Without a Program

The day Kit Belknap took over as West Coast manager, she had a conference call with everyone who reported to her. “There’s just one thing to keep in mind when you work for me,” she said. “Shit rolls downhill.” She said it with a little giggle, but Bob could tell she meant it. He already knew that about Digital Discipline Technologies, which everyone called DDT, anyhow. Kit was about 40 and looked every year of it, her facial features starting to droop from a little too much alcohol. It was the face you saw sitting at the bar in every airport cocktail lounge, and every time he passed one on the way to the departure gate he’d get a twinge, because he always thought he saw Kit out of the corner of his eye.

Kit sent him out to do some pre-sales installs and demos at WampusBank with a guy named Gil Atkins. Gil was one of those odd creatures, a technical guy who can’t do technical things like installs, just like a project manager who doesn’t manage projects. Gil was a kind of sales-minion, a person who talked tech with the techies, but he wasn’t the closer, who was still the account rep. 

He’d stand by the workstation while Bob made the installs, trying to be as helpful as he could without doing any real work, making odd remarks like “I hate this product,” and then he seemed to wait for Bob to chime in. On the other hand, Bob had completed Backstabbing 101, including the section on the guy who pretends to be your friend and pumps you for confidences, which he promptly relays to the higher-ups. So every time Gil said “I hate this product”, Bob would mumble as spontaneously as he could some section from the company web site along the line of “Total Discipline Delivery is your state-of-the-art solution to all problems of IS management--a quantum leap ahead of everything that’s been available. . .” 

Gil would drop the subject, but a few minutes later, he’d start up on something like, “Boy, a lot of people in this company can’t stand Kit,” and he’d wait for Bob to chime in again. Bob would say something along the line of how Kit was new to the area, and he was sure that everyone would work hard and do the best job they could. And trusted Gil less and less. 

It just went to show you couldn’t tell the players without a program. One of the factors in DDT that was difficult for Bob to grasp at first, being new there, was how many people had been with the company a long time. DDT had just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, but it had been small for the first five years. More recently, its growth had been explosive. Yet everywhere there were ten and 15 year veterans. Kit was one of the 15-year people. DDT must have been almost the only employer she had ever had.

There used to be an old-time corporate culture at every company, where everyone who counted had been there for decades. That, of course, made sure any new ideas got stamped out in a hurry, and new people got the same treatment, with the exception of the ones who could prove themselves no threat to the old-timers. Oddly, DDT, a young company in a fast-moving industry, had a similar culture.

With Gil Atkins, Bob’s guard was up, and he was starting to listen very carefully to every small remark Gil made. After a week, he began to realize what the story was: Gil and Kit were husband and wife. Every word Bob said, every move he made, was being reported back to Kit, likely with enhancements if the simple truth wasn’t enough.

Kit worked in the San Jose building, and the next time Bob was up there, he noticed that Gil had a cube right outside her big corner office. There was a full-length formal portrait of Kit in it, her expression quite grim, with a fancy silver frame, the biggest family photo he’d ever seen in a cube. Gil turned up in all of Kit’s conference calls and staff meetings, too: she’d worked out some way to get around the company policy that spouses shouldn’t be in a supervisor-subordinate role. Gil actually worked for some neighboring department, but he was in some vague way on loan to Kit.

Gil had Bob go out to lunch with some of WampusBank’s techies. Bob did the best he could to convince them DDT’s products would meet their needs, but they were there for the lunch--the sale wasn’t coming from their budget, and it wasn’t going to be their decision. Once Bob was at a users’ group meeting with a rep from IBM. Several of the users were complaining about the company’s products. The rep didn’t mince words: “It doesn’t really matter what you tell us,” he said. “We don’t sell to you. We sell to the CIO. The CIO buys what we sell him, and he’ll shove it down your throats.”

The guy from IBM had it called right, of course. Gil and Bob were taking a bunch of low-level people out to lunch, and what they told the techies, or what the techies told Gil and Bob, wasn’t worth the time of day. The CIO would buy what he was going to buy, and he was going to shove it down their throats.

But Gil thought Bob had done a good job. “You’re my man, Bob,” he said. “You knew their problems, you showed them how they could really use the product.” But Bob knew it didn’t do a thing to help the sale.

Bob kept working on the WampusBank installs with Gil for several weeks. The setup there was starting to look like a bunch of low-level clerks were in charge of the project. They were supposed to be evaluating the product in hopes that they’d want to buy it, but the more Bob worked with them, the more he saw that they had neither the interest nor the authority to make any sort of recommendation. The whole thing was just extra work for them that would never pay off. Nobody was talking to the people at WampusBank who could make the decision to buy.

