Installment # 43

At 17 years and 4 months, I was a high school graduate with no direction, no inclinations, and no particular interests.  There is an admonition about finding your passion.  I still have not found my passion.  I’ve taken “personality” tests over the years, and I seem to defy categorization. There are generally four quadrants or categories, and we should be strongest on one quadrant, weakest in one quadrant and one of the other two should be complementary to the dominant one.  Well, in one case I was approximately equal in all four quadrants (totally inconclusive) and in another case I was strongest and second strongest in two categories that were almost mutually exclusive.  The evaluator said that that combination made no sense. Apparently I do not know myself, or do not know my own mind. This must have something to do with common sense.

I met Michelle’s husband, Kevin, for the first time in 1996, but it was not until around 2010 that Michelle first told me about Kevin’s reaction to me.  Sandy and I drove from San Jose, they drove (motor cycle) from Sacramento, and we met at a coffee shop in Tracy or Stockton.  Michelle said that afterwards Kevin said that in his field of business he has learned to assess people he meets and to place them in various categories in his mind.  He said I was the first person he had met who he could not define or categorize.  I was an enigma. I can add that people who get to know me through social situations, like running or at a wedding reception or something, are surprised to learn that I am in the Accounting profession.  My personality evidently does not match up with that stereotype at all.

One of the strangest things that happened with Kevin, apparently, was that I (tongue-in-cheek; clearly kidding) shared an original thought I had about a business idea.  I said that every year we drive past a pumpkin patch where the kids run around, all excited, trying to find their favorite pumpkin and pleading with their parents to buy it.  And every Christmas (usually the weekend after Thanksgiving) families drive up to one of the tree farms, where the Dad is handed a saw with a long handle, and the kids run around arguing over which is the perfect tree to cut down and bring home.  So my idea was, why not combine the two concepts for Thanksgiving?  Why not have a turkey patch where Dad is handed a sharp blade on a stick, the kids run around, argue, and pick out the turkey they want, and Dad cuts its head off on the spot, blood and feathers flying all over, and home they go with the family turkey?  Evidently, that is not the kind of conversation to have when you are meeting someone for the first time, especially in those circumstances.  Who knew?

Kevin has some definite ideas about decorum and what is right and proper.  I remember one of the first times that he was visiting with our family in San Jose; we were sitting around the table after dinner when Bobby stood up and announced that he needed to go to the bathroom (or in Canada-speak, “use the washroom”).  Bobby said, “I am rimmed.  I need to drop a couple of friends off at the lake!”  We all laughed, but Kevin was appalled - or seemed to be.  Staggering back from the bathroom a few minutes later, Bobby put on a startled, worried look and said, “I think I just gave birth to a headless brown trout!”  Now Kevin really was appalled.  Even growing up on a farm out in the frozen tundra of central Canada, I guess they didn’t discuss such subjects in public. 

When Ryan was little I told him the story of Cisco and Poncho walking one behind the other across the desert, with Cisco in the lead.  Poncho thinks he smells something bad, so he asks, “Cisco, you poop your pants?” and Cisco responds, “No, Poncho, I no poop my pants.”  They continue walking single file for awhile until Poncho is convinced that he definitely smells something.  The conversation goes, “Cisco!”  “Si, Poncho.” “Cisco, you sure you no poop your pants?” “No, Poncho, I no poop my pants.”  Finally, Poncho steps up from behind and pulls Cisco’s pants down, and there, sure enough, is a load of poop.  The exchange is, “Cisco!  I thought you said you no poop your pants!” and Cisco answers, “Oh Poncho, I thought you meant today!”

Well, Ryan and I decided to act this out in a skit to amuse his parents and Nana, and we eventually hit on the idea of putting a brown plastic toy hotdog in Ryan’s pajamas, so that when I pulled down his pants, there would be the “poop” in all its glory.  I remember that Kevin seemed appalled just at the story itself and the fact that I was teaching it to his son, but when we revealed the “poop” in his pants, he was red-faced and speechless.  What made it even funnier is how hard Ryan was laughing during the skit in anticipation of the “surprise,” and by the time we got to the finale he was laying on the floor, red-faced, pajama bottoms down around his ankles, laughing so hard there were tears running down his cheeks.  His glee and Kevin’s shocked expression at the same time made for a very funny episode.

