Day 192 - Saddle Up Boys!

            I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in a lot of the westerns I’ve been watching with Nelson. Almost every movie we’ve watched in the last two weeks features a rape scene. First of all I don’t remember westerns being like that. Certainly the ones I watched growing up were pretty tame by comparison. They even used to make jokes about the cowboy hero being more attached to his horse than he was to the appreciative damsels he’d rescued from the guys in the black hats.

Apparently though there was a period from the late sixties to the early eighties where the producers felt that they had bump up the sexual content of the few westerns they made in order to compete at the box office with the non-western fare. I don’t know why this translates into a lot of rape scenes. You’d think that they would be able to get some sex into a movie without creating what surely must be a distorted picture of the unbridled randiness of the American cowboy, but there it was for Neslon’s and my viewing pleasure—ten movies, ten rapes.

          You have to appreciate that this is more than a little disconcerting to Nelson. He’s not a prude, and he’s certainly not above using some fairly explicit language when the occasion warrants, but on balance Nelson has always been a true Southern gentleman. He lived in a house with his wife and four daughters. He has always gone to great lengths to protect those women from the rougher and more unseemly edges of male society. He won’t ever use bad language in front of his girls, nor will he suffer anybody else to do it.

Anne tells the story of playing many rounds of golf with her dad at a municipal course in their hometown in Kentucky. After she got married and her new husband had had the opportunity to go a couple of rounds with Nelson, her husband asked Anne how she could stand to play golf with her dad.

          “What do you mean?” she asked.

          “How do you stand all the cussing?”

          She had no idea. Nelson’s game was completely different when Anne played with him. I wonder which kind of round was the most satisfying to Nelson, the rude or the genteel.

          At the end of our two weeks of uninterrupted raping we found a movie with Candice Bergen. It was made when she was quite young and very pretty. I was pretty sure that she was going to play a classy role, and we were going to get a break from all the rapes. I was wrong. About 20 minutes into the film, Oliver Reed is forcing himself on her, ripping her clothes off, and engaging in fairly violent sex.

“Isn’t that Edgar Bergen’s little girl?” Neslon asked.

“Yes it is,” I said.

“It’s a good thing your wife isn’t here to see this,” he said. “If she comes out, you need to turn this off.”

My wife was busy in her office. She didn’t come out so we continued to watch. Apparently Candice Bergen’s character liked the rough sex because it wasn’t very long and she was head over heels in love with Reed—another thing I’ll never understand about the movies. Guys in the movies get away with stuff the rest of us would be thrown in jail for. You have to wonder how many men—women too—model their behavior towards the opposite sex on stuff they see in the movies and on TV—more than we’d care to know, I’d guess. That sure would explain a lot though, wouldn’t it?

Candice Bergen isn’t the only ingénue I’ve seen in the movies who becomes smitten with a guy who forces his attention upon her. There’s a lot of this kind of crap in the movies that just flat doesn’t square up with real life. I guess you could excuse it because, after all, it’s just the movies, but I have to think that a lot of impressionable people are taking a skewed view of the universe away from the movies and trying to put it into practice in places where it doesn’t work out very well.

For instance, I wonder how many MBAs toiling in the analysis trenches of big hedge funds got their fundamental attitudes about mergers and acquisitions from watching Danny DeVito in “Other People's Money” or Jonathan Pryce as Henry Kravis in “Barbarians at the Gate?” Or how many sales guys learned closing techniques from “The Boiler Room” or “Glengarry Glen Ross?”

This is not far fetched at all. There is actually a website that uses motion pictures to teach principles of management. Can you imagine learning management skills from “The Wizard of Oz”, or “The Godfather”? If not then you need to visit Management Goes to the Movies at www.moviesforbusiness.com and register yourself for a Hollywood MBA.

That’s business advice. I went there because that’s what I’ve been thinking about today. The movies I’m watching with Nelson are all about relationship advice—specifically how to manage your women.

Nelson and I both get tickled over the kissing phenomenon in films. Hero and heroine usually start out having some kind of conflict—big egos, big hat, big hair, big breasts, and big horse all seem to add up to sexual tension and personal friction—until the big kiss that is.

