Mr.S: Because right now our company is moving like a slow elephant. We want to make it move like a cheetah.
Myself: The way I see this going, we are trying to become a mad elephant.
Myself: (Kept quiet, trying hard to not unleash my crude unrefined self..).
Mr.G: Because we've hired an elephant to do a monkey's job.
These are excerpts from some of the many debates that I had with some very well experienced senior folks at my work. These were on a contentious technical initiative at one of the companies that I worked for. Just a disclaimer, my intent here is not to make a comment or form a public opinion about the company. As usual, my intent it to share my experience and understanding of behavior of ordinary people in different situations of life.
In my ordinary career of 14 years so far, I have worked in 6 companies. 5 out of these 6 companies have been Giants in their respective domains of work. At one of my initial few companies, during a post appraisal discussions with my manager, I was expressing my deep discontent over being awarded the next to the best performance rating. My manager told something like - "Neeraj! You are a star resource and an exceptional performer. Resources like you keep yourself floating in the market. Soon some other company will pay you more and you'll be gone. I will be left with these loyal mediocre resources whom I need to keep satisfied and motivated to keep working for me, and keep contributing to my and the company's goals for one more year...". I was startled by the crude honesty and the smartness of the response. At that point in time, I neither had the experience nor the knowledge tools to counter that response. So I accepted the situation. In fact, I re-validated my managers' organizational acumen by floating to a bigger Giant within next few months :).
The above episode was my first encounter with the fact that an organization is much bigger than the individuals who form it. It doesn't mean that individuals are worthless. It means that when any decision is taken, be it an externally facing business decision or an internal operational decision, the organization's interests stand prime over the individuals' aspirations. Most of the freshers, junior employees, and a good portion of the start-level senior employees, tend to not have an understanding of this fact. This leads them to sound monotonously discontent about their ratings, management decisions, and the oversight of their work or opinions in the organization.
I am lucky to have bettered my understanding of this concept of "organization over individual". During one of my another appraisal discussions (this was many years later to that first encounter), my manager asked - "Neeraj, where do you see yourself in our company in next 5 years?" and I answered "Wherever the company wants me to be..". This time my manager was startled :). There was an awkward pause and an eye contact which told me that I needed to explain more. I told him that this company paid me because I was of use to the company. I gave company what it wanted from me. My individual needs and desires are non-IT, non-technical, and non-organizational. They keep changing as I am ageing and developing better understanding of my life. Money is one of the very important means to meet my individual needs and, "accidentally", I am skilled as well as habituated to get this money from the IT industry. Only clarity that I have for the next 5 years is that I will need constant flow of money for things and thoughts that really matter to me. Right now (then), I am technically skilled to make that money by working for this company. Whatever the company asks me to do, I will do my best. If company asks me to learn some new skill, I will try my best to learn. If I am not able to contribute or align with what company asks from me, neither company (which is my manager in the localized space) nor I can be happy. My manager was shocked. As one of the firsts for him, he had to split the one-to-one appraisal discussion with a reportee for over 2 days. While setting up the follow up discussion he requested me to strictly limit my answers to the organizational context. Few weeks later, in one of our team's daily catch up meetings, the manager announced to the team that he was moving to another company. When asked about the main reason, he told the offer was too good to deny :). I asked him in the meeting itself - "Why, a few weeks back, you were pressing me too hard to visualize my future in this company?". He replied - ".. this is what organizations want managers to ask their reportees, we do not need to answer the same questions .." :).
Like my understanding of my personal needs and desires, my understanding of "organization over individual" also kept getting better and simplified as I aged. I was able to plant the sapling of my individual growth and aspirations outside the purview of the organizational trees that I gardened. I developed a kind of indifference to whatever my masters at work corroborated in the day to day affairs at my workplaces. I just focused on the little understandable piece that I needed to work on. I kept a check in mind to keep being able to get those little pieces of work for the next "5 years". This individualistic strategy helped me talk just sufficient enough to keep satisfying the demands of my organizational masters. To ordinary IT people, this setup might have looked very less rewarding and non-sustainable. However, this simplistic setup rewarded both "me" and my "organizations" in a decent way. There was one big trade-off of this setup. My masters and I had to prove that we were constantly producing fruits as well as ready-to-age classic wines from those fruits, and made both of them available in bulk for immediate consumption.
