I know some of us were born to cast our fortune to the winds
And I guess I’m bound to travel down a road that never endsKris Kristofferson
I just got back from Florida. Land of individual checks and lunatics. Nothing you can’t see, or unsee, in Florida.
I ain’t gonna lie. After a hard week of laying down some gold consulting bullshit, getting upgraded to 1st on the flight home is pretty sweet. Jump off the plane and into an Uber and in a pair shorts and out for a walk with the dog in short order. Maybe a small pull of bourbon to shave off the edge from the turbulence and wash the grime off from a week of playing my part in the spoof of good ole’ American corporate ridiculousness
I’m re-reading Hemingway — ‘The Sun Also Rises’. I never was a big fan. Biased, I think, from a forced reading of ‘Old Man and the Sea’ in high school. A 5-page story told over 125 pages.
But I find him more tolerable now. A little arrogant and still obvious. Not really a great imagination. But maybe I am changing to be more accepting. I’ve always been a little jealous of his lifestyle, which inspired his writing, but I never thought he was overly elegant in getting the stories out. I get the sense Hemingway wrote to support his lifestyle rather than out of some great desire to write. Writing is the original fully remote job — you can do it from anywhere. So he did. France, Spain, Italy, Cuba, Africa, Florida, Idaho. The adventures fueled his novels and the novels paid for the adventures. Brilliant.
On his writing, it is true he has sold more books than me. So there’s that.
A good line stuck with me. They had been fishing in the mountains and the evening has turned cold on them. They order hot rum punches at the hotel bar. But there is not enough rum. So they just get the bottle off the shelf and put ‘a half-tumblerful’ in the pitcher. ‘Direct action’, says Bill. ‘It beats legislation.’
I may find a use for that turn of phrase one day.
The world is crazy. I suspect it has been for a long time. Maybe forever. Was there ever a time when humans were not exploiting every other living being to meet their own fancy. Dividing each other and fighting over everything in a world full of abundance. If that time existed, I have not heard or read about it. Perhaps in small pockets here and there.
Now that Trump has manipulated the Supreme Court into supporting his authoritarian aspirations and he has placed sycophants at the head of all Cabinet positions and intelligence services, he is ready to go after his enemies in a big way. He is openly threatening to arrest Biden, Obama, Clinton and a host of other people he perceives as his enemies. He is letting convicted violent criminals out of jail and attempting to frame and imprison innocent people. Trump himself was exempted from his convictions by virtue of being president and now wants to imprison Obama and Biden where presumably they are not allowed the same consideration.
We are witnessing the death of democracy and the birth of a new autocratic dictatorship. We are living through a seriously fucked-up historical moment.
That’s our current governmental situation.
All things are temporary. Nothing is permanent. We may yet find our way clear.
There is a lot of joy in charity work. MYO and my other Namibia endeavors vitalize me. It makes me feel relevant in a world where we are all insignificant. There is a downside. I get dozens of requests for support each year. But resources are finite. So there are more no’s than yes’s unfortunately. Which can be very tough to deliver. The kids talk. They know who is getting support and some, with legitimate needs, come asking but the funds are not enough. It’s hard. Heartbreaking.
It seems no matter how far you go. How many miles. States. Countries or continents. Poor to comfortable. In the end, we never outrun our insecurities or anxieties from childhood. There they are. Reminding us of our inadequacies. Our shortcomings. Drilled into us from as early as we can remember and with daily reminders from parents. Well intentioned, almost certainly. But I think words matter even when you are 5 or 6 — and they carry through the years with devastating efficiency and timeless effect. I don’t reckon I could ever make enough money or achieve enough success to overcome what I was told I would be. And years later, it seems we’ve never quite overcome those early skepticisms. We are who they said we would be. Or at least that’s how it appears.
I’ve got no time for a therapist to sort this out. To tell me I’m good enough as I am.
At work, we have been debating the past few days what the slide order should be for a 3-slide deck the execs need to present to CEO. The content is just rehashed from several other decks that have been prepared and presented to various audiences. I have a meeting today with CTO and CHRO to discuss talking points. Unbelievable.
The wasted time and generally juvenile mentality of execs can be maddening. Their ego’s are massive. Their abilities limited. They waste enormous amounts of resources and time on nothing.
The other day, me and another Deloitte guy listened quietly while one of the directors had a complete unhinged meltdown over a 30-minute meeting we had put on her calendar. She was enflamed because although she is a director in finance, she truly feels she knows a lot more about implementing a modern cloud-based ERP platform than people who wake up every day and do just that. She has not ever done this before. Her anger was so intense it made me worried about her health. She seemed to be trying to conjure up a stroke.
She seems to believe she is over-worked. Maybe she is. I don’t know. If so, change it. For months we suggested time and again that she hire the right people she would need to support the implementation, but her and her team refused. Now they are stuck in a vise that is getting tighter each day. The workload is increasing, as we said it would. Her anger and blood pressure seems to increase each day. All imminently preventable if she just checked her ego and allowed the people who the organization has hired to run the program help her.
In America, we equate social status and money with intelligence. Most people think C-Suite and other executives are really smart. Mostly they are not. Mostly they are just people who stuck around for 35 or 40 years in the same basic role and outlasted everyone else.
But we coddle them because we are paid to indulge their egos and transform their short-sighted instructions into a plan for success.
There are exceptions. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are/were smart dudes. Entrepreneurs and inventors. That doesn’t necessarily make them great leaders but smart as hell for sure. But those are the exceptions. The CIO and SVP of Finance at my last job were excellent. So again, there are some good ones. Unsurprisingly, my last contract went swimmingly while this one is a train-wreck right out of the station.
