Levels Rising

2009 has featured a tremendous capacity for dealing with stress. It's amazing how being happy, being in love, and feeling hopeful and optimistic can leave you with strong reserves to deal with stress. It's been a great year in that regard.

That being said, the last couple of weeks have left me a little more frazzled than I would prefer. It's all work related, not lifestyle focused. We just tacked on a major element to our new work endeavor, which comes directly from my old department, while demanding that we set up entire new operations on our end. It's a big, crucial initiative that I'm currently carrying on my shoulders, and I spend my nights dreaming of spreadsheets, and my mornings waking up with my first thoughts about what work-related things I should be doing that very moment. Brushing my teeth I'm game-planning my agenda, and by the time I have my coffee, I'm already three steps ahead of what I should be doing.

All of this is theoretically great in terms of experience and career, but the plan is to be hiring someone to take on many of these duties I'm pitch-hitting for. That plan was set in motion, aspiring to make the process smooth and easy in terms of a resource, but due to something as mundane and insidious as company politics, it got blown to smithereens. Lots of people ended up doing things in a far less than optimal way, and my agenda gets compromised badly as a result of it, and who knows if there will be later political fall-out. A really unfortunate circumstance that's ultimately going to cost my company a fantastic employee, and me the ability to keep the ship moving forward smoothly and quickly. While I've felt like a superstar at times this year, this was something that I felt I could deliver, and I failed. That's a bummer.

So I've felt more than my share of work-stress for the past few weeks, and I feel badly that I've burdened L. with it. She doesn't deserve it, and though I don't feel that I've been a bad guy at all, she knows that I'm preoccupied, and not as focused on us as I'd like to be. So that's a shame, and I don't want it to be that way. It makes me realize that I'm not perfect when it comes to coping with stress, but then again, what does that mean: to be perfect when it comes to stress? Isn't the very nature of that to upset the psychological apple cart and not be able to be perfect? I still think that I'm generally better than most in that regard, but I'm not sure what all the coping strategies and mechanisms are, from person to person.

And, on top of that, my wonderful L. is in some far away place called Fresno tonight. Fresno. The word itself sounds like abandoned drive-ins and Chinese restaurants called Oriental Palace. But I hope that she's having relaxing family time with her father, and that moments like these help build a stronger bridge between them, which may not have been consistently stable and strong through much of her life. It's good that she's doing it, and me being away from her for a night isn't much of a price to pay for that.

One of the lucky ones

February, 2009. 

Will this be the month that we'll look back on and realize that, "wow... yeah. America really hit the crapper THAT month?". Or was it October of '08? December? Hard to say. 

But there's no question that things are getting much worse before they get better, despite Obama's best intentions and earnest efforts. My ex still can't find work, and is at the end of her proverbial rope. We put our condo on the market, and amazingly, got an offer in 6 days. There are some people out there with money, but not many. Now fingers crossed that the deal holds. No guarantees in this world.

Further, it feels like a day doesn't go by where I don't hear about someone I personally know getting laid off. Two weeks ago it was good friends, married, a baby due in May. Both got laid off on the same day. Yesterday, it was the boyfriend of my closest co-worker.

And today it was my co-workers. A lot of them. We're an amazingly profitable company ($60+m in '08) with 300 employees, but even we can't weather the storm. 50 workers were fired, downsized, eliminated, let go, shown the door, today. Whatever euphamism you want to throw out there. It doesn't change the fact that 50 people were marched into rooms, told "it's the economy, stupid" and shown the door. 50 more people sucking up California unemployment in a state that's nearly bankrupt. 50 less people to accomplish the "mission critical" job that we've been tasked to do in a major re-invention year for our business. 

I've been on my new team for 3 weeks. For the second time in 3 months (since we downsized 10% only 2 months ago, when I was in an awkward "transition" period), I danced through the raindrops. In pretty eerie fashion though. I am one of two "product managers" in my department. I've been a product manager all of 3 weeks. My counterpart's been with the company 9 years, but she happens to work out of Connectticut in a sweetheart deal she was able to get a few years ago; we've managed to operate with a lot of conference calls and email. And she's a sweetheart, and competent, and likely an asset to the company (though I didn't work with her long enough to really know). But... guess who got fired?