When I decided to go to college I remember reading the want ads, trying to get inspired about what I wanted to study.  They are listed alphabetically, so I was seeing Accountant, Business, Controller, etc.  In junior college I mainly focused on fulfilling the general education requirements, but indicated my interest in “accounting-business-controller,” whatever that was.  I took some introductory accounting and economics classes and found I understood them very well.  By the way, I earned all ‘A’s and one ‘B’ over the whole two years, for a grade point average of nearly 4.0.  I don’t remember what the ‘B’ was in.

When I was accepted to Stanford University I learned that the school did not offer an undergraduate degree in Accounting.  The closest they had was Economics, which I was very good at and liked.  I mean, I had taken two introductory courses in economics in junior college and understood what they were about and got ‘A’s in them, so I thought I would do well with that major.  I actually graduated with honors in Economics by taking extra courses and by achieving at least a 3.4 GPA in my major.  It was only after I graduated and started looking for a job that I learned that economics majors are included in the category of “liberal arts” majors. It was 1971, and good luck trying to find a job with a liberal arts degree.

There’s that naiveté/lack of common sense/oblivion cropping up again.  I found I was earning more money loading airplanes for Pan Am than I could earn with an entry level job with a liberal arts degree.  Since we had two children by then, and I was the only bread-winner in the family, going backwards in terms of income was not an option.  Thus I decided to stay at Pan Am another two years and complete the Berkeley MBA program.

The salaries for people with MBA degrees were at least a step up from my union wages at Pan Am.  Among the fields of emphasis available within the MBA program were Marketing, Finance, Accounting and Operations Research.  I didn’t know what Operations Research was; thought Marketing was selling (didn’t want that!); and didn’t understand the difference between Finance and Accounting, except that I knew what an Accountant did and had no idea what a “Finance” did – probably banking or the stock market or something.

In my job search prior to the MBA program, I actually drove down to San Jose from our home in San Carlos in response to an ad for an entry level management job at a company called Electrolux.  There was no easy on-line research in those days, so I went there with no idea what kind of company it was.  I just knew that the starting salary was not less than I was earning loading airplanes for Pan Am.  It turned out to be a vacuum cleaner company, and they recommended that I accompany an experienced salesman for the first few months, going door-to-door trying to sell vacuum cleaners.  That was sooo not going to happen.  I would rather load airplanes with my Stanford degree than do that.  No offence intended…that was just not me in 1971.

At any rate, I ended up in the Accounting profession.  After interviewing and researching, the employment decision for me was either a) large firm/small city or b) smaller firm/big city.  Large firm in those days was one of the “Big 8” international accounting firms, auditors for most of the publicly-held companies; smaller was one of the regional firms, perhaps comprising the 9^th through 12^th next largest firms, offering audit, tax and accounting services to mainly the smaller companies.  The gap between number 8 and number 9 was enormous.  The regional firms were really in a different league than the Big 8. “Big city” meant San Francisco, and “small city” basically meant San Jose.  We lived on the Peninsula, practically equidistant from those two cities. Below the regional firms, the CPA firms were primarily bookkeeping and tax return related.

I chose the San Jose office of Arthur Young & Co, which essentially meant choosing the prestige of the Big 8 and the informality of a smaller office.  When I started in 1973 there were some 65 people on the professional staff, and we had a good variety of clients in such fields as retail, health care and governmental units, along with a smattering of high tech companies.  When I left there in 1980 there were well over 100 professionals and high tech was exploding.  I will not attempt to chronicle the creation and development of Silicon Valley – that is out there for anyone to read about - although I would like to point out that the term ‘silicon’ refers to the material needed to make transistor wafers.  As I understand it, silicon is started and grown in a way analogous to the way yeast is grown.  You need a starter batch from somewhere.  I don’t know where.  Did I mention I am a technical basket case?  When I first heard the term, like many people, I thought of silicone – a substance used in breast enlargement procedures.  Ironically, the birth of that particular phenomenon can be traced to a San Francisco entertainer of the same time frame – early 1960s - named Carol Doda.  She danced topless with these huge, artificially inflated boobs.