While I started writing this post, almost all IT companies were in the middle of a major transition. These transitioning companies included both technology enablers as well as the ones enabled by the technology enablers. Big tech enabler companies were creating products that catered to almost all back-end operational needs of similar businesses. These technology products and their underlying infrastructures were made available over the internet to subscribe and use, like OTT media platforms. Cost of research, development, maintenance, and upgrades of the technology products were borne by the big tech companies. On the other hand, tech enabled companies were subscribing to the easily available technology products instead of developing and maintaining an indigenous technology. The subscribing companies simply paid the periodic subscription fee to the big tech companies, in a pay per use kind of cost model. After buying the subscription to a product, the company would deploy its business process analysts to collaborate with the big tech company's technology experts and tune the tech product to specific business needs. The driving factor for this technological transition was that if the tech enabled companies modeled their business processes around the out-of-the-box features of ready-to-use technology products, then they could modify or grow their businesses in very less time as compared to the earlier times. Quickly enabling new business strategies or models to hit the market was of utmost importance to companies for all practical reasons.
Likewise, one of my tech enabled companies had a very old lineage of tech products in its tech landscape. Let me put a code-name "T" to this company, for easy reference in the rest of the story. The big tech landscape was maintained by an equally big number of "mediocre" resources who ensured that the business ran as usual, without any technical failures. Any tech failure could cause a monetary or a non-monetary impact to the company. New requirements kept coming either for implementing new tech or updating the existing tech to enable new or modified business functions, respectively. Following the global tech transition, the company had subscribed to many enabler tech products. Subscriptions had added to the costs but this was acceptable to the masters since, in longer run, this would set off the cost of operations for maintaining indigenous tech.
As one of the good "accidents" of my life, I happen to be an expert of a technology product that enables any tech product/application to exchange data with another tech product/application without having to bother about the technical intricacies of the other product. Company T had a mix of 140+ different technology products/applications that exchanged information with each other to support back-end operations of its "giant" business. I had implemented and was maintaining 60+ critical integrations for the company. My service boat, like many other "mediocre" resources', was quietly sailing alongside the ship of Company T in the ocean of technology. But then the inevitable change came as some new crew members including Mr.G and Mr.N came onboard the ship, and an old crew member Ms.J was "empowered" to become the new captain of the ship.
As part of business-as-usual, Ms.J was discussing one of the new enabling tech requirements with a big tech company, let us say Company "O". Company O developed and maintained many tech products that were subscribed by Company T, these included the tech product of which I am an expert. While my product enabled tech integrations, there was another "giant" product that enabled workforce management and payroll processing for all employees of Company T. Ms.J requested Company O to tailor its "giant" workforce management product to match Company T's new business requirement. O told Ms.J that these new business requirements required product changes that were not generic and were too specific to T. Product will be changed only if a minimum number of other subscribing companies also demanded similar changes. While a survey would be launched to check for similar requirements, in the meantime, T could go with a technical workaround to enable its specific operational needs. O offered to guide and support the tech implementation of the workaround. This would allow T to continue reaping the benefits of the subscribed standard product and also implement their specific business requirement in parallel. This until the specific business demand matured into a generic one and was added to the standard product offerings.
As per hearsay, from some senior resources, this denial of request caused a major blow to the ego of Ms.J and the Second Officer(s) of her ship. The hearsay was believable as Ms.J and a majority of her crew belonged to a culture which is very high-headed and which cannot easily accept "No" as an answer to an ask. Since O was also a "giant", this plain denial of request from an equal powered partner triggered a perception of being "arm-twisted" in lieu of the big existing dependency of T on O.