There always comes a moment when, in the heat of arguing over minutia, the hero and heroine suddenly have nothing left to say to one another. Clearly things are not working out between them. This is when they stare into one another’s eyes, fall into one another’s arms, and kiss. Something amazing happens during this kiss, to be revealed as the kiss ends and the heroine is suddenly vulnerable, docile, and compliant while the hero is noble, sensitive, and protective. 

This is the point in a movie when Nelson invariably remarks, “That guy must be a really good kisser, don’t you think?”

Love has bloomed before our eyes and in the space of several seconds. Not just any love either, but perfect movie love. Love, the dynamic of which appeals to the lowest common denominator in each of us and satisfies the simplistic expectations we were given as children by fairy tales and heavily edited family histories. People believe this crap because they want to, and seeing it over and over again in film after film reinforces it and makes it part or our cultural legacy. Fortunately, at least so far as the Western rapes are concerned, only Nelson and I seem to be watching.

Day 89 - Shooting the Messenger and other English Traditions

Essential tools of English management.

          The Colorado recruiter finally called back today. He said the juice packer client was looking for someone with an active CPA. I would have taken this at face value, but the other recruiter who claimed to have a solid and lengthy relationship with the employer had told me that they were not looking for a current CPA but only someone with public accounting experience. Who am I to believe? The local recruiter hasn’t returned my calls yet. Maybe she found out she was mistaken. Maybe the employer changed their mind. All I know is, I seem to be suddenly short on credentials.

          I was a CPA once. I let my license lapse by accident. I thought I could take it inactive indefinitely, and bring it back active by getting some continuing professional education in the form of seminars and online programmed training. I was mistaken. There is a time limit. I suppose at one time I knew that, but somewhere along the line I forgot it and the deadline passed unnoticed.

Now my license can’t be resurrected. To be a CPA again I would have to go back to school. The college coursework I took 30 years ago would count to an extent, but it would be insufficient. When I first got licensed I only needed a 4 year degree. Now I would need a total of 5 years of course work. Effectively that means to get another license I’d have to get a master’s degree and sit for the CPA exam again. I’m 61 and unemployed. I don’t have the time or money or the energy for that. I’m going to have to stay short on credentials.

          The unfortunate thing is that it’s an employers’ market for labor. With hundreds of candidates chasing every available controller and CFO position, the employers can require almost anything they can imagine in the way of qualifications. Now I’m seeing them requiring, in increasing numbers, active CPAs, advanced degrees, and significant and specific experience with a number of program disciplines such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing as well as experience with the major ERP platforms like SAP. I’m beginning to wonder if this all means that I’m going to have to wait for the recession to end and full employment to return before I can hope to get a job with my now obsolete skills set. Am I bummed? You bet!

*****

          For a time Albatross was the best place I had ever worked. It seemed to be a real company where Henry and Ivan’s companies had seemed more like playground sandboxes ruled by bullies. There is a line of dialogue that has always stuck with me from the TV series, Thirty Something, “Life is just a pale imitation of high school.” I never really followed Thirty Something, and today I don’t remember what the episode was about that had that line in it or even if I watched the episode or just happened to catch the line as I was switching channels. Whatever the circumstances the line, “Life is just a pale imitation of high school,” had for me an unforgettable and compelling resonance.

          The line contains a truth that may have been trickling into my consciousness at the time, but which did not fully register until I heard it spoken on television. That truth is this: I keep waiting for life to get real, to gain importance, to become consequential, but it never does. I saw high school and college as preparation for something that was supposed to be more serious, more meaningful. So all my time since college I have been looking for evidence that the important stuff has started at last—that life and death are, well, life and death. Everywhere instead I have found evidence that very little can actually be taken seriously. It’s the same old emotional effluvia we suffered in our adolescence. Once we recognize it for what it is, once we’re ready to dispense with the turmoil and the hormonal mudslides of our coming of age we find instead that all the crap continues unabated. It’s just no longer magnified by the crucible that is high school.

It seems that there is no ideal, no lofty concept, no momentous moment that cannot be diluted, denigrated, debased, or denatured by the actions of the supporting cast of my life. I learned in high school and college of grand themes and essential philosophies meant to underpin all that happens with meaning and import. When I began to live my life in earnest however, that is when I deemed that I was finished with the preparatory phases and undertook to leverage what I had learned into some significance of purpose, I found that I was thwarted on all sides. Nothing in real life has been as lustrous, as shining, as important as it seemed it would be in high school. Nearly everything has been tarnished by comparison, and tarnished not on its own lack of merit or capacity for greatness but rather by the poverty of capacity in so many of the players on my stage to recognize import and give it its due. Nowhere is this truer it seems to me than at work, and the final dawning came to me, over a time, at Albatross.

