Of all the people I've worked with at my current job, the last people I thought they would ever fire were Dave and Mike.
It's a familiar story, perhaps. What started as a family company has endured and is now ripping at the seams to be more of a corporation. What was once, "make it work" is now being demanded to "standardize a process." It means push and pull between old guard and new, a need to evolve flexibility into repeatability. It's never easy, it's never clean, and once you reach a certain point - it's never anything but inevitable.
I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world. Quality matters.
Unfortunately, the cost is usually people.
The gurus. The magicians. The "we're coming to you because we're stuck, and everyone says you're the guy that can help us."
Trouble is, wizards and magicians are slow. Potions and incantations take time. Creativity. Duct tape can fix a lot of things, but whether we like it or not -- after a while everything starts to look like a patch.
Standardizing and consolidating ideas isn't the worst idea in the world. Half the time the edge that a guru provides is access to information. Technology and innovation can streamline, even automate something like that if the structures are understood. And it can do it faster, more reliably, and use it to trend, identify, and improve.
Or to put it another way, I get that not everybody can start a fire in substandard conditions. But it's kinda hard to argue with lightbulbs.
But before we start bemoaning the death of craft, let's remember what we're talking about here. Corporations. Companies. Profit.
What you really need are magicians who recognize the need for process standardization. People who have lived in the gaps long enough to get them, but are also forward-thinking enough to be able to conceptualize the best way to build a bridge over them. People who are good at meetings, and want to go to training seminars to discover new opportunities for partnership with tech guys who can connect the dots.
I'm generally not that guy.
Not because I can't envision it, or see the need. More like I have found a space where I feel like I function best like a firefighter. I can adjust to change, but just let me know when it's ready - I've got too much stuff on my plate for anything else right now.
But Dave and Mike were. Or they had a knack for presenting themselves as such. But more than that, they were also "made" guys, if that makes sense. They volunteered for things, led teams. Top floor guys would come to them directly. They were equal parts "rah-rah" and "things need to change around here" and they made it all work.
Where I was happy to be in the shadows casting incantations and pulling rabbits out of hats for project teams, they were in front suggesting new ideas and practices. There were new software programs, new processes, they had us in meetings a lot. Execs loved it. Potential was noticed. Processes were envisioned.
Projects have a way of snapping you back, though.
Dave and Mike were leaders on a hell project. It went bad, the way hell projects do. It frustrated them more than anyone because they knew what was needed - but future states can only get you so far. So they did what you do, they got out the duct tape.
Project got done. Dave and Mike got fired.
From the outside looking in, it seemed they took the fall for how messy it got. How unexpectedly chaotic the process turned out to be. Not for using duct tape, but for letting things get to a place where they had to.
I wasn't on that project.
Usually, my stuff is more chaotic by nature. Smaller scale, faster timelines. But this latest thing I'm on. This thing that's gone bad? The one where they keep saying we should have stuff, but we don't really have stuff?
I never thought they would ever fire guys like Dave and Mike.I never thought people would think of me as a guy like Dave or Mike.
..I'm worried.
[Now Playing: Alpha Wolf - "Akudama" ]
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