In parallel to the above episode, Mr.G came onboard to manage a group of service boats of core techs that supported many back-end tech operations at T, other than the tech integration operations which were supported by me. He led a group of resources to implement and deliver an indigenous tech solution that claimed to save a huge amount of operational costs to the company. This solution was not an ask to enable a new business requirement. It was a tech initiative to beautify internal operations. It gamified the process of one worker booking extra work hours to back-fill the temporary absence of another worker, to earn an additional overtime payment. To be honest, the initiative and the outcome was indeed an impressive one. Apart from being visibly attractive, this gave Ms.J and her crew, a quick opportunity to showcase their tech strength and smart leadership potential to the super masters at T. With the right mix of technical and communication skill, Mr.G publicized the solution and the associated potential cost savings really well. He got promoted to Officer ranks in almost no time since he came onboard. This was understandably acceptable as per the rules of the game in the corporate IT world. However, maybe because of tasting a big success in almost no time, or maybe out of his basic nature, Mr.G started to first intervene and then dominate all tech strategy decisions in the company. He made everyone feel as if he'd developed a generic formula that could apply to the company's entire tech landscape, and gradually get rid of all dependency of T on the "arm-twisting" "giant" tech partners. If he were asked where he saw himself in the company in next 5 years, I guess he'd have said something like "... the Captain of the Ship" :). And maybe his manager would have happily accepted the answer, just for the synchronicity of the answer with what organizations want to hear.
Eventually, a skilled technocrat with wild individual aspirations colluded with frustrated souls who had organizational powers to take big decisions. An org wide tech strategy was built and conveyed that T would be moving away from all expensive tech partners, especially Company O. It was decided that T will rebuild majority of its tech products/applications in an indigenous way using Mr.G's core tech. While this strategy seemed unrefined to a lot, not many challenged it or questioned it back because of the seniority of Ms.J and the backing of the dominant Mr.G. Like in any IT company, the strategy and the associated work-plans started travelling down the organizational hierarchy. When it reached the lower levels of the "mediocre" resources, first feeling for most of them was "time has arrived... and we may need to depart soon...". The ocean was otherwise calm, but the crew dropped my and many others' service boats in the turbulent waters that were created by the waves and splashes of the very ship which we were supposed to service.
Waves of insecurity started splashing and rocking almost all service boats. Mr.G marketed his core tech so aggressively that he made everyone believe that he can implement anything and everything within a span of a few weeks. Majority of the back-end tech teams, and almost every "mediocre" resource who did not possess the core tech skill-set, had become unsure of their relevance to the company. They became insecure about their ability to maintain the status quo of their lives, by the fear of losing the salaries and the relatively better work-life routines in T that they had got habituated to. This insecurity and the associated fear suddenly changed the whole vibe of the routine cross-team communications. In every email or every technical brainstorming session, every team tried to hard sell their technology/product and tried to hog the associated implementation work, even if their tech was not the best fit for the implementation.
I have shared my views about women empowerment at small personal forums. I feel that over its decades-long existence, the women empowerment campaign has actually empowered and produced very capable women in workforce, in both my country and around the world. However, I must say that this major decision at T had come out of a typical high-headed, powerful, frustrated, and an egoist person rather than a capable woman leader. I know, saying or writing such things about any woman might trigger a now-default thought of slander against me. However, I do not understand the hypocrisy of our people who do not mind picking on every bad decision that men make and link it to their gender and its proclaimed dominance in our society. I have come across working women making comments like "... Men are in a habit of over-committing at work...". They do this freely and seldom invite any criticism of unnecessarily bringing feminism into the play. "Men will be men", ".. all men are alike .." - most men have to receive these statements in a playful spirit, accepting two facts - 1. They cannot completely deny these, and 2. They are not strong enough to fight the unreasonable but socially "very empowered" women brigade. When women want to be equated to men, why can't they also be accepting towards the fact that not all women are great leaders and not all women make smart choices. Being a good leader and a smart decision maker are the qualities of a "person", not a "gender". Why can't women accept their basic instincts of being impulsive in times when things go against their expectations. The fact of the matter is that majority of this "empowered" women brigade have actually not come out of any oppression. I can claim this at least in the corporate IT world. They have actually capitalized the opportunities of quick progressions created at their workplaces by this irresistible and now-misdirected campaign.
In terms of both the "women empowerment" and the "avoid unnecessary propaganda" brigades, what happened at T in the next 24 months was a complete chaos created by an "empowered" woman leader who was easily disillusioned by her own impulses and an "over-committing" man who had high individual aspirations. The service boats of the core-tech service-men got upgraded into a service ship that sailed smooth and parallel to the master's ship. The service ship was captained by Mr.G and it sailed honking its bugle of dominance and partnership with T. In his own world, Mr.G must have put a flag bearing a photo of a "cheetah" on his ship.