And Gil would send him to other WampusBank data centers in hopes that he could install the product for demos there as well. But Gil never followed through with the paperwork and phone calls that would authorize Bob to do the work at the other data centers, and nobody would have the server or the network address he needed available to set things up. So the trips would be wasted time, money, and effort, and it didn’t help DDT’s image with WampusBank to be sending guys out to the data centers without the i’s dotted or the t’s crossed.

One morning Bob was eating breakfast in a hotel in Sacramento, about to go out on another WampusBank wild goose chase, when Rudy Valenzuela, the chief technical guy in the LA office, turned out to be eating breakfast there, too, and saw Bob from his table. Bob had a pretty good reputation with him, because he’d made it a point to share everything he was learning with the other people in the LA office when he was in there. He called Bob over, and they wound up eating breakfast together.

“Where are you working?” Rudy asked him.

“The WampusBank demos,” Bob said. It was something Rudy probably already knew.

“How’s it going?” His tone and his look suggested he already knew it wasn’t going all that well, and he seemed to want to hear the straight dope. Bob gave it to him, in detail. He didn’t seem bored.

The next time Bob was in the LA office after that, some people he hadn’t met called him into a conference room. There was a conference call set up for some people outside the office, in addition to the half dozen or so in the room. A woman introduced herself as the sales manager from the Orange County office.

“Would you go over for us the things you told Rudy last week?” she asked. He did. He had two impressions from what he’d seen: the WampusBank people involved in the demos weren’t very interested, because it wasn’t their budget and wouldn’t be their decision, and in fact they didn’t work in areas where they could understand or benefit from what the product would do. And just getting the demos set up was a bear. They weren’t doing the right advance work, and they weren’t getting cooperation.

Nobody said much. They mostly just sighed and gave each other looks that suggested he hadn’t told them anything they hadn’t already surmised.

“OK,” said the Orange County sales manager. “Thank you.” And that was that. As Bob left the room, he heard someone say, “Well, it just isn’t being sold at the right level.” And that was the last he heard about the issue, at least from the LA office.

Kit started her next staff meeting in an odd way. “I want to tell you a story,” she said. “Now, this isn’t about anyone in particular. This is just a story. Nobody should get upset.” This, of course, automatically meant someone was likely to get upset, but it would involve getting upset with Kit, which was a bad idea.

The story had to do with a DDT employee who had important information and was looking to stab people in the back with it. The employee kept looking and looking, until he saw a vice president in the hall and blurted the damaging information to the vice president, just like that. Then the employee kept going around looking for more people to tell the damaging information to. And kept on telling it.

But that wasn’t all. The employee was being sent to customer sites. Due to inadvertences, the employee would arrive at customer sites, and the things the employee needed to make the installs and perform the demos wouldn’t be available. So the employee couldn’t do the work the employee was supposed to do. So the employee had to do things like study the manuals to pass the time. Now, Kit wasn’t saying this was bad. After all, what else could the employee do? But somehow this didn’t seem right. The employee wasn’t cooperating as much as the employee could be.

Bob realized soon enough that this was about him, though it was being delivered in oddly allegorical terms. And it was an odd sort of story. It started somewhere in familiar territory, and then it went off into fantasyland. He kept wanting to say that he hadn’t been trying to peddle anything, that people had sought him out, and he didn’t see that he had any choice but to give company officers accurate information. And he wanted to say yes indeed, he felt terrible about wasting time and money going to customer sites when he couldn’t do the work, but if it was because somebody else dropped the ball over arrangements that had to be made in advance, how could he fix it? But as Kit said, the story wasn’t really about anyone. Bob should keep his mouth shut. And he did.

Kit had had her knuckles rapped, of course, as a result of what Bob had said to Rudy and the people in the conference room. But not rapped hard enough to make a difference. For that matter, it seemed like much as Rudy and the people in the conference room might have wanted to change things, whatever they tried to do, it wasn’t enough. Prospects for the WampusBank sale, as such things do, gradually petered out in a flurry of happy talk. Meanwhile, Kit surveyed her sore knuckles and brooded.

She belonged to the management school that favored staff meetings, lots of them, and long ones with no particular agenda. These started as conference calls, with everyone calling at a particular time from the office or customer site they were working in. Soon enough, they ran as long as three hours, and the customers began to complain that they were watching the engineers burn up hundreds of dollars of the customers’ time sitting on the phone in company staff meetings.

