A Perspective

This story begins forty-six years ago, almost to the day, when a skinny kid four weeks graduated from college with an English degree many thought useless learned he had landed a job at Ford Motor Company.

He’d landed this job, not through any great set of skills, certainly not through demonstrated experience, but (this being a first job, after all), through connections. Who you knew often meant more than what you knew. And the kid’s mom was the executive secretary to the company Treasurer. Something could and would be done.

Shortly after joining Ford, the kid wrote a note of thanks (there was no email back then) to the personnel manager who had hired him. That manager’s response stayed with the kid all these years:

“Just do a good job; that’s all the thanks I want.”

Just do a good job.

The kid learned, over time, that he would be trading the vagaries of becoming a recognized fiction writer (a useless goal in a commercial world) for the certainty of getting a paycheck. He was a “test procedures writer,” a role that had little to no creativity about it, except of the diplomatic sort when explaining to an engineer (who had, after all, a useful degree) that a complete sentence cannot be “The one with the red handle.”

Over those early years, the kid met many people in the test operations area — test technicians, engineers, tradespeople, secretaries. He sponged up not only the details of the testing environment; he soaked up personalities as well.

He never stopped writing. He wrote lots of throwaway stuff; indeed, he would think of everything that he created as throwaway, whether it was the tweaking of a fuel lab procedure or the creation of a short story or poem.

He didn’t know what he was worth; he knew he never would; and faced with this, he graded himself harshly.

A couple of years in, he was joined by a college intern, a whiz in the new world of computers. The two became friends. At the intern’s East Dearborn home, the kid and the intern played early versions of video games. Already the intern was showing his potential, developing prototypes for startups.

The intern lost his Ford position during one of the many cutbacks; but the kid and the intern remained friends for decades. The intern would rise to become one of the leading innovators at Apple; the kid would plod along, still trying to do a good job.

After some years in the testing world, he moved to World Headquarters, the big glass building that dominated the Dearborn landscape, at the corner of Michigan Avenue and the Southfield Freeway. Here he worked in the Pension Department, as part of Finance Staff, writing computer programs in an ancient language called Mark IV. By now he was tilting toward the intern’s world of computers, of machines that only appeared to think.

The kid knew by this time that nobody cared about his writing. He would need a useful degree. He pursued a Master’s of Business Administration at U of M - Dearborn, the local branch of the main university in Ann Arbor.

One day, he was called up to the Treasurer’s office. The Treasurer asked how things were going, and the kid mentioned the Dearborn MBA. “Why Dearborn?” the Treasurer asked. “Why not Harvard or Stanford?”

The kid had no answer.

The Treasurer outlined the reason why Harvard or Stanford was better: “The world isn’t fair. You’re doing a great job here, but if you go to Harvard or Stanford, you’ll come back at a much higher level in the Company. The Company will recognize the degree from the big school. You’ll have a leg up on success. Think it over.”

The kid did just that. He couldn’t understand that what was being offered was a helping hand, a sponsorship, as his sister, eight years older and so much wiser, told him. He wasn't used to the idea of a helping hand -- even though he'd been helped along himself. What did it mean to do a good job? What did it mean to be in a community?

Something told the kid that being bold at this moment would change him. Was that what he wanted? What was the price of boldness?

So the kid made what many would consider to be a monumental mistake. He stayed where he was. He decided he needed to earn his way up in the Company.

Thirty or so years after this event, the kid would leave Ford as a manager in IT. He was promoted seven times before his run ended.

Here is where the kid went. From the Pension Department, to information technology (IT), to plan the hardware configuration for a new data center; then to analyze system availability and IT performance for Ford’s Parts division; then large-scale systems development; systems methodology and Time-To-Market (what is called Agile today); Enterprise Y2K; the Leadership Development Center and Ford Learning; Enterprise Business Continuity; IT Security Incident Response; North American Audit; Product Development Systems; Enterprise IT Strategy.

All the while, trying to do a good job. And all the while, writing.

