Not Very Flexible…
I spent the car ride home last night thinking of ways to tell my wife, some funny, others blatantly to the point. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, since I’ve experienced it four times in the last year and a half.
- “I’ve been wanting to spend more time with the kids anyway!”
- “Now I don’t have to worry about the CEO’s online earning release conference call next week while we’re on vacation!”
- “I got two paychecks this pay period!”
- “That old 8 to 5 thing is terribly overrated!”
- “I’ve decided that I’m going to work six months out of the year, and you’re going to work the second six months!”
- “Tag, you’re it!”
- “You know how I’ve been complaining about getting up before 7:00. Well, now I can sleep in more!”
I finally settled on “I’m not working at Flextronics anymore.” It’s never good news, so I just wanted to get it out in the open.
The weirdest thing about the whole situation is that I woke up yesterday feeling strange, nothing I could pinpoint. I felt ill and my stomach was unsettled all morning. I’m a pattern watcher. I study people, their reactions, their actions, their inner moods, their outward demeanor. Someone’s unusual deviations from standard routines are plainly evident to me and filed for later analysis. Strange things were going on — atypical meetings between upper management and Human Resources; typically chilly reactions even colder; decisions bypassed; information withheld — none of these blatant, just barely under the radar. I knew something was wrong.
I hadn’t previously been worried about my position, as Flextronics was desperately in need of someone to take control of its intranet, corporate site, and portals. Everything was in complete and total disarray when I arrived, the reputation of the web team was in the toilet, and the websites were ill-used as the effective tools they could have been. Flextronics’ internal communication has been and continues to be severely crippled or otherwise nonexistent. It saddens me most to realize that all the improvements, all the positive enhancements, the increased support for the team, the inroads paved to release a company-wide centralized intranet as the foundation of the company’s future success, all will be thrown out. Compliments were given to the team’s efforts almost daily in the last couple of months. Not one negative comment was received in the last 30 days, compared to the dozens of weekly complaints during the first calendar quarter. The e-communication initiative was proceeding exactly according to plan. Everyone was excited!
Flextronics was on track to save over $400,000 by the elimination of outsourcing costs related to internationalization and localization of its intranet. That doesn’t take into account the potential savings of millions of dollars it spends every year in IT costs just in creating, deploying, developing, and maintaining its 50-plus intranet sites located all over the world. And those were just the ones we knew about. Business units throughout the various regions kept creating new websites almost every week, popping up strange internal and (God forbid!) external customer-facing atrocities, websites that a company number one in its industry can do without. As people around the world began to see the progress, the rogue sites slowed. They started communicating instead.
Not to say that it was easy. I faced a tremendous number of obstacles. First I wanted to cut out $2.5 million in IT costs by spending $750,000 for a company-wide enterprise-class content management and deployment system and the developers to complete it. “No.” I asked for $300,000 for a QA manager, a designer, and various enterprise software packages to get about 80% of what we needed. “No.” I wanted just a designer to assist in various internet projects in an effort to increase user’s efficiency and productivity. “No.” Can I hire my intern permanently? “No.” I needed $4,000 to license a package that, in trials, made the web team 80% more efficient and would allow greater communication for the worldwide web developers. “No.” How about a couple thousand dollars to hire a designer part-time on a per-project basis? “Not yet. Maybe someday.” Some books, perhaps? “Sure. Don’t spend more than $150.”
But the biggest obstacle was the management structure into which I reported. I never thought I’d hear an employed IT professional proclaim “performance is not a concern”, “quality is not important”, “it doesn’t matter how many errors there are on the website; customers will never see them”, let alone hear my boss at the industry-leading electronics manufacturing firm repeat them during my exit interview, of course noting that in January the live corporate website had over 6,500 errors on it, while in April through June the number of errors fluctuated between zero and one, thanks to my efforts. I was told during that same exit interview that because I thought differently about quality and performance, I didn’t fit in. Odd, considering the push by the executive management team to be compliant with ISO 9001. Well, maybe it’s not so odd, after all; my boss and I attended a quality management training program late one afternoon. He left in the middle of it after signing the roster in an attempt to pull a fast one and get course credit. It didn’t work. I stayed and got full credit. I’m sure CEO Michael Marks would love to hear that his very highly paid director-level IT management team neither conforms to his policies on quality nor supports his corporate-wide communication initiatives.
I always associated “resign or we’ll terminate you” with melodramatic movies of a bygone era, not with 21st century corporate America. OK, maybe with the occasional executive at Enron, Worldcom, or Arthur Andersen, or in high-profile cases where theft or sexual harassment were involved. All this on the exact six-month anniversary of my start date, coincidentally the first day after the expiration of my negotiated severance package. It will be interesting to see what other events unfold over the next week or two that may impact my decision whether or not to be litigious.
I may sound bitter, totally against the company or lambasting specific individuals, but I’m not. I just have to learn not to wake up in the middle of the night agonizing over the big picture of Flex’s IT failures, the backward steps that will occur with every passing day that I am not there to hold the fragile system together. You can have the best laid foundation possible, but if the structure remains only partially built, it is inevitable that the entire building will be torn down. That saddens me. It may sound like I’m blowing my own horn, but I’m not. You have no idea how bad it truly was, is, and will be. The company itself is sound, incredibly able to continue its financial climb through its executive leadership, but it’s IT management is unfortunately typically mediocre at best.
If I really was bitter and had no faith in the company, I wouldn’t have bought thousands of dollars of stock on the open market the day after I was let go. Let that be the ultimate message as to what I truly feel about the company…
Well, like I said, at least I can sleep in a bit more now…
How frustrating. It was so hard for me to believe stories such as this when I first entered the IT field, but now they seem to be cropping up everywhere. Hope something turns up for you!
*sigh* One day out of a job an already the computer skills are starting to fade. “carride” “wierdest” “stomache” (Although I kinda like this as an abreviation for stomach ache. Or did Mr Quayle get a hold of your spell checker?) “nonexistant”
I know how you feel. I work(ed) for a company 4 hours away. I used to only get home at weekends. I need to be out of the house by 5am on a monday morning to be in work for 9am. I got a phone-call at 4am one monday morning saying “Ummm, don’t bother coming in this morning, or any other morning. You’re fired.” The bas**rds owned me close to
Sean, “carride” can be considered a closed, temporary compound word as defined by the Chicago Manual of Style, but could go either way. “wierdest” and “nonexistant” are just the kind of spelling mistakes one experiences at midnight the day after being laid off! “stomache” has always been one to throw me a loop (no pun intended), as I always confuse it with the Old French “stomaque” and I swear that there was once an Old English version spelt the same way. All corrected. Thanks for commenting on my spelling instead of my content!