In the many years that I had spent at T, I had learnt well one of the important tools deployed by the company for subjective evaluations of key decisions - the "What? Why? How?" trio of questions. My "What" was communicated to me by my immediate manager Mr.S. My immediate question was "Why?". As expected I got a vague answer. "Why" was known to or maybe disclosed to a very few, and "How" was not known to anyone. The "core tech sailors" claimed to hold the only compass that showed the direction to "How". They were not able to explain "How" to the service-men of the techs whom they were trying to replace, but were able to explain it satisfactorily to Ms.J and her group of ministers. They launched into an aggressive campaign to implement some random idea, market it smartly, and keep the core-tech buzz alive. This without investing any time in taking a pause, reviewing, and reassessing what they were doing or where they were leading themselves and the organization.
Another good "accident" of my life was that I blindly joined a "Big 4" audit firm's IT consultancy practice. I was blinded by the big brand name of the firm and immediately accepted the offer. I didn't assess whether the firm offered any better growth prospects in my technology space or in terms of faster progressions in organizational hierarchy. The firm had a relatively small IT consultancy practice when compared to their Audit practice. It required my tech skills in an even smaller team to implement tech integrations in the IT projects of their many "Giant" customers. The company was not as aggressive in IT consulting as it was in Audit domain. However, because it was an audit firm, there was an unmatched focus on processes, documentation and communication, even for the IT consultancy practice. During my time there, I learnt a lot of good communication skills and practices that gave me a slight edge over my peers in the subsequent companies where I worked.
First it was my manager whom I asked constantly to give me a convincing answer to "Why". While doing this, I reassured him that I am anyways going to do "What" the company had asked me to do. But the company had also taught me to understand and appreciate the "Why" of my delivery objectives, so I continued to ask. I matured to asking his peers and one level-ups when I kept getting vague answers like T trying to become a "cheetah" from a slow moving "elephant". The level-ups made the cloud of vagueness furthermore dense with answers like "cost-optimization, not cost-cutting", "vendor management challenges", "..rising cloud costs are taking over traditional enterprise systems costs..", and many others from the smart corporate jargon. The "mediocre" sea could not see through the descending clouds, but it could sense the ocean. It could sense more ships coming, more anchors being lowered by the core-tech "pirates".
I was one of the stubborn mutineers. Every time I got a vague answer, I documented the received answer, the masters' strongest points that supported the answer, and my well researched counter points. I updated and used the document as basis for my subsequent mutinies. However, most of the times, my resistance was looked at as being fueled by my insecurities and associated desperation rather than the technical merit. This was understandable since there were many "mediocre" folks making similar noises without strong backings of assertive facts or observations. I kept telling myself to remain mentally calm, reminding myself of my learning and acceptance of "organization over individual". I started working on my plan B, that was looking for calmer seas to row in my service boat. Plan C, which was more aligned with the offer for truce from the pirates, was to quickly learn the "core tech" and become one of "them".
Another great quality of Ms.J's ages old and well established culture is "Divide and Rule". Some of the great administrators of this culture mastered the art of putting their administered people up against each other, so that they could never collaborate and question the rule. Then they were good at identifying people with extraordinary individual ambitions. They identified these ambitious ones, from among the fighting clowns, and elevated them to become their deputed administrators. The job of these deputed administrators was to keep the clowns disillusioned enough to be not able to do anything meaningful other than what the whip commanded. This is where Mr.N came into the scene. In his very first meeting with me he told me that I would lose everything in my work portfolio within 2 months, if I did not concede my position and agree to his command of learning the core-tech.
I must admit that it was a long stressful phase of my life at work. Like I've mentioned earlier, I do not have any emotional or innate connection with my work or job. In this instance, I was worried about the possibility of the status quo of my otherwise comfortable life getting badly disturbed. In our social intellectual chitchats, we keep preaching that one should not get too used to one's comfort zones. But we say these things only when we are happily enjoying our comfort zones. When uncomfortable, we sob in one corner thinking repeatedly about losing things that are dear to us. When uncomfortable, we do not socialize and do not discuss "Gyan". Establishing myself in a new company, or learning a new skill and competing with younger technical experts, would disturb my meaningful world that existed outside the ambit of my IT work. However, just to be well prepared with my Plan B, I looked out and gained some confidence on being able to find a calmer sea soon in case of an apocalypse. Tired from failed mutinies, and having secured my Plan B, I told myself that I should take at least one serious shot at Plan C. Surrender, play along, and see if there is a chance to sustain my meaningful world with a little compromise in my work-life. This was the end of my pursuit of "Why" in this voyage.
