People constantly ask me what I’m doing these days. TechDrawl is widely known, but it’s rather a well-kept secret that our team is doing a good bit of marketing and technology development for startups (ours and others), large organizations and a few turnarounds. Our diverse backgrounds afford us a wonderful opportunity to work across a variety of industries, from developing web-based applications and digital media apps for the iPhone/iPad to designing the brand and customer experience for everyone’s new favorite taco truck, Yumbii. Some of these endeavors rely on an additional layer of help in mentoring and incubating the companies around them, and I personally often take a hand in that.
All of this leads to the topic of this article: A general discussion about career paths in technology. Mine has been rather undefined and opportunistic. Nearly every business I’ve started ended up with an entirely different strategy than originally envisioned, yet often with successful outcomes. About the only time when my job was easily characterized was when I was the president of a de novo bank in the 80s. Everyone has some idea of what a banker does, or least used to do in normal economic circumstances. I recently met the head of Quikrete; one of my friends remarked that there is an ideal situation – one word is all that is needed for him to define what he does. That yellow Quikrete bag is a ubiquitous brand, which is a fancy way of saying your parents (or in my case, children) can adequately explain what you do for a living.
Serendipity has played a major role in my career path. I have acted on introductions, on ideas brought to me, and on invitations to join teams with trusted colleagues. I have generally gone straight from one gig to the next without pause and have often had overlaps. Even during my banking days I was advising and funding an early multimedia company in Greensboro, NC. While the other bank employees were enjoying the many official holidays, I was always on the scene at my other business. In retrospect I missed a great opportunity to hone my golf game during that era, but at the time my children were young and golf wasn’t of particular interest.
My intent is not to entrap you in a “home movie” retrospective of my career but to set the stage for a series of articles on career building in technology. People looking for their next jobs get referred to me so often that I simply can’t attend to them all on a one-to-one basis. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help… I’ve decided to commit my thoughts to this medium in hopes I can be somewhat helpful to those making work-life decisions. But, to put things in context, I need to first tell a bit of my tale.
After my junior year at Georgia Tech I was fortunate to have a summer internship at AT&T (the original, before divestiture, long before mobile phones, but at least after touch-tone phones were overtaking rotary dials). AT&T loaned me to an organization called Economic Opportunity Atlanta, where I was charged with creating a 30-minute television show on volunteer work in the poorer sections of the city. I had absolutely no relevant experience, but I soon had use of an Arriflex 16mm film camera under the tutelage of the Atlanta Film Festival promoter J. Hunter Todd and his assistant, the very appropriately named, Rikki Knipple. (No, I am not making that up.) After many mistakes, we did in fact produce the desired show, and it was aired many times on public television in the state. I call that success by fire. Everyone needs to go through a few of those as it builds character and weaponry for your next gig.
Upon graduation the following summer I had a number of job opportunities. That was during the glorious days when recruiters worked the Georgia Tech campus pretty hard, took us on “plant trips” to exotic locations like Evansville, Indiana (actually one of my most interesting factory tours) and made us top-dollar offers approaching as much as $1000 per month. I had developed an affection for AT&T and chose to accept a permanent job there in the Initial Management Development Program. I became what was known as an “IMDIPPER” and was part of an entering class that was given extensive classroom and on-the-job training to prepare us for long careers with Ma Bell. I also attended Georgia State University at night to earn an MBA, so I was getting doubly educated about business practices. I actually rode a carpool to work many days from “Telco Heights” – a part of town where constantly transferring Bell System employees generally bought their homes. I discovered early on that the company had a very loyal culture but moved people so often that they only bonded among themselves and never really sunk deep roots in local towns.
I was given considerable latitude as an IMDP guy. In my first job in a downtown Atlanta based facilities engineering group, which laid out the microwave towers and pathways that carried long-distance calls, I was allowed to introduce a very early computer graphics system to help automate the process. We bought a product developed by Corning Glass that used a beam of some sort to darken targeted portions of a glass screen. I suppose this was similar to current eyeglass and sunglass lenses that darken under bright light. At the time when only green screen computer terminals were in use, this was a revolutionary attempt at bringing graphics into play. The contrast was pretty low, and the “paint” rate was slower than a turtle, but it got the job done. Unfortunately, I still remember the day the Corning executives came to me to say they were discontinuing the technology because it had found so few users. I was much more of pioneer than I intended to be, but the company was quite supportive of my efforts even though Corning let us down.
My second job with AT&T was across the street at 51 Ivy, where the major “private line circuits” of Atlanta all intersected and were switched. Large customers like Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola had their own networks for internal calls running through facilities across the country like 51 Ivy. As part of management, I was not allowed to touch any equipment in that union shop. The “craft” were very protective of their rights and were especially disdainful of young IMDIPPERS like myself. The good news was that we had two strikes during my tenure. I once got flown to Memphis were I trained to be an operator on the most modern automated station of the day, but unfortunately that strike was averted before I was able to inflict my humor on unsuspecting long distance callers. A better strike arose where we management types actually got to run the “testboards” at 51 Ivy, basically large vertical stacks of instruments and lots of wire jacks. As the youngest, I was primarily the cigarette runner through the picket lines, but I did get some hands-on gear time.
We once had a trouble call from a major customer and jacked into the line to insert a tone and diagnose the problem. We immediately encountered a true long-distance love affair between two employees of our customer, and it was getting pretty graphic and entertaining as it went along. (“Honey, the next time I won’t even put the suitcase down.”) Little did that couple know that we soon had them on our speaker with about ten of us listening. Nor did they know we were using jacks to actually clip some of their sentences to get them confused. Ah, what fun that was! And funny enough, it was that ‘Cinemax After Dark’ moment that taught me to never say anything on the phone I might later regret. A practice I carry on today with email and such…
My point is large corporations are not evil. I have plenty of tech friends who’ve had wildly successful and satisfying careers with the big guys. The massive budgets, enterprise-scale development and yes, red tape all work together to create true professionals capable of solving the largest of problems. That’s why these behemoths often hatch the best entrepreneurs, which was my next path that I’ll share in Part Two.
In summary: Starting out with a big company has its advantages. It’s great to get some high-powered practical education at the hands of a large organization that depends on such training to sustain its ranks. It was just plain good stuff. And, although I was very active in leadership roles at Georgia Tech, there’s no substitute for getting socialized into the business world in an environment like AT&T’s IMDP program that is designed to equip one to succeed. I used much of what I learned there throughout my career, and more specifically I even leveraged AT&T’s personnel evaluation guidelines through a succession of my own businesses. That company was a master at managing people, both management and union, and they hired many, many fine folks in the organization – a model I sought to recreate over and over again as an entrepreneur.