           Albatross had everything going for it when I got there. It had a long history. It had a loyal customer base. It had a mountain of cash. It had a talented, committed, and loyal workforce. It had new owners with a vision for the future. I thought I had arrived at last at real and momentous work. I thought I had found a home where my abilities would be nurtured and encouraged, where I would flourish, where I would at last find the fulfillment that I thought ought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of honest labor. I thought I had seen the last of arrogant, self-destructive blowhards like Henry and Ivan and of errant, tail-chasing buffoons like Fische. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

          My first inkling that my new paradise was just a veneer of civility and good sense pasted over the same old craziness came at a board meeting. Local management had presided over the sale of the company to a British holding company. The local organization was left largely intact, and the new British ownership group came to the U.S. once a month to update and redirect the business as they saw fit. The chairman was a man we will call Richard Hardin. Richard Hardin had almost single handedly put together a consortium of investors and lenders to buy Albatross and two Canadian companies in an effort to stake out a meaningful presence in North America.

          Now Richard, in addition to his plans for the core business, which was office and school furniture, had an equally ambitious vision for the boat segment. The boat business had been almost an afterthought for Albatross. They’d been building desks forever, and had carved out an early niche in school fixtures, locker systems, and bleachers. They started in boats in the sixties because their owners liked to camp and fish. They had developed a solid reputation over the years, but they had never made any real money in the boat business. By the time I came on the scene they were selling 80 to 100 small motor yachts in a typical year.

The business was break-even at best. If you take into account the lost opportunity cost, the money they could have made if they had reemployed the boat assets into the building of school school fixtures, the boat business was a loser. Loser though it may be, however, it was a high-profile business.

The boat products were stand-outs wherever they showed, and probably brought more than their fair share of attention and recognition to Albatross as a company. In other words the boat business had some value in terms of marketing, and it had a lot of glamour—glamour in which Albatross would not otherwise have been able to glory.

          Richard Hardin wanted to change all that. He liked the glamour and the high profile customers, but he wanted more. He wanted to grow the boat business into a profitable segment. He wanted to double its market share. He wanted to cut costs. He wanted to expand the product line. He wanted to do this within a year. He wanted to do all this at a time when the total motor yacht market, not counting the custom mega-yachts, had suffered two consecutive years of decline.

This is the scenario we walked into at my first board meeting with Richard Hardin. The sales guys took statistics prepared by the boating industry. They also took copies of the last 3 quarters of Nautical Surveys, an independently published compilation of boat registrations captured from the licensing and titling departments of all 50 states. This publication breaks down boat registrations by make, model, state and month and compares statistics to previous quarters and years. It is the bible when it comes to tracking the boat markets because it can’t be fudged. Most boat manufacturers and dealers will lie about their sales numbers to make things look better than they are. The registration numbers in Nautical Surveys are as real as they can get.

          What the sales guys hoped to accomplish was to convince Richard that doubling production to meet his optimistic sales projections was probably a mistake. The industry stats didn’t support his rosy outlook, and building a huge inventory of unsold boats was a path to financial ruin. Richard wasn’t having any. He had been listening to a fellow named Kaiser Dickson, then president of the largest and most profitable fiberglass boat manufacturer in the country, who had told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to develop a lower priced model and aggressively pursue increased sales volume in the middle price ranges.

The industry stats showed the middle and lower range sales flattening or declining. Dickson was giving Richard bogus information. He may have been doing it on purpose—a predatory trick to induce Richard to over-commit resources and send Albatross’s boat business into a tailspin. It may just as easily have been sincere error. Dickson’s company was at the top of its game at the time, and that is precisely the moment at which CEOs who have benefited largely from fortunate timing and other generous serendipities begin to believe in the efficacy of their own bullshit.

Richard’s reaction to the sales department presentation at the board meeting was to shoot the messengers. At one point he held up the copy of Nautical Surveys he had been given, waved it around like a bloodied battle flag, and announced that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. I was reminded of Henry’s characterization of my cash flow analysis as unfit for toilet paper.

