And I was right. I was about to experience yet another big change at D&B. Our “news and events” operation was not a great fit where we’d ended up and I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t last, but what happened next was pretty fucked up. I’m still shocked at it and not sure why it happened but here’s the story.
Apparently, D&B as a company was used to having parts not fit from time to time, and living with a certain inefficient churn in how things were organized. There must have been a perception at some top level of the organization that when Boss8 was laid off, we “news and events” people had become one of those parts that didn’t fit, and that we needed to be repurposed. The importance of my department-mate’s legacy “business as usual” work in Center Valley was understood, but not the importance of the work I did to maintain and improve news flow into Avention products. It was also not understood that in the past couple of years we’d changed things around so now the legacy work couldn’t be done without my work!
And so one morning I was told that I had a new job, as a “Data Owner,” which was a new department meant to supplant the old means of acquiring content. And I was expected to be giddy with delight at this for some reason. My new manager (Boss14) was going to be a guy in our Hong Kong office, and they gave us just the faintest hint as to what this new “Data Owners” group was supposed to do. It soon became apparent that a) Boss14 didn’t really have time to manage people from 12 hours away, b) they expected me to be an expert at doing something I’d never done before, and c) I was expected to just drop the “business as usual” that I was doing. This was a very stressful thing for me, to put it mildly.
My last couple of years of work were quite dramatic. To my great relief I soon was switched to another new manager (Boss15), who turned out to be one of the best I ever worked with. And I got him to understand the strategic issues that needed to be faced and why I thought the sky was falling. This was now January 2020, and our contract for news was going to expire in April 2021; there were some major strategical decisions to be made and there was no one to make them. Well … there was me and him and as it turned out, we had to make them.
Yikes, this was stuff I’d never done before! We were stuck between our new “Data Owner” bosses insisting that we had to save money over our existing contract, and intransigence from many places in the organization when we told them we might be serving them news differently. They did not want to change and did not have the time to engineer for any change. And besides those agendas, there was dealing with the “do modern stuff” agenda. Incorporating “analytics” and new sets of data such as “Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG)” were the hot thing in that time. These sciences were young and not yet proven. But the teams were desperate to succeed, and they tried to hijack our news vendor process, even if it meant not supporting our proven products. One leader in Austin made a totally inappropriate offer to me to join his team (with a big raise) and stab Boss15 in his back. Needless to say, I did not respond.
I have to say that this was an empowering time for me, though I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have. I’d never been close to the business end of acquiring content. My strengths were in evaluating it, exposing truths in it, and implementing it. I now had to develop a list of potential vendors (including the incumbent of course), compile requirements throughout the organization, analyze what vendor(s) could meet the requirements and would charge us less, gather political momentum for change, select a short list of candidates, and negotiate technical details of a new source of content. Most of this was new to me, and I had to do it in a very transparent way (as opposed to being a one-man band) and keep on producing spreadsheets and slide shows about our progress, as well as leading lots of meetings. I ended up performing pretty well, though it was a very stressful period.
Well, soon after we started to get our shit together about the huge “news vendor” project that we were faced with, the clock ticked around to March 2020 and suddenly everything was different, and I mean everything. Boss15 and I had planned a huge summit meeting in Center Valley with a large list of stakeholders as a first step in getting requirements together, but ended up having to do this virtually. Everybody had to switch immediately to a whole new way of interacting with our colleagues dictated by the realities of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Geez, as if we needed more strangeness!
The news-vendor-selection part of the drama reached a fitting climax. We were just about to select a vendor that would have checked off all the boxes (including my most important criterion FWIW, better quality and user experience), when they were bought by one of our competitors! Truly a last-minute twist that was too dramatic to be true. We had to change course right away (continuing with them would have meant heads would roll, like ours), and managed to get to an acceptable alternate ending. But we were really close to doing something very good, so it counts as a win in my book. And I feel I really grew a lot in the experience.
Working at home every day was not bad for us older people. Our office managers and IT staff did some great work to supply all of us with the technology and tech support we needed at home. And the company actually gave us all a stipend to buy furniture we might need. Some had been working at kitchen tables and in their childhood bedrooms in the cases of some of our younger employees. In mid-2020, D&B announced that since we were all doing so well at working remotely, they were going to close many of our offices permanently, including the one in Waltham.
This was sensible to me, but in retrospect it added yet another layer of disconnect between me and my job. The dramas mentioned above were reaching a peak and in some ways I was more involved with my job than ever. But in other ways Sarah and I were feeling more and more distant from “work.” I’d always needed a job for income, but we were reaching the end of this need. And not having a physical office to go to increased the feeling of being a ghost going through the motions of work, but not being fully involved in it. I loved not having to commute and I was interacting with colleagues all over the globe. But somehow I felt myself moving more and more away from them. And I’d never met Boss15 face to face. Was he really real? Was I? Would the pandemic ever end, and what then?
Working for D&B was rewarding in many ways, though it was frustrating and anxiety-producing in others. In my last year I made around $135K, which was way beyond my expectations, and I always felt valued there and had the chance to work with some extraordinary people. But I guess I wasn’t alone in feeling an increasing disconnect from my job. The pandemic produced a wave of “quiet quitting” (an inexact but popular phrase).
Sarah and I had always figured we’d work until mid-2022, when she’d be 65 and could get her max pension and I would be 66+ and could collect full Social Security. But she was feeling as disconnected as me, fooled around with the books some, and announced one day that there wasn’t a huge reason not to retire sooner! If we moved things forward a year and retired in mid-2021 we’d lose a little bit of income, but would still be within acceptable risk parameters. Well, neither of us could come up with good objections to that, and neither of us wanted to.
No comments:
Post a Comment