Chapter 8 My Corporate Career Fizzled
In the spring of 1979, adorned in the same cheap suit I wore 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, the fresh Hartwick grad, 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 $2,000 that my parents 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 must 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 my naïve 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 on 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 6'10" 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 had a hunch about my potential. A month later, I started the management training program. Somehow I'd 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, a 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 was 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 comprised 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 to 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 leaving my job at Crocker, an acquiring bank fired everyone in the department I 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 their version of the fast-track, which they 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, one presumes, 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.