For Immediate Release: Shape Minds, Build Brands, and Deliver Results with Game-Changing Public Relations (2015)

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“Sorry I’m late,” I say, slumping down in the booth across from Chris.

Shell-shocked after our meeting with Steve, he and I decided to meet for lunch. In front of him is some sort of fruity drink with an umbrella. I always figured him to be a blue-collar drinker—more like Pabst Blue Ribbon, not some bachelorette party mixed drink.

He laughs humorlessly. “Trust me. You showing up ten minutes late is the least of my problems. Get yourself a drink.”

Paige tells me repeatedly that I shouldn’t trust this guy. She has a great instinct for people, but when it comes to me, she’s embarrassingly protective, which makes me laugh. I’m the ex-Marine, after all. She’s just a “nice nurse.”

“Any pilsner you have on tap, please,” I say to the waitress. “And a scotch and water, too. It’s been a rough day.”

“That’s what I heard. No problem at all, sweetie,” she replies, laughing. To Chris, she asks, “Another mai tai for you?”

He nods, handing her his empty glass. So that’s what a mai tai looks like. I’ve never tried one. We Marines are very self-conscious about what we’re seen drinking.

Chris raises his water glass and says, “To having a common death sentence.”

I smile wanly and raise my glass. Feeling obligated to inject some optimism, I say, “And here’s to figuring out how we get a stay of execution from the governor.”

We clink glasses.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Chris says. “Maybe my group being outsourced wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I’ve been in software development for virtually my entire career. I’m used to everyone demanding miracles, expecting the impossible, people changing requirements at the last minute, but, after living through this latest nightmare project, I wonder if it might be time for a change…”

I can’t believe it. Chris has always been confident, even arrogant, seeming to really love doing what he does. “What kind of change? You thinking about opening a mai tai bar in Florida or something like that?”

Chris shrugs. When he looks down, I can see the huge bags underneath his eyes and the fatigue in his face. “I used to love this work, but it’s gotten so much more difficult over the last ten years. Technology keeps changing faster and faster, and it’s nearly impossible to keep up anymore.”

The waitress comes back with our drinks. Part of me feels guilty about drinking during lunch on company time, but I figure I’ve earned it, having given enough of my personal time to the company over the last two weeks. Chris takes a long swig, and so do I.

He continues, “It’s crazy what programmers, and even managers like me, have to learn every couple of years. Sometimes it’s a totally new database technology, a new programming or project management method, or a new technology delivery model, like cloud computing.

“Just how many times can you throw out everything you know to keep up with the latest new-fangled trend? I look in the mirror every once in awhile, asking myself, ‘Will this be the year that I give up? Will I spend the rest of my career doing COBOL maintenance or become just another has-been middle manager?’ ”

I laugh sympathetically. I chose to be in the technology backwaters. I was happy there. That is, until Steve threw me back into the big, shark-infested pool.

Shaking his head, he continues, “It’s harder than ever to convince the business to do the right thing. They’re like kids in a candy store. They read in an airline magazine that they can manage their whole supply chain in the cloud for $499 per year, and suddenly that’s the main company initiative. When we tell them it’s not actually that easy, and show them what it takes to do it right, they disappear. Where did they go? They’re talking to their Cousin Vinnie or some outsourcing sales guy who promises they can do it in a tenth of the time and cost.”

I laugh. “A couple of years ago, someone in Marketing asked my group to support a database reporting tool that one of their summer interns wrote. It was actually pretty brilliant, given that she only had a couple of months to work on it, and then it started being used in daily operations. How in the hell do you support and secure something that’s written in Microsoft Access? When the auditors found out that we couldn’t secure access to all the data, we spent weeks cobbling together something that satisfied them.

“It’s like the free puppy,” I continue. “It’s not the upfront capital that kills you, it’s the operations and maintenance on the back end.”

Chris cracks up. “Yes, exactly! They’ll say, ‘The puppy can’t quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It’s just a simple matter of coding, right?’ ”

After we order food, I tell him about how reluctant I was to accept my new role and my inability to get my arms around all the work that my group has committed to.

“Interesting,” Chris says. “You know, we’re struggling, too. We’ve never had so many problems hitting our ship dates. My engineers keep getting pulled off of feature development to handle escalations when things break. And deployments keep taking longer and longer. What used to take ten minutes to deploy starts taking an hour. Then a full day, then an entire weekend, then four days. I’ve even got some deployments that are now taking over a week to complete. Like Phoenix.”

He continues, “What use is it having all these offshore developers building features if we aren’t getting to market any faster? We keep lengthening the deployment intervals, so that we can get more features deployed in each batch.”

He laughs. “I was in a meeting last week where the feature backlog was so long, the product managers were arguing about which features will get worked on three years from now! We can’t even plan effectively for one year, let alone three years! What’s the use?”

I listen intently. What’s happening with Phoenix is a combination of the need to deliver needed features to market, forcing us to take shortcuts, which are causing ever-worsening deployments. He’s put his finger on a very important downward spiral we need to break out of.

“Listen, Bill, I know it’s a little late to say this, but better late than never. I’m really sorry about my part in this Phoenix fiasco. Sarah came to me a week before Kirsten’s project management meeting, asking me all sorts of questions. She asked when would be the soonest that we could be code-complete. I had no idea she was going to interpret that as the go-live date, especially with Steve in the room. William predicted that it was going to be a disaster, and I should have listened to him, too. That was bad judgment on my part.”

I look into his eyes for a couple of moments. I finally decide to believe him. I nod and say, “Thanks. Don’t worry about it.”

I add, “But don’t do it again. If you do, I’ll break both of your legs, and then I’ll have Wes attend every one of your staff meetings. I’m not sure which is more motivating.”

Chris smiles, raising his glass. “Here’s to never letting this happen again, eh?”

A good thought. I smile and clink my glass against his.

I finish my second beer. “I’m really worried that Sarah is going to try to blame this whole thing on us, you know?”

Chris looks up from his glass and says, “She’s like Teflon. Nothing sticks to her. We’ve got to stick together. I’ve got your back, and I’ll give you a heads-up if I see her trying some weird political crap again.”

“Likewise,” I say emphatically.

I look at my watch. It’s 1:20 p.m. It’s time to head back, so I signal our waitress for the check. “This has been great. We need to do this more often. How about we meet once a week and figure out what we need to do to head off this boneheaded idea to outsource all of IT?”

“Absolutely,” he says. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to roll over on this. I’m going down swinging.”

With that, we shake hands.