I should also note in passing that ‘Silicon Valley’ is now a very outdated name, since nearly all wafers and semiconductors are now manufactured in Asia.  One of the attributes that has made Silicon Valley so unique has been its ability to reinvent itself.  It has transitioned from semiconductors to PCs to the Internet, through the dot-coms and now social media (and don’t forget bio-medical and the I-Phone).  For the third quarter of calendar 2013 venture capitalists invested some $7.8 billion, of which Silicon Valley received 46%!  The next highest regions of the country were New England, New York and Southern California at 11%, 9% and 9%, respectively.

Anyway, my ability to earn a living and raise a family was greatly enhanced by the birth of Silicon Valley.  I don’t know how I ever would have fared in the older, more staid environments where you must become the good “corporation man” in order to keep your job, get raises and promotions, etc, knowing that there is no other job waiting for you if you lose the one you’ve got.  In Silicon Valley, we used to say that employees “vote with their feet,” meaning that if an employee didn’t like the way things were going at one company, he merely had to walk across the street to the next company.  Similarly, as a consultant, I had confidence that I could always find another gig if and when this one soured.  (Carol Doda probably could, too).

I have enjoyed describing my approach to goal-setting as akin to the archer who shoots an arrow into the side of a barn or something, then walks up and paints the traditional circular target around the arrow.  That is really an exaggeration, and is amusing, but it is not necessarily how I approached life – it just looks that way sometimes.  As in how I chose the Accounting major because the want ads were alphabetical and I saw Accountant, Business, Controller, etc.  As in how I transferred to Stanford before realizing that they didn’t have an undergraduate Accounting major, so chose Economics as the next closest thing.  As in how I discovered after graduating from Stanford that Economics majors are lumped in with “Liberal Arts” majors, for whom openings in the business world are limited and starting salaries are weak.  As I have said, if I had to choose one word to describe life, that word would be “funny,” and if I had to choose one word to describe my attitude towards life, it would be “whatever.”  But it has all worked out beautifully.

As a consultant, I have seen many companies struggle, downsize and ultimately be acquired or go out of business, and I never got accustomed to the shattered dreams.  Many times I have pulled into the company parking lot knowing that this was the morning a lot of unsuspecting people were going to receive very upsetting and scary news – scary in that most households were not prepared to withstand the loss of a paycheck.  In the months prior I had become accustomed to walking past an increasing number of empty cubicles, sometimes forgetting the names of the former occupants.  Sometimes there were whole floors or even whole buildings sitting empty while the Company tried to find a tenant.  Even leaving just one wing of one building empty at least cut down on the heating and electric bill.

I’ve watched companies cut back and cut back until they were acquired for “pennies on the dollar” because they had no alternatives.  It takes courage to be the first on the management team to stand up in a meeting and say that it was time to be acquired before it was too late – to “get out while the gettin’s good.”  I remember telling more than one CFO that you can’t keep amputating the patient’s body parts without eventually killing the patient.  I remember “all hands” meetings that required renting off site facilities, because there was no room big enough to handle everyone; then moving the meetings on site into the largest room, then progressively smaller rooms, as the number of employees dwindled.  I remember looking around and trying to imagine what some of the employees who had left a couple of years earlier would think if they saw how small the latest “all hands” meeting was.  They would be stunned.

I mourned the shattered dreams because I knew that every hi-tech company started with a dream – an idea, a vision and a mission – shared by one of more co-founders and early employees.  And as each new employee had interviewed and come on board, they had learned about the Company’s goals and had allowed dreams of their own to develop and become important to them.  From entry level to senior levels, new employees had hopes of learning and growing, advancing in their careers, strengthening their resumes and, of course, benefitting nicely from their stock options and the like. 

I should hasten to acknowledge that the venture capitalist community and people who call themselves “serial entrepreneurs” are not setting themselves up for heartbreak, by any means.  With cool calculation, they realize that even if only one in five ventures “makes it,” they will be millionaires many times over, and the employees who come and go in the process are just so much collateral damage – something that can’t be helped and is not to be mourned.  I believe I read, however, that the 2013 IPO of Twitter created some 160 California millionaires, which the state takes into consideration as it forecasts its tax revenues for the coming years.