Once this happened, the project managers mostly had enough sense to find ways to keep the engineers out of the calls with some excuse or other. “Oh, he’s working with the customer, Kit.” Kit countered by demanding that anyone who wanted to be excused from a call send her an e-mail the previous day, and only limited, specific exceptions were allowed, like a previously scheduled meeting with the customer that could not be rescheduled.

E-mailing Kit, however, was a dodgy proposition. One of her favorite topics in the staff meetings was the number of unread e-mail messages she had in her mailbox, an index, she apparently felt, of how important she was. “I had 118 unread messages in my mailbox this morning,” she would say. Her instructions on this would be that if anyone had sent her an e-mail that was actually important, they should instead call her about the issue on the phone. The unread messages built up far enough that periodically she would have to say, “I can’t answer any e-mails for a while. Something has gone wrong with my mailbox.” This simply meant that her secretary would need to call the help desk and have them fix the problem so Kit could go on not reading her e-mail.

Although the conference calls never had a formal agenda, they were predictable. The first stage (following roll call), and most important, was always the enumeration of offenses that would lead to immediate termination. This list was ever-expanding, although occasionally there were specific deletions. Terminable offenses included not having one’s time sheet faxed to Kit’s secretary by close of business on the day it was due. These days were not predictable, because Accounting’s idea of pay periods was intricate. The threat made sure you stayed up-to-date on what they were.

You could also be fired immediately if you didn’t have your weekly expense forms in overnight express by the Saturday of that same week. This requirement had been relaxed from Friday only after people pointed out that they normally flew home Friday nights still having to charge expenses like parking or taxis long after the overnight deadlines had passed.

And once Kit learned that people had found ways to avoid her conference calls, she decreed that you could also be fired immediately for avoiding a conference call. A week later, in one of her occasional deletions from the list of terminable offenses, Kit started the meeting with a giggle and said, “Of course, I didn’t really mean last week that you could actually be terminated immediately for missing a conference call.” It sounded as if someone might have spoken to someone else, and someone else spoke to Kit, and the policy was rescinded. But she said the whole thing in a way that made you think maybe she was joking this time, rather than last time, so nobody took any chances.

So the conference calls still began with a roll call, heavy with the portent of consequences to those who missed it. “Al, are you there?” Pause. “Al?” Another pause. The fear of missing a conference call was so great that people would call in while out sick or on vacation. Then Al would wake up from his doze while sitting in his cube: “Wha? Wha? Who? Oh, yes. Here.”

“OK. Al is here. Tina?” And so it would go. After ten minutes or so of roll call, with the usual suspects forgetting their names or otherwise delaying the process, Kit would say what she always, said, “Well--I don’t think I have much this week. We’ll probably get this over quickly for once, ha, ha.” But Kit would keep remembering things: “Oh, yes. I forgot. I was talking to my Senior VP on Tuesday, and he wanted me to remind everyone that you will be terminated immediately if you. . . .” and so forth. Sometimes I wondered if there were offenses that could lead to delayed termination as well as the immediate kind. As I write this, I realize that there certainly were.

After a few months, Kit decided staff meetings were too important to handle over the phone. Once a quarter, she decided, we would all fly in to San Jose from wherever we were and have an all-day staff meeting on a Friday. (And after one Friday meeting, she decided this was so worthwhile that in subsequent quarters we would continue through Saturday.)

As it happened, Bob was scheduled to wrap things up with a customer the week the first Friday meeting was scheduled. The customer had been unhappy, but they liked Bob, because after all the problems, he had finally been able to make things work the way they wanted them to. And they wanted Bob there the whole final week, including the Friday. This was the old problem of the engineer burning up hours in conference calls writ large. The customer thought they were entitled to have Bob the whole week. Kit thought a Friday all-day staff meeting was more important. As far as Bob was concerned, the customer was always right, especially if it could get him out of one of those staff meetings.

So Bob talked to Aaron Friedlander, the project manager there, about the problem and suggested he ask Kit if he could be excused from the meeting. He knew he was putting Aaron in a bind, because if Kit had definite ideas about not avoiding conference calls, she was going to have even more definite ideas about not avoiding all-day staff meetings. But the customer had also made what they thought was a reasonable request under the circumstances: they thought they were going to get five more days of Bob in the final week; now they were only going to get four, and Bob wasn’t going to be back.

The outcome, Aaron told me, wasn’t pleasant. The customer kept insisting, and the result was that to get Bob into the Friday staff meeting and still keep the customer happy, Kit had to give the customer two free days of his time the following week. In other words, he would be back after all, with a couple extra days thrown in. Bob could sense the bad vibes in it for him, since in Kit’s mind he was the cause of the problem. Not only had he gotten her into a losing argument with a customer, but behind it all lay an obvious desire to avoid a staff meeting.