It wasn't me. 

Maybe it's being cynical to just presume that geography was the deciding factor. I am well-liked at the company, so it could've been a real view of potential, value or something like that. That'd be nice to think, and I actually thanked my department head for keeping me on the team, and he seemed to really appreciate that, and also said that he thought highly of me. So on a very grim day, that was a nice emotional boost for me, and probably somewhat cathartic for him. 

It's all headlines until it's you. Until it's the person in the cube next to you. The husband who can't find work. The ex-wife who can't get an interview. The father who's forced into early retirement. The sister who can't get a job out of college because there are no jobs to be had. 

It's going to get worse before it gets better. A lot worse.

New Turns, New Roads

Benjamin Button said that life is defined by those moments of opportunity, and the question is how someone reacts to them. Do you take this path, or another? Or stay on the same path? Sometimes the paths you take create waves in the lives of others. My wife needed another path, and it sent my own life into a tailspin, and forever changed the tenor, texture and shape of our son's. How his will develop in the long run is another question. 

My professional life the last three years, having left Hollywood for the fast-paced, fast-rising world of the Internet has been a study in movement. Each year has brought on new challenges, and new opportunities. After a great 2008 (professionally, at least), my initiative was eliminated due to corporate priorities and restructuring, that left me driftless and confused. 

I need a new challenge, I need fresh ideas and that learning curve that's going to take me to the next level. At the same time, I'm reticent to change, and am generally fearful of strong shifts in my life. That's part of why I didn't leave the company when I had a chance a year ago (which turned out to be a remarkably smart move, given the economy and other factors). 

Yesterday I was offered a job on another team within our company. Flattering to be thought of. Great new skills to be learned, central to the company's mission, and developing talents that must be considered core to the overall structure of Internet content sites. Pretty key. Yet, again, it's change. The comfortable stability of my team, of my knowledge base, the reassurance of strong management. Those will be lost in the short term, at least, in favor of the unknown.

The unknown frequently scares me, but I need to learn to embrace it with more open, excited arms. 

Companies have Salieri Moments Too

The work I've been doing all year has been exploratory in hopes of finding new, diversified revenue streams for my company (we're a prominent player online). We have a vision of something that hasn't quite been done exactly in this way online, a business plan, a product vision, product specs, the whole deal. A great deal of thought, and effort went into this. And my presentation bowled over the CEO, who was firmly behind it.

The comes strategic planning for 2009, involving the entire executive team. Each person with their own agenda, and a collective vision that we need to radically shift our company's agenda for the next year. That's all well and good, but the problem is that it means decreasing the overall size of our business and revenue. Which means that a new revenue stream is ALL the more important.

Collectively, the group took an alternate view: they need all their best people on crucial, mission-centric tasks. That means no new business verticals. That means no product that I've developed, envisioned and championed. That means... that really sucks.

From a rational perspective, I get it. We are sharpening our focus and anything that consumes resources outside the core objectives can be both a distraction and a headache. Yet, the investment was minimal. My time, time of a few others, a couple tech assists, and a modest outlay of money. Not a gigantic deal, truthfully. But they didn't see it that way.

The upside is this, however. There's a certain amount of flattery that the company wants "good" people on important projects, and apparently, one of the main considerations was, "Hey, we can have this guy - who really stepped up to the plate - building us something new, or we could have him playing a role on something that we view as short-term critical". So it's nice to be felt of that way, but at the same time, it's like being kicked in the gut. A couple of times. A year's worth of work pissed down the tubes before we even saw any return. 

Ironically, our corporate shift is due to a desire to put long-term company stability ahead of short-term revenues in the pecking order. Yet, the irony is that, again, we fall prey to short-term thinking rather than long-term vision. 

A Salieri moment. For all of us.

Another Mozart Moment

This year I was tasked with starting a new business vertical for my company. As a result, I divested myself of many of my other job responsibilities as this project grew and grew and grew in scope. The first route we took was very one-dimensional, and mid-way through the summer, we realized that monetizing this vertical was not as simple as slapping up a simple website and driving traffic in and out of it (what you would call a pass-through site).

