"Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever. It is so, so much harder to leave a good thing."

— Po Bronson, 2002,
"What Should I Do With My Life?
The True Story of People Who
Answered the Ultimate Question,"
New York: Random House.

When I started at San Francisco State, my old friend and new colleague Robert Saltzman advised me to treat each course as a Continuous Improvement Project. This has proven to be good advice, for I'm always amazed, in retrospect, about how little I had actually known before teaching a class for the first time. Looking forward to the new semester, I'm inspired to get back to it, to strive for success, to go deeper into the mystery of how a teacher connects with and contributes to the students' experience (what my friend Rich Murphy has dubbed "The Calculus of Intimacy"[1]). I feel lucky to have the chance to do it all over again.

But this past week, I heard from three friends for whom the whole damn drum set had come crashing to the floor, and each of them swore that he just didn't have the will to pick it back up and start the same banging all over again.

"Dane Williamson," 41, had spent nearly two decades managing complex IT projects, most recently as a director with a large insurance company. "Manny Johansen," 31, had been a very successful process improvement consultant. "Archie Flowers," 37, had been a manager with several technology firms on both coasts. All of them had hit the wall.

Dane had wandered into his career, starting as a technical programmer/consultant and then moving into project management. His strengths — highly organized, detail-oriented, technically capable, quick to learn, solid work ethic, committed to straight talk — made him wildly successful for many years. ("Look," he tells me, somewhat modestly, "I just did my job.") Over time, he found it more and more difficult to locate the passion for dealing with the constant conflicts that a PM faces. When his commitment to quality and professionalism came in conflict with his employer's values ("All that anybody cared about was the stock price. ... People did not matter at all."), he looked within and felt he had no choice but to leave. More surprisingly, after a few months of vacation, he found that he simply lacked the desire to go back to managing technical projects within any large company.

Manny was a star, working for several years in a very large industrial firm as a quality management/process improvement specialist. He experienced success at every level, earning certifications, stellar performance reviews and top-of-pay grade raises along the way. And yet he was not happy. "I became more and more convinced that what I was doing did not matter," he says. "I could re-engineer and improve processes really well, but I saw fundamentally bad decisions being made all around me, and I was not empowered — or incented — to do anything about it."

Escaping gracefully into an MBA program, Manny gained access to a bigger tool set and a broader perspective while in school. Once graduated, however, he was surprised to find that the companies most interested in his services wanted him to take on the same type of internal quality consultant role that he had left behind. The job offers were lucrative and enticing, especially in the face of substantial personal debts (student loans, wedding bills), his undeniable expertise and extensive experience, and a strong connection between his own sense of self and his job. But he simply could not go on being a small cog repairing other cogs in a huge machine.

Dane and Manny left their employers voluntarily. Archie was fired. In his position as manager of technology services for a mid-size consulting company, he encountered unethical behavior, political gamesmanship and what he considered to be "gross mismanagement." His reward for addressing these problems honestly and directly with senior management was a pink slip.

Archie had been a success at everything he had ever done, gotten into every college he applied to, had climbed faster than the norm at every company that he had ever worked at. So he figured he would get a similar position at another firm relatively quickly, and in a different economy he well might have. But his search took some time getting off the ground, and during that time he realized that he simply did not want to go back to another corporate environment. What he really wanted was to start one of his own.

So these friends of mine — each desperately seeking less hierarchy, more control and a chance to do something new — have all moved on. Dane purchased a small Internet store and is now applying his multi-dimensional talents to figuring out how to grow it. Manny joined a start-up company in the online advertising space, where he'll do a variety of new things (ironically, he also may be called upon to use his process improvement skills as the company grows). And Archie launched a services firm of his own, providing computer services to individuals and small businesses, where he currently serves as chief cook and bottlewasher.

Time will tell. They're living it. I salute their courage.



Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University, and an operations management consultant.

References

1. Murphy, Richard J., 1993, "The Calculus of Intimacy: A Teaching Life," Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

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