Meanwhile, Kit hired a new secretary who was turning out to be scatterbrained. She did a lot of irritating things like call you on your cell phone during lunch or while you were driving to a customer site. A few days before the Friday meeting, Bob got one of those lunchtime calls. Her instructions were simple. “Kit says you have to fax me all your weekly time sheets for last March, April, and May.” This was October.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t carry them with me. I can’t carry all that in my briefcase, and I’m up here in San Francisco until Friday. They’re probably home, but I’m not sure they’re all in the same place. How soon do you need them?”

“Let me find out,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

About twenty seconds later he got another call, this one from Kit herself. “My secretary has lost some people’s time sheets,” she said, “and Accounting has some questions. We need your copies right away.” Bob told her pretty much what he’d already told her secretary. The part about the secretary being the one to lose the time sheets was new.

“Call your wife,” growled Kit. “Tell her where the time sheets are, and tell her to fax them up to my secretary.”

Bob fought down the urge to tell Kit that what she actually meant was for him to ask his wife to ask her secretary to fax the time sheets, but he kept quiet. So when he called his wife that night, he told her where he thought the time sheets were, and she took them in to work the next day and gave them to her secretary to fax up to Kit’s secretary.

The next day he got another call from Kit’s secretary. “What happened to your time sheets?” she asked. “We still don’t have them.”

He called his wife, who verified that her secretary had faxed the time sheets and kept the confirmation. He called Kit’s secretary back. “My wife says her secretary has a confirmation sheet off the fax machine that says the time sheets went through,” he said. “Is there anything you might be able to do on your end to look again where the fax might have gone? I sort of think my wife and I have gone the extra mile on this.”

“Let me find out,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

About twenty seconds later he got another call, this one from Kit. “I hear you said something to my secretary,” she said. “Something about going the extra mile, or something like that.”

He started to say something.

“I will not have you talking to my secretary that way,” she said. “If I ever hear of you talking to her that way again, you will be terminated immediately.”

“OK,” he said.

“You are coming to the staff meeting Friday, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I was worried for a while there that you might not be. Well. I think you and I are going to have to have a separate little meeting after the staff meeting. We need to discuss how you are to talk to my secretary in the future. Anything my secretary tells you is actually coming from me. Anything you say to my secretary you are actually saying to me. Do you understand?”

“That’s your call, Kit,” he said. He could see the writeup coming.

About half an hour after that, Bob got another call from Kit’s secretary. “You can tell your wife she doesn’t need to fax the time sheets again,” she said. “I found the fax.”

“Thank you,” he said. Whatever the status of the time sheets, it looked like he’d still be written up for asking her to look for them a second time.

When Friday came around, everyone assembled in one of the San Jose conference rooms at eight in the morning, morosely nibbling on cheap, dry supermarket bagels from a plastic bag that someone had brought in. Everyone stood around for about an hour, with no sign of Kit and no idea what else was going on. Here and there in the room there were little flurries of excitement. “They’re taking George to UC Davis,” somebody said. Still no sign of Kit and no idea what was going on.

After a while the phone rang in the conference, room, and Harry Martin, one of the project managers, picked it up. He mostly just nodded and said “uh huh.” Then he hung up the phone. “Kit is taking George to UC Davis,” he said. “George had a stroke last night. They’re trying to get him the best treatment they can.” He paused. “George is . . . a small dog,” he added noncommittally. “Kit had some people lined up to give their presentations. Depending on whether Kit gets in later, we might break up early, or we might wait for her.”

So the designated people droned through their presentations. Hopes began to rise by early afternoon that Kit might not make it back to San Jose by the time people had to leave to catch their planes, and Harry was toying with the idea of sending everyone home. Bob kept hoping this would happen, because he was waiting for the private session where she would hand him his writeup. About two thirty, though, Kit called and said to hold everyone there; she was just leaving Davis. Davis to San Jose on a Friday afternoon was at least two hours, likely longer. But everyone sat around, waiting for Kit to make it to her own staff meeting.

When she finally came in, she talked for twenty minutes or so about how sick her dog was and then let everyone go. Bob asked her if she wanted to see him, and she said she didn’t under the circumstances, so he left, too. She’d probably just send the writeup to his personnel file, but at least he wouldn’t have to sit there while she snarled at him in person.

A few weeks later Kit’s secretary left the company. As best anyone could tell, it was voluntary and her own idea. She said too much pressure came with the job.

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