In a big company, typically, multiple forces pull in different directions. As a lowly employee, you are liable to misread directions as they come from higher up. I was just such a naive employee, and I was constantly thinking about what is good for the company instead of trying to read what’s in the wind.
Ron was waiting outside Diane’s office, waiting for her to arrive. He didn’t know why he was summoned, but he didn’t think it could be anything good. On the opposite wall was a framed poster of a frog catching a fly in midair. This brought to mind Firefly, a competitor vying for a slice of the database market. “I wonder where she found that picture”, he thought, it looked like Costa Rica, and the frog had a blue tinge to it. He recalled the talk on company values. “At Blue Frog, we put the customer first”, the CEO, a stylishly dressed woman in her fifties, was explaining. “We strive to make products and services that matter to the customer, this ensures that we do not waste efforts on things we think are important, but do not really make a difference”. “We believe in diversity”, and this was accompanied by a slide with yellow, pink, black, and blue frogs. “We like to have many opinions and find that this encourages healthy information exchange and knowledge sharing. We treasure wild turkeys, mavericks that buck the trend and come up with new ideas. Those are essential to finding new routes and novel solutions.” He felt inspired; together, they were going to make something important, something that matters.
“Come in”, Diane called, breaking his reverie. She sat behind her desk, which had a great view of the surrounding forested hills. She motioned for him to sit down, while she was on the phone. “Yes, I will talk to him,” she said and hung up. “Ron, I understand that you were on a customer call yesterday”.
“Yes, it was a very good conversation, I was explaining how they could improve their storage system performance two-fold. They were very enthusiastic.”
“I heard you told them they could get even better performance if they used a Firefly database instead of ours,” Diane said.
“Well, I did say that, but it was an afterthought, at the end. Also, it is the better product, and we should tell the customer what’s best for them.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The CEO said we should put the customer first, it is a company value,” Ron said.
“Ahem, well, that may be true, but you just gave away a million dollars worth of business, do you realize that? From now on, you are off all customer calls. You will not interact directly with a customer. Understood?”
Ron felt like arguing, but bit back his reply, and made himself nod. On his way back to his cubicle he thought what a good week it was, until now. He was so sure he gave the customer solid advice, after all, he spent weeks tracing the storage system, running simulations, and projecting performance. The firefly DB was plain better at the customer workload, besides, the storage would be Blue Frog’s. Luckily, it was a Friday, so he was not going to have to see Diane tomorrow.
“God save us from these naive employees”, Diane said to herself.
Ron lay low for a while, licking his wounds. A few weeks later, he reached the conclusion that they needed a new visualization engine. He simply could not make heads or tails of the storage traces he was seeing, with the legacy visualization system. It was hard work; he had to learn a lot about web pages, how to build them, add complex graphics, how to keep the size down. He started making a name for himself with the salespeople. They would call him up and asked for help showing customers how much better they would fare with the new Toad-2001 storage system. It was going great, they were making money for the company.
Ron was waiting, looking at the frog picture again. That morning, he received an email from Diane, for an unscheduled meeting at 2 pm. “This time, I will get the recognition I deserve, for doing such a good job,” he thought. Some of those customer accounts were really hard to get into, and they managed to get their foot in the door for the first time.
Diane was on the phone and motioned for him to sit down. Outside, it was raining, and a flock of turkeys was trotting down the hill. They were magnificent, fanning out their tails, and bobbing their blue heads.
“Ron, it has come to my attention that you wrote a visualization engine, for our salespeople,” Diane said.
“Yes, they are very happy with it -”
“You realize that we don’t work for them?”
“Sure, but they are the ones that make money, so -”
“That means that there is no funding for your pet project. You should get back to working on a paper for the next academic conference; as we were discussing last week” Diane said.
“I was taking initiative, doing something new and needed; the CEO said that we treasure wild turkeys.”
“Wild turkeys?” Diane laughed. “Look how many we have outside, we don’t need anymore.”
Ron held back tears as he shuffled his way out the door. He was feeling so good, he let himself believe there was a technical achievement award in store. A month went by, winter arrived, and a new project came up. By spring, Ron was entirely absorbed in a collaboration with a Boston team. They were building a portal for processing voice calls to Saint Jude’s hospital. The goal was to automate the complex directory, answer simple questions by machine, and switch to a human operator when needed. The Boston office was doing the natural language processing, Ron’s side developed the database and storage back end. Initially, things went well, but after six months, progress on the Boston side slowed down. Diane harped on it incessantly and talked about how good her team was. They were on track to miss their end of year milestone, and Diane never looked happier. One day, a college friend of Ron’s from Boston, asked him why their database was so slow. Ron started after work, at 10 pm, to look at the code. He didn’t get it, the database was blazingly fast, what could be the problem? At 12 pm he rubbed his eyes and got more coffee. At 1 pm he was completely puzzled. At 2 pm, eyes nearly shut, he figured it out. Boston was using an old access library, from 2009!
The next day, the Boston side managed to complete a week’s work in one day. By week’s end, they were closing on the milestone. Two weeks passed, and Diane was pacing the corridors liked a caged leopard.
“Ron, did you tell them about the 2009 library?” Diane asked. It was more of an accusation than a question.
“Sure. The CEO said we are supposed to share expertise, right? Besides, it’s a government contract, we want to look good.”
“God help us!” Diane said “I have been jockeying to move the entire project over here because the Boston team is so incompetent!” she stalked back to her office and slammed the door.
Two weeks later, the milestone was achieved, and they were in the news. The headline read “Blue frog helps children with cancer”, and below was a picture of Ron, Diane, and the others, smiling to the camera.
Ron’s wife studied the picture and noted that Diane’s smile looked like she just stepped on a dead cat.
THE END
