Something A Little Different

I've been a bit sick for better than a week, trying to work through it. I find that as I get older, some of my youthful abilities, including the ability to keep a completely clear head and work through illness, are diminished. Unfortunately, even this heavy cold/light flu or whatever it is has impaired me sufficiently that I can't do much

Not only that, but I'm unable to get out an exercise. As those who know me well realize, I'm not much of a "stay indoors" kind of person. Even when I work, I try to find the excuses to get out as much as possible. I once described "my ideal work environent" to a career coach as "a place where the windows aren't welded shut and I can actually feel the breeze everyday." Needless to say, that coaching session didn't go much of anywhere.

So, here I am inside. Though obviously with all the windows open and a nice breeze.

Thankfully, I've been sleeping more than usual, which kills some of the time, but otherwise the frustration about everything has been building, as is probably obvious in my last post. I'm feeling a little better today, but don't want to push it, so I'm giving myself one more to recuperate. I have another job discussion tomorrow afternoon, so want to be in good shape for it, even though it's on the phone.

There have been some other frustrations recently. Seriously blew a job interview last Monday. In part, I suspect, because I was already beginning to crash and didn't quite realize it. In part though it's because the IT world has changed and I'm just not a great fit for it anymore. For better or worse, "traditional" IT has become more and more focused on controls rather than on innovation and serious business improvement. I'm a notorious "break all the rules to meet the strategic objectives" guy, so those kinds of roles don't work very well for me, even if I could get somebody to hire me for one of them, which I doubt. My resume is too long a history of "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" kind of stuff.

While it was all successful, it's not the kind of stuff that gives me much to say to anybody when asked what methodology, or approach, or other management mumbo-jumbo I favor. I try to answer truthfully: I know lots of ways to get things done. I try to always pick the one that's most appropriate for the circumstances. "Situational Project Management" as I call it. I try to make it sounds better than "I figure out how to deliver and if I leave flattened bodies in my wake, then it's too bad they got in the way," but I don't think I convince anybody that I'm a good fit for most of todays Sarb-Oxed, control-freaked IT environments.

The innovations that are happenning in technology tend to be in areas related to media, which I have almost no understanding of and frankly no interest in. (The little media I actually see tends to be the CNBC stuff I watch during the day, usually with the sound off, mostly because I like having some material to use when making fun of Cramer and friends in this space.)

So I find myself thinking that it's really time to do something different. The question, as always, is "what?"

Certainly, moving out of media-town may be a good idea. And I'm certainly looking elsewhere.

But as noted above, my brain just doesn't do quite as well at certain things as it did when I was younger. Even if I found a cool company that wasn't media related, was doing some interesting stuff with IT, and I could figure out what in the world I might do for them, I'm just not sure I'm up to the task of doing it. And I'm sure that my interest level is at or close to zero. In large part, because I find that most of the energy going into technology at most companies is completely wasted.

Even as an IT guy, I've always been very skeptical about technology's benefits. One of my first bosses was setting up a new technology-intensive business within one of the big brokerages that I worked for early-on. I remember our first organizational meeting in which he told us the trooth straight out. He said:

Our customers don't care whether we deliver the best value by using the latest and greatest technololgy, or if we do it by having a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and banging it out.

If I recall correctly, about half the guys from the technology side -- the ones who really wanted to believe in technology as something more than a tool -- were gone, mostly by their own choices, within a few months. Nobody wants to be told that they're only there because they can get the job done cheaper and better than a million monkeys. Me, I took it as a compliment: I wasn't there for my technical capabilities. That wasn't the point. I was there because somebody thought I was the kind of guy you wanted around when you're building a new business. It was possibly the best professional experience in my life. I suspect that much of the frustration I've felt since then goes back to that one experience and my inability to find anyplace that is equally focused, aligned, results-focused and unencumbered with self-imposed rules.

I've learned that I can't even bring up that job in interviews, and often not even after I'm hired. IT departments are full of people who want technology to matter and will spend their lives pushing it. They don't want a guy around who thinks of technology purely as a tool rather than a religion, and who is always going to be looking for the alternate tools that can do it cheaper and better without spending a penny on tech.

CFOs, on the other hand, tend to love me.

I saved one CFO $60K on a small initiative a few years back. The idea was to automate some menial process and save the cost of having to hire temp workers to enter data. I pointed out that instead of having a low-skilled temp 3-4 days a week, we'd need a higher-skilled one to feed and monitor the new systems, albeit for less time each week. I put the payback period on the new system at somewhere close to 35 years. The CFO nixed the project and told the manager in question to spend her budget on hiring temps as she needed them.

Needless to say this made me an enemy to much of the IT community, including the new IT director, who decided that he didn't need project managers who couldn't always find an excuse to justify even the most boneheaded of projects.

I believe that selling myself to CFOs might be a better strategy than even bothering with IT types. But even then, I'm not sure what the role would be. And it's still is tough to reconcile it with my own need for constant change (the one thing CFOs hate more than anybody!)

Anyway, that's what's been bouncing around in my head this week. Sorry if it's a bit disjoined, but I guess that's the way my brain is right now, as I suffer through both physical and mental exhaustion, and a lack of much other than Olympics crap on TV.

-btc