstreet had bought OneSource/Avention, one of the thorns in their side. They seemed like nice owners and things were looking up. Boss9 announced, “I’ve done what I was brought in to do, make this into a salable company, now good-bye!” and he left the building. The new guys took over the meeting and the first thing they said was to forget the names Avention and OneSource, from now on we were part of Dun & Bradstreet. Message received.
No comments:
Post a Comment