by Adams, Scott
My mother decided to try her hand at selling real estate once her three kids were old enough to stay alive on their own. She became an agent and did well enough to build up some savings that would go toward our college educations. My mother told us from the time we could understand language that all three of us were college bound, like it or not. In my family, only an aunt had ever attended college. My mother decided to change that. Later, when the real-estate market got saturated with brokers and agents, she took a job for minimum wage on an assembly line, winding copper wires around speaker magnets for eight hours a day. That money too went toward our education. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a step in the right direction.
My mother decided that I should become a lawyer. She spent a good deal of energy convincing me that it was a good plan. The two lawyers in our town were doing well, and my grades seemed strong enough to make a legitimate run at the legal profession. I didn’t know much about the job of lawyering, but I did like the idea of making good money and someday escaping my little town. I signed on to my mother’s plan and set my sights on a career in law. All I needed to do was figure out how to pay for college.
One day in eleventh grade health class our gym teacher/health teacher mentioned that our small school (there were about forty kids in my class) had never produced a student who earned an academic scholarship to college. He explained that one unusually tall and athletic student had managed to get a basketball scholarship before blowing out his knee in his freshman year, but no one had earned a college scholarship based on academics alone. The teacher speculated with confidence that this was about to change. He announced that one student in our grade was likely to get an academic scholarship. This news surprised me. I looked around my small classroom and couldn’t figure out whom he meant. Curiosity got the best of me and I raised my hand. “Who are you talking about?” He stared at me in a gym-coach way, either annoyed or surprised by the question. Then he answered in a confident voice, “You.”
I didn’t believe him. He was just one guy with an opinion. But my mother told me I was going to college one way or another, so I set about the task of figuring out how that happens. This was well before the days of highly involved parents. I was pretty much on my own. Our guidance counselor pointed to a wall-length shelf that was full of college pamphlets and books and gave me this valuable career guidance: Pick a few colleges that look good and fill out some applications. This was not the precise sort of career advice that one would hope for. I skimmed a few college books and felt lost. How could I possibly know the best choice for me?
Luckily, a new kid had joined my class a year earlier. New students were rare. I attended kindergarten with about thirty-five of the forty kids I graduated with, and most of those classes were in the same building. This new kid, Peter, came from some exotic city, or maybe it was a suburb, where people knew how the world worked. I followed his lead and did what he did. I decided to major in economics because Peter told me that would be a good prelaw degree. Then I followed him around in the guidance counselor’s tiny library of college information and learned that the process for applying to each college was described in those books. Eventually I picked two colleges that looked good on paper. And by that I mean the schools were located within driving distance, they offered degrees in economics, and the photographs of their campuses were pleasing.
My first choice, Cornell, had two factors working against it. The first was a tragic men-to-women ratio that guaranteed I would graduate a virgin. The other was that I applied too late and missed its deadline. Cornell informed me that I was on its wait list. My only chance of getting into that school was if some sort of fast-moving plague killed all of the people who knew there was a deadline for applying.
The only other college I applied to was Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. Hartwick had several things going for it. It was a one-hour drive from home, so travel would be affordable. It had a well-respected nursing major, so there were more women than men. And it accepted me. It was my only option. This is when I learned that one should not seek life-altering advice from a kid named Peter whose primary credentials were that he once lived in a suburb or maybe a city. Either way, it was a bad idea to apply to only two colleges and a worse idea to choose those two colleges based on the quality of the photographs in the brochures. (Full disclosure: Attending a college with a favorable male-female ratio turned out to be genius.)
My next problem was that my parents couldn’t afford to send me to Hartwick, which is a pricey private college. So I applied for an academic scholarship. To my surprise, but not the surprise of my gym teacher/health teacher, Hartwick granted me a partial academic scholarship. I also received some small scholarships from the state of New York. With my parents’ savings, plus my own savings from mowing lawns and shoveling snow for years, I had almost enough. I figured I could work a few jobs at school and close the gap. And so my college career began. I would study economics and aim for law school later. I escaped from Windham, New York, but just barely. Things would not get easier.
A short time into my first semester at Hartwick, I discovered several interesting pastimes that might fit under the heading of adult fun. The drinking age was eighteen in those days, and I was fresh off the leash. Soon, thanks to many delightful distractions, my grades dipped below the level that Hartwick expected from an academic scholarship recipient. The dean sent a letter putting me on notice. The scholarship would be rescinded unless I got my grades up. At about that same time, I came down with a world-class case of mononucleosis. The college nurses were impressed; they had never seen a case so severe. My glands were so swollen that my throat almost closed entirely. I couldn’t even swallow. The college physician advised me that I would be too drained and sleepy to study, and my best bet was to pack up my stuff and drop out. He suggested that maybe I could come back to college someday and start over. It was my choice, he explained, but his medical advice was to regroup, recover at home, and try college another time. I had been in college for only one semester and I was on the verge of complete failure.