Here is some of what the kid learned. How test operations work; how safety systems work in volatile environments; how union contracts are written into code; how computer systems work, from large-scale to laptop, smart phone, internet of things; how manufacturing plants operate; how to establish an enterprise program for a one-off exercise (Y2K) and for ongoing resilience (business continuity); how to conduct a business impact assessment, reducing hundreds of processes to the hundred that matter and the ten that require immediate effort; the intricacies of security, vulnerability and threat management, anatomy of incidents and first responder disciplines; security architecture; forensics and special investigations; how audits work; how demographics rule much of what happens; what it means to shape strategy that affects thousands of IT people working across continents and delivering solutions for tens of thousands of employees and millions of customers.

Here is some of what the kid saw. How Ford struggled to stay in business. How product issues and external events could take down empires. How capitalism changed from purposeful to speculative. 

How the workplace changed as the new order of shareholder value and employee-as-cost versus employee as investment infected the place.

The kid once asked an up-and-coming HR guy how the changes CEO Jack Welch was making at GE was affecting the workers. “Oh, it’s killing them!” the HR guy responded. “But it’s great!” The kid saw Welchism take hold at Ford, as shareholder value replaced product value, as arbitrary forced ranking booted hundreds onto the street, as employees learned to look over their shoulder wondering if they were next, rather than concentrating on doing a good job.

The kid wrote about it in his novel, “Santa, CEO,” in which Santa was depicted as a CEO of a vast empire of thousands of elves and half-elves, forty thousand stand-in “santas” flying half a million magic reindeer ranched worldwide. Here was a CEO who’s consumed by the business, whose wife had left him, whose own position was in jeopardy as company forces conspired to oust him, slaughter the reindeer, sell off and downsize. In “Santa, CEO,” both Santa and the company had lost the purpose of the business -- that children are the only shareholders that matter. They had lost the magic.

The kid saw Ford go to the brink of destruction before pulling back, bringing in an outside CEO who stopped Welchism in its tracks, transformed the business and restored a sense of value and purpose to the work and its people who, even though more cuts were needed, could understand that here was someone with vision who ultimately would save them by applying their own Working Together principles.

The kid saw all this and more.

Through it all, until that day in 2017 the kid knew he’d reached the road’s end, the kid learned and wrote, and wrote and learned. He wrote short stories; a children's short novel; a coming-of-age short novel that was his best work but that he never considered publishing because it contained racial slurs, even as it described a boy's realization that everyone, himself included, lies; a novel on good and evil whose harsh language prevented his considering its publication; poems; suites of music describing the rise, fall and rise of Detroit, the Lac-Magentic rail disaster, and the Warriors that surrounded him, Warriors who were simply people doing the best they could too. People like you.

All he tried to do was a good job.

Writing, as Toni Morrison has said, is a way of thinking. Writing is a way of stepping back from the madness and trying to understand it. So the kid wrote.

Was it a mistake, so many years ago, to opt out of the Harvard or Stanford experience? To opt instead for a career lived among equals, suffering through the changes and the sometimes gut-wrenching loss of colleagues, opportunities? To sometimes be appreciated and sometimes not? To be treated fairly or unfairly, time and again? To guess and second-guess one’s own capabilities, while hiding the angst from everyone?

All the kid tried to do was to earn his way, his own way.

Reflecting on his choice, the kid recalls the words in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, of Galadriel the elf-princess who is given the opportunity to hold the Ring of Power:

  “…I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer. For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands… And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible…

  She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad. ‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.’ (1)

It is enough, perhaps, to explain the decision to stay and do a good job — the monumental mistake others would claim the kid made. But for the kid, by staying, by earning his way, his own way, the hard way, he remained himself, however diminished but however whole and true.

The kid, today, continues to write. He has gone into the forest, as Gurcharan Das reminds us, because the forest holds the oxygen of contemplation, reflection, synthesis. From this the kid hopes to tease that which is relevant from that which is only momentarily dazzling. To find the honest and small truths and hold these up as invincible responses to large and loud lies. To impart some wisdom from a life experienced, to those whose experiences are barely underway.

Here, today, six years on from Ford and forty-six years from that first day, watching the nation convulse its way yet again to an election that once again threatens to end democracy, the kid writes, and writes, and writes some more.

The kid thanks you, dear reader, for your trust in him, and he invites you: just do a good job -- because, in the end, that's all the thanks you can give yourself.

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(1) Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Lord Of The Rings: One Volume (p. 365-366). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.