Richard’s performance devolved from there to resemble one of Ivan’s profanity fests, except done with a British accent. The accent did little to refine the carnage, and I guess that one only need look at a survey of English history to know that, however civilized the accent sounds in the movies or theater stages, the English have always been a bloodthirsty bunch. They have a long and well established tradition from their Norman royalty right through the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Hanoverians of summarily dispatching anyone who disagrees with them—often including drawing and quartering the victim to make a lasting impression. Richard Hardin was not ignorant of his heritage.

          The sales force left the meeting pale, shaken, and of one resolve. They agreed with one another never to disagree with Richard again, no matter how ridiculous his ideas and no matter how predisposed those ideas might be to ruin. Eventually ruin is what we got. I knew it was on its way from the moment of that first meeting. You can’t scare your troops and expect to achieve any lasting victories. It doesn’t work. It might motivate them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, but sooner or later your lack of sound intelligence and analysis will undermine your efforts and you will fail spectacularly.

Day 60 - Trouble Brewing

          There was nothing of substance on the job boards today. I’ve noticed a pattern. Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to have the most new job postings. Then activity tapers off. Mondays seem to be the slowest. Of course this is only after a few weeks of observation so it may not be valid at all. I’m just saying.

          I like to study patterns and trends. If I had the patience for charting and graphing all my observations, I might know a hell of a lot more than I do. Still I watch and observe and file stuff away in my mind, and sometimes it helps me predict the future. Other times I am taken completely by surprise. Completely by surprise is a good characterization of my life with Ivan’s company. For the sake of brevity, let’s call them Quilnutz.

          While Fische, Ivan’s travelling second, was very like Ivan in his use of abusive and scatological language he was very different in one other important regard. Ivan was as nearly asexual as a man can get and still be married with children. Ivan was unmoved by and oblivious to anything remotely associated with feminine wiles. He was not a philanderer, a chaser, a flirt, a gawker, a backslapping exchanger of sexual innuendo, a speculator, or a teller of dirty jokes. He seemed immune to women with the exception possibly of his wife, and his receptiveness to her input must have been based on something other than romance as she was more manly by half than most of the men at Quilnutz. Further, Ivan seemed to have passed this immunity on to his son who also had little if any use for or attraction to women, although in the son’s case it would be hard to judge his predilections based on evidence that was likely influenced to some extent by the continual presence of manure on his boots.

Fische on the other hand may have been happy to share Ivan’s family dispositions in many things from salty talk to motorcycles and greasy foods to the smell of diesel, but asexual he was not. This led to some of the darkest days of my career.

          Shortly after Quilnutz took over our company Fische decided that the skill-set of my cost accountant would better serve the company in another capacity. He decided to make him the assistant production manager. Fische announced his intention to the cost accountant, let’s call him Rob, on the company jet during a trip to Florida. Rob stalled. Rob felt that he owed a certain amount of loyalty to me for plucking him out of the upholstery shop and giving him a chance to use his accounting degree for a change. Rob told Fische that he couldn’t give him an answer until after he had talked to me. Fische told him that it didn’t matter what I had to say in the matter, that Rob would be the new assistant production manager or he would be fired. Fische gave him two weeks to transition.

This kind of thing was typical of Fische’s heavy handed management style, something he had learned in the Marine Corps and carried with him throughout his civilian career. Everything with Fische was a battle, and success or failure was always measured by a body count.

          Rob came to me and laid out the new plan. I realized quickly that there would be no point in protesting. Anything I said at that point would get me another one of the by now famous Quilnutz lectures where the lecturer stands the lecturee up against a wall and yells obscenities at him until the paint blisters around him in a perfect silhouette. That way when they come to cart the carcass away there’s no need for the forensics people to make a chalk outline. I had two weeks to find and train a new cost accountant.

          My wife knew someone who might fit the bill. One of the other agents in the real estate office where my wife worked was a young woman with an accounting degree and some experience in oil and gas accounting. I knew oil and gas accounting to be a demanding field, so I reasoned that she would be smart and trainable and, more importantly, given the lack of otherwise qualified candidates in our area, a quick hire if she was interested. I gave her a call. She was interested. She came in for an interview the next day.