So the work started on "What", without understanding "Why", and without knowing "How". Every time when I asked Mr.S or Mr.N about what will replace my tech, they told me that they did not know that. But they reassured that my tech needs to be replaced. I asked which particular skill/sub-tech in the "core tech" I should learn. They gave me a list of probable sub-technologies which could be chosen by the pirates at a later point in time. In parallel to this, a small design and development team was built which comprised of 4 pirates, Mr.N, myself, and another mutineer who rowed my service boat while I was calling shots at the core-tech ship and chasing my masters for answers. When I asked the pirates what to learn, they told first they need to understand "What" to implement. Replacing 60+ critical integrations with an entire new tech infrastructure required a micro understanding of the existing implementation. Apart from the technicals, business criticality of every integration needed to be understood to ensure that sufficient safeguards were in place to not impact business-as-usual at T. While the core-tech people were at the helm of their ship, Mr.N somehow put the accountability of their success on me.
By this time I had realized that there is no point in arguing with Mr.N on practical grounds. I quickly finished beginner level courses in one of the sub-techs of the core tech, and formed a very high-level understanding of "How" we could at least try to replace my tech with the core tech. I validated my newly gained technical knowledge with the other 4 core-tech experts in my new team. Of course I had to give some ego-massages to my team members. To reduce Mr.N's persistent pressure on me, I gave him a sense of collaboration and casually pushed the team to do some basic proofs of concepts and implement some of the basic capabilities of my tech. Based on my recently finished courses, and based on the proofs of concepts done by my team, I formed an understanding that replacing the 60+ integrations would take a huge amount of time which would span for at least 2 years.
In IT, in general, when managers are told that a project is going to take a long time, their most popular response is - "let us increase the number of deployed resources and see if we can finish it faster". Somehow they tend to forget that they are building an information system and not a physical, civil structure. Even in civil engineering, if a pillar has to be conditioned with damp concrete for a week after plastering, the conditioning cannot be completed in 1 day by deploying 7 more civil engineers and putting water of 7 days at once. Mr.N, the deputed administrator, was no exception to this general class of IT managers. However, instead of proposing to add more core-tech resources to the team, he exerted more pressure on me to expedite my learning of the core-tech and become project ready to be the fifth core-tech developer in the team. Now, I had to support the existing 60+ integrations as part of my usual duty, share my knowledge on existing integrations with the core-tech team at a very micro level, learn the core-tech, and also start delivering solutions in core-tech in no time. To add to this, the 4 core tech resources knew how to code but they did not know how to design a technical solution. They were like masons who could build a wall wherever needed, but they could not architect a building. And while building a wall, they could not guarantee that the wall will fuse seamlessly with the other walls at its ends.
After initial few weeks of progressing on my plan C, I intervened and asked Mr.N how much time did we actually have to implement this. He told that we had 5 months to implement and go live, and we had 2 months to give a final confirmation to our masters that "Yes! We can and we will do it within 5 months". It took a few moments for me to absorb the shock, pull myself back into my senses, and say "Mr.N, I do not see this happening. My this claim is based on my deep understanding of our current integrations and their dependent business functions. And from where our team and its capabilities stand now, there is no way we can hit what we are aiming at". He immediately asked the team to convene and asked a straight question to the core-tech folks - "Guys, do you feel confident of doing this?". As expected from the deputed administrator, his tone was so authoritative that the core-tech folks got scared of saying "No". So they said a "soft" Yes. I am pretty confident that Mr.N, with all the experience under his belt, would have observed the lack of confidence in the team. But he happily accepted the "Yes", because that's what the organization wanted to hear :). Everyone in the room could feel the whip that was passed on to Mr.N from his masters. Also, the core-tech folks could not defy the extreme faith that the captain of their ship Mr.G had sold to Ms.J and other masters.
