More info on my background

After I completed a very early manuscript of my book, “The Exceptional Middle Manager”, a publishing agent told me to be careful that I didn’t put too much personal history in the introduction… “you’re not writing a memoir.” I took his advice but kept my notes about the earliest years of my career because I thought I might be asked about my career journey someday.

Now that I have a blog, I thought it might be useful to post those notes here. So, here they are :

Although I don’t know the original source, my favorite quote in life is:

 “If I had it to do over again, I’d never let an 18 year-old decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life!”

When I was 18, I actually wanted to become a psychologist, so I majored in Psychology at the University of Southern California, graduated with honors, and set my sights on graduate school. I was excited to be accepted into a great master’s degree program at Boston College, but then life intervened.  Due to pressing family issues, I never attended Boston College, and I never worked a day as a psychologist. Instead, I followed other unanticipated career paths and ultimately achieved considerable success in a variety of middle management and executive positions, over several decades, in the world of corporate mid-size and enterprise businesses.

My personal background -- An Unintended Life in Business

Despite all the years I’ve spent in business in general, and in the technology sector in particular,  my personal history is not the familiar story of a business school or computer science education that typically leads to the type of career I’ve had.  I entered the business world more or less through the side door, as a working-class kid, from humble beginnings, who did all kinds of odd jobs before I found myself on a business career path.

As a young teenager, I was already a hard worker who always had a job – mowing lawns, and working as a “plumber’s helper” for a couple of uncles who put me to work digging trenches and crawling under houses with pots of molten lead. While still in high school, I worked in a menswear store and, in the summer, as an under-age busboy in a Lake Tahoe casino. (I could write a whole book about that experience!)

While attending college, I pumped gas, painted houses, served as both janitor and gardener at a huge church in Southern California, and worked as a shipping and receiving clerk in a major book distributor.

After college, I worked for a year as a weights and measures inspector for a small county in the hills of Northern California. Then I returned to L.A. and worked as an entry-level management trainee at Transamerica Insurance Group. But I really didn’t want to spend my life in L.A., and I hit the road again when an old friend convinced me to join a special project in the social service system in the State of Montana. After a couple of years in Big Sky Country, I found my way to Seattle where I went to work for Seafirst Bank, which would soon become a Bank of America subsidiary. That’s where my career in business management really began.

Early in my banking career, in the pre-digital era when “a mountain of paperwork” was a real thing, I worked as a business forms designer. I was told that I had some potential for leadership, so they put me in charge first of a forms analysis team. After that came additional management roles, with increasing involvement in project management, operations management, and banking technology.

In those early days, I actually didn’t care much for the banking industry and was convinced I would spend only a short time there before I moved on to something I liked better. But life has a way of leading you in directions you did not foresee. As I started to master some of the lessons I talk about in my book, I became pretty good at management.  I was well rewarded by B of A, and before I knew it, some twelve years had gone by and I was the Assistant VP in charge of Retail Operations.

Around that time, a number of execs left B of A to launch another big banking initiative on the West Coast, and they drafted me to be their VP of Retail Operations. That job, a rollercoaster ride in the tumultuous world of mergers and acquisitions, lasted only about three years, until that bank was acquired by another bank… even as we were in the process of acquiring a smaller bank!

I had arrived at a major junction in my career. The acquiring bank offered me a choice: another VP role in their Operations group or a fairly generous severance package. At that point,  I recognized I still wasn’t all that fond of the banking business, but I was fascinated by the fast-evolving tech sector. I decided I was ready to make the leap into tech, so I took the severance package and ran.  As it happened, part of that generous severance package was some high quality “outplacement” counseling from some real pros. Their expert guidance was solid gold and served me well throughout the rest of my career. I have shared ome of that wisdom with the readers of my book. 

After crossing over into the tech industry, starting with Attachmate Corporation then moving to Microsoft, I spent most of my career serving customers from the technical support and operations side of the business, along with a couple of short stints in the product engineering and marketing divisions. I’ve had roles where I managed over 400 people, and roles where I was an individual contributor. I was never a senior C-level executive, but I’ve worked with plenty of them over the years, and I’ve come to know what makes them tick and how to communicate with them.

Some of you may reflect on these milestones in my career journey and think “that may have worked for you, a college-educated white guy in a bygone era, but today it’s much harder to land a job without the right credentials.” Well, I just left one of the biggest tech companies on the planet, and I need to tell you it might work differently than you expect.  I have worked alongside some very successful people, many a good deal younger than me, with college degrees as varied as English, anthropology, sociology, education, psychology, and even some people who had no college education at all but showed a high aptitude for a particular technical skill. Of course, that possibility is never reflected in an official description of a job that you might encounter, but as I discuss in the book, there are ways you can finesse official processes and find a job that is a good fit for you.

I left Microsoft a few years ago, then later returned as a consultant, working mostly with middle managers in the operations and services and support space. Today I serve as a management mentor to these same groups, along with other leaders in other companies and other industries.