We reset out ambitions earlier this summer, and then I spent the summer envisioning, designing, and devising a plan for where to take this business. Now, I didn't do it all on my own, but I was the driving factor, the one getting things done, creating ideas, building the designs and plans, and generally being the engine to this little engine that could.  Our goal by the end of the quarter was a full-fledged marketing plan - the vision of where this is going, what it's going to be, and most importantly, why it's meaningful. 

Today was the big day to present our whole year's worth of work and seek his backing to make this a larger company agenda moving forward. At stake is, frankly, my job. The reason goes back to that first point I made - as this grew more complex, I divested myself of so many other key elements of my job. If this doesn't get the green light and the doors get shuttered... uh, hello...? I'm still here, right? On the upside, I'm well liked at my company, and people would likely find some way to make me "of use", as Dr. Larch would say. But this is my baby, my project, and what I get excited about at work, and where I'm making a difference and a stamp. So, it's not hyperbole to say today was a crucial professional moment. 

And, in short, I nailed it. The company CEO came in a skeptic, and came out a believer. He frequently stopped me to bring up his own ideas, and to express how he thinks we've hit on what makes it important and valuable. You could see the twinkle in his eyes. Now, this doesn't make it a slam dunk, because we have some challenging headwinds as a company, and we have parent company concerns to deal with. But we got his emotional backing, and his commitment to find a way to get this done. 

Later tonight, the CEO sent me a note that says, "And best of all your passion for the initiative left me inspired and ready to join your team myself.  It was a pleasant reminder of one of the fundamentally great reasons why I love working here – there are smart, passionate people out there who can inspire me every day.  So thanks for that."

No, Mr. CEO, thank YOU for that.

Definitely a Mozart moment.

Wolfgang moment on Friday. I'm involved in a new initiative at work where we are, essentially, creating an entire new business vertical - a new way to diversify our revenue streams for the company. A couple of months back, we were tasked with a very narrow sliver of such a venture, and we knocked it out, only to learn (perhaps predictably) just how hard this was going to be, and how challenging a vertical it would be to make money in the rather beautifully simple way our parent company makes boatloads of cash.

So a small group of us, including our very inspiring - but challenging - VP did a dramatic thing by tasking us to stop thinking about making money (initially we were told to think exclusively about making money), and to envision a product that's going to matter, to last. This is easier said than done, because it's a fairly competitive, saturated market already. But we spent a day hanging out in a park, diagramming ideas, getting inspired. But the next step was a mystery... which I cracked.

After a lot of research and pondering, I put together a Powerpoint presentation of data - and how to use that data - for the group, and essentially laid out a vision of where the product could go, and what it could be. And, for all intents and purposes, knocked it out of the park. The VP was inspired (just like he's inspired me), and most rallied behind the idea, even though it's not 100% there yet - it's the next big, bold step.

That felt pretty great.

Sometimes you feel like a Wolfgang...

Sometimes you don't. Lately, I haven't felt like a Mozart very often.

But yesterday I felt like something even better - a rock star. I work at a company of about 350 people, and though I've moved up the ladder fairly swiftly, and seem to have the respect of my peers, and am well-liked, I sometimes wonder if I really... noticed. There are a lot of people around me who are true rock stars - the kinds of people who run companies, are on top of their game 100% of the time, shoot up the ladder at a speed that'll blind you, etc. I sometimes feel like I'm 90% of that, but that something truly special's not there.

Then again, maybe I underestimate myself at times.

We have quarterly company meetings, where a small set of awards are given out to people who have distinguished themselves from amongst the crowd, and it's based on feedback from your peers, etc. It's called the Golden Cart (we're a comparison shopping engine... you might have heard of us). Because of how my role is structured, much of my work involving outside vendors rather than internal people, I never thought I'd be in contention for one of those. But I got one.

And it felt pretty damn good. It didn't hurt that it came with a cash bonus, too.

So for that particular day, I felt like a Mozart.