With full faith in Mr.N's authoritarian rule to get my tech replaced, Mr.G continued hard selling his core-tech to replace other techs. Mr.G had reassured all the masters that any technical use case could be implemented in his core-tech, in a span of 2 weeks. They achieved few minor successes which they showcased as major ones and marketed as guides for all other use-cases at various forums. Whenever a new integration requirement came, the masters' first preference would be to implement it in the core-tech. The requirement would then go around in the sub-groups of the core-tech folks who were busy re-implementing other techs' use-cases. This going around the board on the core-tech service ship was done to just see if there was a matching core-tech solution that could serve as the guide and quickly implement the new requirement. This would waste weeks if not months from when the requirements were identified. But again the delay was pushed under the carpet with the smart corporate jargon like "..inertia before flying high..". More interestingly, the running around concluded with ".. we have not yet matured enough to implement this new requirement..", "..let us implement this in existing tech for now, eventually we will migrate this to core-tech..".
I could see an identifiable pattern for all new integration requirements. Without any master asking for it, I would prepare a solution design and delivery plan for implementing new requirements in my tech. I'd also list the potential risks which were mainly related to the expected very limited time to deliver. As I'd then expect, the masters would finally turn towards my team to casually check if we could do something in the very limited time left. They had a hidden faith in us that they could get a confident "Yes", and that's what we gave to them. I would update and fine-tune my already refined plan and give it to them within a week of their approach to my team. My plan would clearly define the expected overrun from the originally planned time to hit the market, along with the obvious risk of not having sufficient time to manage too many unknowns. Me and my tech team had a track record of managing the risks well and enabling the business teams to hit the market as per their original plans. Mr.S and his level-ups would always be very happy with my team's face-saving efforts but they could not showcase them on bigger forums because the organization did not want to hear any success stories related to my tech. My solutions were published with the label "tactical". They received "soft" applauds with the disclaimers that they will serve as guides to the "strategic" core-tech solutions. This happened many times in the 2 years that followed. In line with my principle of doing whatever my masters asked me to do, I accepted the work every time and kept delivering the highest quality solutions. My every delivery of a new integration solution added ammunition to my subsequent mutinies. Every time I accepted building a new solution, I asked my masters "Why". I captured their answer in the now-very-long log that backed my next mutiny.
So I had a Mr.N and his lost team of core-tech pirates who were promising to deliver, in 5 months, a technical solution of which they did not have an iota of understanding. And then I was implementing new business critical integrations in my tech, which were added to the targets of Mr.N's already lost team. Still there were no change either in the superficial confidence that the core-tech team exhibited or in the authoritarian behavior of Mr.N.
Lost we moved closer to the 2 month deadline to reassure our super masters that we had a fool-proof plan to replace my tech with the core-tech in the remaining 3 months. T's subscription to O's integrations product would end by the end of this period. The final reassurance would mean that T would not renew it's subscription of O's integrations product. If so, within next 3 months, my 60+ back-end integrations would cease to support T's back-end operations. More and more senior masters started getting involved in Mr.N's daily meetings. Being one of the key resources of the outgoing tech, I was also included in these meetings. Everyone on the meeting was at least 10-15 years more experienced than me. So in the initial few meetings I just listened. I listened to Mr.N's concocted stories about the leaps of success that his team had made and the confidence they possessed to pull this off in the minuscule time. I didn't intervene as I knew Mr.N would say anything to paint a very rosy picture of what the organization wanted to see. And its a human thing that we can't accept but ignore the little possibilities of failure when someone promises to give us almost all that we want. However, to my pleasant surprise, one of the super masters, T's Engineering Director, asked a very simple question on the planned tech infrastructure on which the whole new solution would be deployed. Mr.N first paused and then fumbled in his reply. This logged the first doubt in the heads of the super masters. In another meeting, another senior master, one of the Technical Program Managers (TPM), asked me to prepare a detailed pre-mortem report highlighting the business risks if any of the planned 60+ core-tech integrations were not ready to go live within next 6-7 months. He gave a period of 6-7 months considering that we could consider an extension of a few months if Mr.N's plan really had some mettle in it.
