This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “To initiate or not to initiate, that is the question,” a blog post published in slightly different fashion on the IBM Researcher platform on September 3, 2019. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published blogger. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
Carlos, the manager who hired me into IBM, was no longer my manager by the time I arrived at the White Plains, New York office. He had been transferred to a communications area elsewhere in the company. Apparently, this reassignment scenario was common: Employees said that IBM stood for “I’ve Been Moved.”
By my second day, the marketing executive, whose speechwriter I was supposed to be, had also been moved to a different division. His replacement was living in Japan and I had to wait for him to come back to the U.S. Just like that, I was “without a portfolio:” I’d Been Muted.
Being adrift without a manager or a raison d’etre put me in IBM purgatory. My new colleagues told me I could not last if I stayed there.
I reached out to various communications and marketing people to see what else I could do. Nothing clicked into place. Working on my graduate school paper about J.G.A. Pocock’s Virtue, Commerce, and History, which is how I was spending company time, was not going to earn me a passing grade on my employee evaluation. I couldn’t figure out how to keep my job from going over a cliff.
One colleague was unsympathetic to my plight.
“Somebody else would know how to canvas the communications function to get a new portfolio,” Wendy said.
I resisted Wendy’s criticism. Was it my fault that my manager and executive disappeared on me?
Privately, though, I wondered if Wendy was right. My biggest business weaknesses are networking and strategic thinking. Maybe I was too shy, too professionally maladroit, to navigate a matrixed organization like IBM.
I didn’t know enough back then to understand that even clients cannot always figure out their next step. Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt — the FUD Factor — was a natural part of entrepreneurship, especially in the early 2000s when all companies had to grapple with new enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management software. Hard to believe that companies circa Y2K were just getting their head around “e-business,” a concept now so baked into large-scale enterprises that the term has pretty much disappeared from daily discourse. If clients could be confused, why couldn’t I?
I told Sam, one of my instant IBM friends, that Wendy held me responsible for my stalled career. Sam encouraged me to call the head speechwriter’s administrative assistant and ask to join a speechwriter meeting scheduled for later in the day.
“Show initiative,” Sam counseled. “Demonstrate passion. The company will like that.”
Within fifteen minutes of my calling the head speechwriter’s admin, I got a call on my landline phone from my newly appointed manager. She wanted to see me in her office right away.
Probably to congratulate me for showing initiative.
“Close the door, please,” she said.
My manager said, “I guess you never worked at a big company before, and you don’t understand the politics around here.”
The admin had called my manager to complain about the crime of corporate passion I had just committed.
Turns out I had to run every idea that entered my initiative-taking pea brain past my manager. “We do not take unilateral action here,” she told me.
I was so chastened that for the rest of my time with the company — almost ten years — I dreaded speaking up. Occasionally, I would volunteer a comment at a communications meeting. But a single raised eyebrow — the non-verbal code that “Brook doesn’t get it” — would return me to silence.
After several months without a portfolio, Wendy asked me to join the new sales intranet team. I did. Writing stories about how each sales team closed a deal kept me alive. I was safe at IBM as long as I worked on an assigned task.
I wonder now if my getting chewed out twenty years ago for “taking initiative” was a sign that I should have left the company. Maybe some other place, maybe a startup, would have rewarded my initiative, not slapped me down for it. But I was a single mother of an eleven-year-old boy, and I needed job security more than self-respect. I stayed.
My decision, however abject, was fine in the long run. I wrote hundreds of stories about selling IT. I made friends I adore to this day. I’m even proud to say I worked at IBM. But my little contretemps with the head speechwriter’s office vitiated my belief that I had joined the “Harvard of the business world.” I felt I had joined the Riker’s Island of the business world.
If you are young, and you encounter a situation like mine, I would urge you to leave. Try your luck at a company that thrives on give-and-take. You shouldn’t have to worry about getting dinged for a stupid suggestion. Because what’s stupid now can be brilliant later. To wit, Sam and I approached that same manager, the one who told me I couldn’t take unilateral action, with an idea for an IBM TV show about selling IT. She shot us down. But within the next five years, a lot of us comms people were producing our own sales podcasts. Our essential idea, which had struck our manager as threadbare, was suddenly de rigeur.
Or do I still just not “get it?”
You can read this post on Brook’s Blog, a project of IBM Research.