This was one of those times when the difference between wishing and deciding mattered. I didn’t wish to stay in school; I decided. For the next two weeks I stayed in a bed in the college infirmary, struggling to stay awake long enough to read my textbooks and keep up to where I assumed the class would be. Upon release, I discovered I was actually a month ahead in some of my classes. My grades climbed back where they needed to be and I marched on.
I had ignored my father’s advice to work for the Postal Service. That turned out to be a good idea. I got into college without much help from my guidance counselor, and I stayed in school against my doctor’s advice. This was about the time that my opinion of experts, and authority figures in general, began a steady descent that continues to this day.
As I learned more about the legal profession, I realized it wasn’t a good fit for my personality. I’m not the sort of person who feels comfortable winning when it means the other side loses something of equal or greater value. I’d feel even worse if I were to win a victory for my client that was ill deserved and accomplished only through my weasel-tastic skills. I had been raised to decline offers of candy from family friends under the theory that I had done nothing to deserve it. I was the kind of person who needed a job that made other people happy, ideally with a side benefit of making me rich and famous too. And for that I needed a system.
I decided that my talents would be best suited for creating and running some sort of company. To acquire the necessary skills I would complete my economics degree and get an entry-level job at a big bank. I would take as many company-paid training classes as I could and learn all there was to know about business from a banking perspective. I also hoped to complete my MBA at night on the company’s dime. I was agnostic about what specific sort of business I would someday run. All I knew for sure is that I needed to be ready when the time was right.
This brings me to my system. I still have the diary I wrote when I gradu
ated from Hartwick, in which I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.
My plan wasn’t the one and only practical path to success. Another perfectly good plan might involve becoming a salesperson who works on commission in an industry that handles extraordinarily expensive items such as rare art, airplanes, or office buildings. It might take years to get into one of those positions, but no one said success would be fast or easy. I don’t have the salesperson gene, so selling expensive items wasn’t a good plan for me. I figured my competitive edge was creativity. I would try one thing after another until something creative struck a chord with the public. Then I would reproduce it like crazy. In the near term it would mean one failure after another. In the long term I was creating a situation that would allow luck to find me.
It helps a great deal to have at least a general strategy and some degree of focus. The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, focus is always important.
My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal oriented instead of system oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall. But being systems oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project I happened to be working on. And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off.
Today’s the day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My Corporate Career Fizzled
In the spring of 1979, adorned in the same cheap suit I’d worn on the flight to California, I walked into a San Francisco branch of Crocker National Bank and asked for a job as a teller. The manager hired me on the spot. I needed a job right away because all I owned was my ill-fitting clothes, a plastic alarm clock, a watch that worked occasionally, a toiletry bag, and two thousand dollars that my parents had scraped together as a college graduation present. My plan was to start at the bottom and claw my way to the top.
My degree in economics made me somewhat overqualified for the teller job, and yet I still managed to be dreadful at it. My people skills were good enough, but I somehow found a different way to misplace money or transpose numbers nearly every shift. I’m not good at any sort of task that has to be done right the first time. I’m more of a do-it-wrong-then-fix-it personality.
My supervisor liked me, but my sloppiness at keeping track of people’s transactions—which in those days involved writing down numbers with a pen and paper—made me unfit for the job. My supervisor warned me that unless I improved quickly, she would be forced to let me go. I knew I wasn’t likely to get better at handling details. I was a failure at my first job.
I figured I had two ways to leave my job. I could get fired or—and here’s the optimist emerging—I could get promoted. I wrote a letter to the senior vice president for the branch system, who was probably seven or eight layers of management above me, and described all of my naive suggestions for improving the bank. My ideas had one thing in common: They were impractical for reasons a twenty-one-year-old wouldn’t yet appreciate. I closed my letter by asking for a rare and coveted spot in the management training program, a fast track to upper management. It was a long shot for a guy who had on his permanent work record some version of “too incompetent to write numbers on a piece of paper.”
I included in my letter a list of my qualifications that contained a witty reference to getting robbed twice at gunpoint in the course of my work, which was true. As luck would have it, the senior vice president was a six-foot-ten, red-headed, bearded elf of a man who had a great sense of humor. He read my letter and invited me to his office for an interview.
The senior vice president told me that my suggestions for improving the bank were underwhelming, but he liked my sense of humor, and because of that he had a hunch about my potential. A month later I started the management training program. Somehow I had failed my way to a much better job.