This was my last chance and also my last hope. I put in my best effort and created a report with 100% real business risks that I had mitigated, and handled when triggered, over my many years of managing the integrations. I substantiated the business and non-business impacts of all risks. I specified how I had implemented safeguarding measures in my tech solutions to mitigate each of the risks. Whenever a risk was triggered, both tech teams and business teams had to act very quickly, in collaboration, to execute risk-handling measures. Deadlines for successfully closing the triggered risks ranged from 2-24 hours, and it involved managing a diverse set of business stakeholders. At the first sight of my report, the TPM was stunned. In all my prior interventions, I had tried to bring these risks to Mr.N. But he told me that it was not "rocket-science". Similar safeguarding measures could be easily implemented in core-tech as well. He asserted his viewpoints, in his usual authoritarian tone, and asked core-tech folks to confirm. As usual, he'd succeed in extracting the "soft" reaffirmation and then kill my mutiny.
The TPM had realized that we were dealing with a huge risk to business, and that it would take months just to validate that the new core-tech integrations had the capability to handle all the risks. He asked Mr.N if he had thought this through. Mr.N was still defiant. I failed to understand what was motivating him to not accept the simple fact that this was not doable, especially in the stipulated 5 months of time. The TPM, though senior to Mr.N, respected Mr.N's seniority and showed trust in Mr.N's experience and confidence. So, even though he understood the real picture, he did not challenge Mr.N's defiance. But he set me up to present my report to his next level, that was T's Engineering Director Mr.R. I was nervous for the meeting. Suddenly, I was talking to the masters who I had not thought of talking to in my next "5 years".
Mr.R was the one who'd earlier made Mr.N fumble while answering a simple question on core-tech infrastructure. So I had some confidence that my report could make as good an impact on Mr.R as it made on the TPM. So the meeting happened and I repeated my now-rehearsed performance in front of Mr.R and Mr.N. Mr.R was a very busy man at T, with maybe a thousand things running in his mind in a given work-hour. So he formed a quick high-level understanding of the situation by the time I stopped talking. He didn't need to deep dive to low-level details in any of the many projects that were running under his leadership umbrella. So he asked Mr.N if he had taken all these valid risks into account and whether he'd be able to deliver the expected new solution ensuring that the risks were handled as well as in the outgoing solution. Mr.N once again downplayed all risks and reassured Mr.R that his core-tech team of 4 resources was "excited and confident" to deliver the solution on time. This was a lie in plain sight, and it was putting the company at an unimaginable risk. It was a very hard test of my patience to not counter Mr.N in the meeting, then and there. There were no better words than "lie", or maybe ".. this is not true..", which I could use to sugarcoat my counter. My any counter would have put Mr.N in a very bad light in front of Mr.R. I felt that would not have been the most sensible thing to do, professionally. So I kept silent for the rest of the meeting. I slept over the unfortunate meeting.
In my general routine, I wake up at around 5 am, make my coffee and sip it peacefully in the quiet "me" zone, almost every day, thankfully. I trust the purity of every thought that comes to me at this time of the day. My mind is super active and receptive of all positive energies flowing around me. Most of my confusions about all aspects of my life get resolved while I simply sit and let thoughts flow through my mind, uninterrupted. Many a times, a simple random thought resolves a technical problem on which I'd have been stuck the entire previous day. Unchecked thoughts at this time of the day act as an auto-pilot and thus, generally, set up the rest of my day.
In the morning that followed the meeting with Mr.R and Mr.N, my feeling of dejection was peacefully at rest. Refreshed faculties of my mind started understanding the situation. I understood that my Plan C was destined to fail miserably as it depended on Mr.N and the core-tech team whom I could neither understand nor align with our organization's success. So what were left with me were my mutinies and my Plan B. I realized that this was a do or die situation for me and I could not play completely by the books. So I decided that it was time that I did same straight talks at work.