I first became acutely aware of this in the late 90’s when a start-up I was working for that was worth around $500,000 or so was acquired for $12M by a pretty lame executive at a tech company. This guy was easily duped into thinking the company he was buying was much bigger and much more established than they were. We had no contracts to speak of. Only a handful of employees. He had an accounting background but was wildly off the mark in valuating the company.
The owners were hoping to receive an offer of between $500K and $1M. Brad’s opening offer – $12M. Wow.
The owners cleverly walked Brad around the office we shared with a paper supply company and gave the impression our offices were nicer than they were. We did show 30 employees or so on paper, but 25 of them were hired a few months before the acquisition, ostensibly to service a large contract that was ‘imminent’. The large contract never materialized but Siebel bit anyway.
A few weeks after the acquisition I submitted my resignation but Brad asked me to fly up to Boston to meet with him to discuss. When he asked why I was leaving I told them the old owner who was remaining in charge was an idiot and I assumed he would have been fired after the acquisition. Brad said he thought Dave was great and wanted him to remain. That was the 2nd clue that Brad was minimally equipped for his role.
To satisfy my grievances, he offered to move me to London where I would work for someone else. So I stayed a few more years to gain that experience and take the money. Within a couple of years, Brad was forced by HR to fire David because he was just so fucking dumb that he was a nightmare for the company. Everyone knew it except Brad. Brad ran a half-assed division for a few years (two very talented folks beneath him did all the heavy lifting) and he eventually moved on – able to convince some other company that he was talented when he was average at best.
And that’s the story of corporate execs. Nearly all are unimaginative and average IQ — because that’s what it takes to succeed in corporate world. Smart, Creative people leave because of the boredome, constraints and ignorant policies. Corporate life is just doing time. Getting along to get along and picking up a check. Don’t make waves by trying to improve something — we’ve always done it that way dammit!
It reminds me of the old Seinfeld series where George is dating a supermodel. When they break up, other super models want to date George because once you achieve that level, everyone believes there must be something special about you. It’s the same with corporate executives. We read constantly about people getting fired for doing a shit job, but they get a parachute on the way out the door and then get re-hired somewhere else at the same level or even higher. Many of them just keep failing up. Crazy shit.
Here’s something interesting. I moved to VA for my primary care physician last year. The service and care is exceptional. Far more efficient than the myriad of private practitioners I’ve had over the years. I’ve never had to wait more than a few minutes to get called back. And when I am in the examining room the doc is in straight away. This is interesting to me because the public perception is that private practice is efficient and government services suck. That has not been my experience. Even when I have to call the IRS for some reason or another, I find their services (including on-line) are just fine.
Brittany and I had just decided to go to Paris in November. But then I found out that the ISU rugby team was having their 30-year anniversary. So we traded Paris for Pocatello, Idaho. Imagine that — Paris for Idaho. But really it’s the chance to hang out with my beloved old rugby mates and a few key friends like Carla and Kelly and Jose. We will spend a few days in Jackson visiting Brittany’s friend Brittany. Drive around the forests and mountains. With any luck, I will be between jobs. I am interviewing for a couple other opportunities to get out of the space I am in. Money is good, but professionally unsatisfying. And so to my way of thinking, not really long-term tenable. So off we go looking for someone else to give advice to in return for eggs and bread and dogfood.
Work continues at Black Dog Ridge. The garage is nearly complete. The basement has been doubled in size and the new fireplace is coming along nicely. Next is the elevated bedroom that is being built just down the ridge from the main house. I think all the work won’t be done until around the end of October, but it will be magnificent when it is completed.
Brittany, Shannon, and I took mom to the zoo on Saturday. She wanted to see the new baby elephant. Mom’s eyesight is so bad that it’s hard for her to see much but she had a good time. We saw bears and moose and elk and lions, giraffes, zebras, penguins, apes and monkeys. All the usual suspects. Nice day.
Life for me is as busy now as it has been in a good long time. I am always up at 5:30 or 6:00 to walk Marti. Then work and a couple of more walks and dinner and some writing and some work on MYO or Namib Futures or Emerging Namibia and then every weekday except Friday, an 11:00 – 12:30 meeting with our Indian development team for TOOM.
It’s a lot but I am grooving on the possibilities of TOOM. As with all start-ups, more can easily go wrong than right, and obstacles present themselves around every corner. But somehow this feels pretty good. We are daily discussing the tradeoffs of functionality, costs, user interface etc. But we have a good team. My partner is smart and a hard worker. Truly the only business partner I’ve ever had that carries as much or more water than me. Right now he is doing the heavy lifting as he is far more in tune with technical development than I am. But my time is coming with the business end and pushing growth and marketing and partnerships etc.
It’s a bit exhausting at the moment, but all good stuff. It feels relevant and interesting. MYO alumni continue to absolutely kill it. Andris is about to get his PhD from Oxford. Frieda is doing a Ted talk and becoming a real voice in Namibia media circles. Chief, Ndeshipanda, Talishi, Joel, Janice, Crystal, Glorische, Wilfred, Leopard and so many others. They are climbing over obstacles that would paralyze most American kids who have grown up ill-equipped to solve issues and motivate themselves to push through difficulties.
It all began for our species in Africa and it may well be Africa that saves us in the end.
Humbly Submitted
Robert Myres – Flanker, Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club (ret.)
The Martini Tales 