In my eight years at the bank, I was incompetent at one job after another. At various times I was a branch banking trainee, project manager, computer programmer, product manager, lending officer, budget supervisor, and a few other jobs I’ve forgotten. I never stayed in one job long enough to develop any legitimate competence, and I’m not entirely sure additional experience would have helped in my case. It seemed as if my only valuable skill were interviewing for the next job. I got hired for almost every job I pursued in the bank, and each was a promotion and a raise. It was starting to seem as if I might be able to interview my way to some sort of senior executive position in which no one would notice I was totally skill free. That was my hope.
My banking career ended when my boss called me into her office and informed me that the order had come down to stop promoting white males. The press had noticed that senior management was composed almost entirely of white males, and the company needed to work harder to achieve something called diversity. No one knew how many years that might take, so I put my résumé together and sent it to some of the other big companies in the area. I had officially failed at my banking career and, against all odds, my incompetence wasn’t the cause.
The local phone company, Pacific Bell, unwisely offered me a job, and I accepted. Once again I got a big raise, thanks to my interviewing skills and the fact that I had nearly completed my MBA at Berkeley, attending classes at night. I looked great on paper. Little did they realize that looking good on paper was my best skill.
A few weeks after I left my job at Crocker, an acquiring bank fired everyone in the department I’d left behind. My failure as a banker allowed me to escape to a new job before the firing. This was one of many examples in which the universe makes sure there isn’t much of a link between job performance in the corporate world and outcomes.
Pacific Bell put me on its version of the fast track, which employees referred to as being “in the binder.” Higher levels of management kept printed lists of the up-and-comers in three-ring binders, so they could mentor us and, presumably, so they could hedge their bets in case one of us passed them on the management ladder. It’s a bad idea to be a jerk to someone who might be your boss in five years.
About 60 percent of my job at Pacific Bell involved trying to look busy. I was in charge of budgeting, and the actual work was far from challenging, even for me. Most of my budget spreadsheets had formula errors, but that didn’t matter because all of the inputs from the various departments were complete lies and bullshit. If anything, my errors probably smoothed out some of the bullshit and made it closer to truth. It was a truly absurd existence.
My biggest complaint was that smoking was allowed in offices in those days, and a chain-smoker was in the cubicle next to me. I sat in a cloud of her tobacco stench all day. I tried asking her not to smoke, but all that did was turn her into an unfriendly smoker, and that wasn’t an upgrade. I asked my boss to relocate my cubicle, but there were so many smokers that the new location had just as much of a tobacco fog.
As luck would have it, the company had a robust workplace-safety program, and one day management passed around a document listing common workplace hazards and asked us to sign it. One of the listed hazards was secondhand smoke. The company encouraged employees to be proactive about safety, so I did just that. I declare
d my workplace a safety hazard and informed my boss that I would need to stay home until it was remediated. I don’t think he took me seriously.
The next day I stayed home and called in to see if the hazard had been eliminated. My boss said it had not, so I cheerily thanked him for the update and said I would keep checking back. I was happy to do my part to make the workplace safer. Telecommuting wasn’t yet practical because the Internet was still a zygote, so I didn’t even need to work from home. So far, I had a paid day off and nothing but fresh air to breathe. My plan was working.
On day two, my boss’s boss called and asked what the problem was. I explained the situation and he listened. He was an engineer by training, and he couldn’t find a flaw in my reasoning. I was applying the company policy exactly as it was intended. He wasn’t a smoker, so I think he saw the point. I thanked him for listening and said I would check back periodically to see if the workplace was safe for me to return. I was professional and upbeat about it, in part because I thought it was funnier that way.
I expected to get fired. And I expected to call the local newspaper afterward and see if it wanted an interesting story. This was the first time I realized how attracted I am to controversy.
On day three, if I recall, my boss’s boss called to say he had discussed the issue with a few levels of management above and they had agreed to make everything but their own private offices smoke free. And they had agreed to close their doors when they smoked. I returned to work, happy in the knowledge that my cubicle was relatively smoke free, and as a bonus the smokers in senior management were closing their doors and turning their offices into extra effective carcinogenic hotboxes. It’s hard to imagine a better result.
I thought my career at Pacific Bell was going well. I finished my MBA classes at Berkeley’s evening program and probably moved ahead of a few people “in the binder.” One day a district manager position opened and I was a contender, or so I thought. My boss’s boss’s boss called me into his office and explained that the order had come down to stop promoting white males. Pacific Bell had a diversity problem, and it might take years to fix it, if it was ever fixed. My bid for upper management at Pacific Bell was officially a failure.