I texted my line manager Mr.S and requested him to set up an urgent meeting with his level-up Mr.M. Mr.M had worked very closely with Mr.R for last more than 15 years at T at that point in time. Both of them were very instrumental in changing the face of technology at T. I had some hidden faith that Mr.M will do whatever it takes to save T from a disaster. Only thing I needed to convince him that what he was looking at was a disaster. Like Mr.R, he also had a thousand active matters at hand at any point in time during his work-day. So, as soon as I met, I launched - "You may see this as my unprofessional behavior, to bypass all hierarchy and say this to you in a direct and crude way. We are subscribing for a big disaster by trusting what Mr.N is promising. There is a huge disconnect between his understanding and the ground reality. You can see this as my extreme pessimism, but I am claiming that our failure is assured if go forward with this initiative..". He intervened and told me that he also got a similar sense but did not question further because of Mr.N's reassurances. He asked me why I would not raise these directly with Mr.N since I was reporting to Mr.N for this particular project. I told him that I have been raising the red flags but, out of some non-understandable motive, Mr.N pulled all the flags down. Then I told what Mr.M always anticipated in his IT industry acumen but which he never expressed freely. I told him that Mr.N's project was an assured disaster and as we'd move closer to the deadline, life would become a living hell for everyone working on it. I continued - "..the max Mr.N or anyone can screw me or any other tech resource at T is for 60 days (which is our notice period). And it is not that the market outside does not need me or the core-tech. What will happen to this project if me or my fellow mutineer suddenly become unavailable, or are available only for a period of next 60 days? We might be at an individual loss, but the organization will be at a much bigger one..". I told him that I did not capture this implicit risk in my report that was now doing the rounds at the tables of many masters. Mr.M ended the meeting citing his another appointment and told me that he'll get back to me on this.
Next day, Mr.N called for an adhoc meeting of the 4 core-tech folks, me and my fellow mutineer, Mr.R and Mr.M. I had a slight sense of what was expected to come but to others, it was big surprise. Mr.N declared that they were putting the entire project on hold with immediate effect. He sugarcoated the reasons behind the decision, to not demotivate the core-tech folks. The elephant inside me was quietly observing Mr.N's words and expressions, and enjoyed watching the monkey getting leashed.
I hardly had any one-on-one interactions with Mr.M in all my years at T. My integrations work fell under his leadership umbrella but my interactions with him were limited to occasional skip-level meetings and the issue-triage meetings when risks got triggered in the integrations space. I did not do any small talks on the floor and just discussed work that was assigned to me by Mr.S. Accidentally, I exhibited a popular tool of being more effective at workplace - "Talk less, to be heard more". I guess in my uncommon one-on-one meeting with Mr.M, my plain acknowledgement of the possibility of losing key human resources, and my conviction that T's business-as-usual was at great risk, won me his acceptance of the crude facts that I'd blurted out about the nonsensical vision of the project and its assigned executors.
When the news traveled across the floor, everyone in my team and the outsiders who were aware of the matter started congratulating me, terming it as my "big victory". I was pleasantly surprised. I told them that I was nobody in the organization and had won nothing for myself. I was happy that a big disaster for our organization was averted, and I was able to play a key role in that. Mr.S and Mr.M were pleased that I persisted with my efforts and had proven my points despite having no official support from the higher levels and having minimal chances of being heard and accepted. But, again, they could not openly market my efforts, for now obvious reasons. However, the status quo of my work was restored. More implementation work started flowing my way and I got a healthy pipeline of work for at least next "3 years". Whenever Mr.N and I crossed each other on the office floor, I wished him with a smile and a look that said "I am still not out of work here". He sometimes ignored and sometimes just shook his head, with the same old authority.
My "victory" had given a hope to many other "mediocre" resources and teams. Mr.S also belonged to the under-privileged clan that did not know the core-tech. He was also a little unsettled by the unchallenged organization growth that Mr.G, his peer, was making, by selling promises of huge benefits to T by implementing the core-tech. Maybe he also got some hope from my "victory". So he requested Mr.G to conduct a knowledge-sharing session on what was happening in T's tech strategy space. He was smart enough to give an ego-massage to Mr.G by saying that other teams should also have a high-level idea of Mr.G's team's success story. So the session happened. Mr.G again hard sold his initial project and its associated potential cost savings for T. Then he restated the whole big story around the organization deciding to replace "giant" tech vendors with indigenous systems built in core-tech. I assumed that he'd have had some reflection after knowing about my recent "victory". So I asked where did we stand in terms of the strategic decision to remove my tech. He said that we will do it. I was surprised and once again I asked "Why". He told ".. coz we've hired an elephant to do a monkey's job..". I turned to my fellow mutineer with an angry + tired + mocking smile. After the meeting was over, I told Mr.S and my team that so far I had fought the "monkeys". Now I had to take on the the King Kong who was at the helm of the "ship of monkeys". What I'd won was a small battle, the war would continue. But I decided to take a little break and rejuvenate myself in my just-restored status quo. Now I could answer very quickly and crisply if any of my masters asked "Neeraj! Where do you see yourself in T after 5 years?".. Bon voyage :)