          My new candidate, the real estate agent, acquaintance and co-worker of my wife, let’s call her Alicia, was not just smart, educated, and trainable. She was also very attractive. She had a pretty face framed with a lush cascade of auburn hair. I did the interview, gave her a plant tour, and agreed to call her by the end of the week with a decision. After she left half a dozen fellows from the plant floor stopped by my office to thank me for giving her a tour of the plant floor so they could see her and to encourage me to make her an offer. They agreed to subsidize her salary if money became an issue. The women in the office, who I later learned all knew Alicia and loathed her, said not a word. Had they said something they might have helped prevent the train wreck that was about to happen, but they chose to keep quiet until it was too late.

          In my experience sometimes women will tell you too much too soon and sometimes they will tell you too little too late. In either case they expect men to glean from the exchange what constitutes to the women proper and sensible behavior. In either case a man will almost always guess wrong and in so doing set himself up for a boatload of censure from the women who could have conveyed useful information, but chose instead to put the poor bastard to the test.

          I made Alicia an offer, and she accepted. I was a hero among the men of the plant. I was a goat among the women. The trouble began shortly after, when Fische met her.

Day 55 - Henchmen

          I guess I gave satisfactory answers to the recruiters yesterday about my experience. One of them is going to submit my résumé to a client, and the other wants me to come to their office for a face-to-face interview. I’m glad I’ve got the new suit, but now I’m wishing that I had gone with the blue rather than the brown. I’m every bit as adept at calling my own opinions and decisions into question as Ivan was. I just use less profanity when I’m doing it.

          Ivan wasn’t alone in his predilection for strong language. He had a sort of travelling second in command. His real second in command was his son, but his son stayed close to home. In addition to his duties at work the son had a farm. When I met him the whole crew of them had flown down from their headquarters in the Midwest in their corporate jet to start their negotiations with us. Everyone had taken some pains to dress for the occasion except for the son. He wore jeans and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots that were caked with manure. Fortunately for the rest of us he raised cows rather than pigs.

          The travelling second in command, let’s call him Fische, was more urbane in his dress but no less earthy in his demeanor. One of the first things our new management did after they had taken over was to look for assets that they could sell off. We had a little Kubota tractor with a mower deck that we used to cut the grass in front of the plant. Fische came one day to me to ask where it was. I told him I thought it was in the back of the upholstery shop where there was a rollup door to the parking lot. He said he’d looked there and not found it. I told him I’d look into it. I asked around and found out that it was at Henry’s son-in-law’s house. The son-in-law usually cut the grass so this was not unusual or even alarming to me.

          I found Fische on the plant floor and told him where the tractor was. He launched on me in much the same fashion that Ivan had—streams of profanity obfuscating any sense he might have otherwise made. It was an awesome display of invective aimed principally at me that left me literally shaking when he finally ran out of breath. The gist of it seemed to be that we, the old management from Henry's company, were an incredibly ignorant bunch of thieves who were engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to steal the assets that Ivan's company had bought and had a legitimate right to use as they saw fit. It didn’t matter to him that I had come to him to tell him where the tractor was, and had even made arrangements to get it delivered back to the plant. I had no idea what to say in reply, so I just walked away.

          The final irony to this little exchange was that Fische had the tractor loaded onto a flatbed trailer and delivered 600 miles to Ivan’s son’s farm. We were credited for half it’s appraised value—the value on our books after the merger—and so had to take the first of many losses orchestrated by them and charged against our earn-out. It seems they were going to make it as difficult as possible for us to ‘earn’ any of the shares that had been escrowed for us.

          I witnessed a lot of profanity-laced yelling in the ensuing weeks and months of my association with Ivan’s company. It seemed to be one of the hallmarks of their management philosophy. I’ve seen similar management styles employed since, all with the same ultimately disastrous result. While the people engaged in the yelling and invective think they are instilling an appropriate level of urgency in the people they are yelling at, what they really do is ensure that the people they are yelling at will forever after go to great lengths to avoid being yelled at again. This does not translate into a workplace where everyone is efficiently engaged in moving the company toward its goals. It rather translates into a workplace where otherwise talented and creative employees stop taking any kind of risk in order to avoid censure. In other words they stop using their talent in creative ways, and focus instead on the immediate security offered by not drawing any attention to themselves. This becomes a kind of vicious circle in which management begins to believe that only they have good ideas, and that everyone who works for them is a slug requiring constant motivation by way of verbal lashings to accomplish anything at all. Eventually the company is crushed under the enormous weight of management’s artificially inflated opinion of its own worth.