"This is a hard Thoughtlet for me to write. I realize there is a popular TV show called The Apprentice, which has the theme of Donald Trump saying You're Fired.' I've never seen the show, and have no interest in ever seeing it. However, the experience I'm writing about this week is the same thing, it is very personal, and I take it as a significant personal failure on my part.
When we started Landmark and got the initial venture capital funding, I was given the title Senior Vice-President of Operations and given responsibility for marketing and manufacturing. I hired two guys, Ebb Pye and Stirling Reed Lindsey, to run these two departments. Maybe I should say that Bob Limbaugh hired two of his friends, and set it up so on paper they reported to me, but in reality they reported to him. Neither Ebb nor Stirling worked out, and both of them were fired within a year of starting with Landmark. I liked them both, thought they both did good work, and was and continue to be a strong supporter of them individually.
I did not have direct management responsibility at Mobil. Big companies monitor people, and I'm sure there are good reasons why I was not a manager. I was a Zone Leader for about one week of my Mission, and a District Leader for maybe six months. I like to be involved in doing something, not in making sure other people, none of whom seem to have the same motivation to work as I do, are doing their job. At the Seismic Acoustic's Lab, I ran everything, but did not have people reporting to me, did not have to do annual reviews, and was not really a manager. After the Ebb / Stirling fiasco, I was not particularly interested in management. They are both really good guys, each of whom did their best to do what they thought was right, and because of a variety of reasons, mostly being political maneuvering by Bob Limbaugh, they were caught in the crossfire and heard the words `You're fired.' Maybe it happened only because of my limitations as a manager. I'll probably never know in this life.
About eight years into Landmark, I got very frustrated because I did not have the tools to do some of the things I wanted to get done; i.e. software programming tools. I complained about it, and I was given two direct reports. One was a guy who had failed in the software development group. It turns out he was on drugs. I don't remember his name, but I definitely remember having to take him aside and to say `You're fired.' It was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard for me to do. The other person was Dennis McMullin, who to this day says he had never had to work so hard to get so little recognition, and has never had a job where he had so much fulfillment. Dennis and I are good friends, at least when I don't forget to show up for lunch with him (0509.html). Whatever the case, this experienced convinced me that I am not a manager, this is not one of my talents. I do not want to manage people, I just want to get things done.
Well HyperMedia happened, and I delegated all management responsibility to Bill Rollwitz. I did not keep up with what he was doing, and he ran the company into the ground. Leaving me to go in and say to many people, `You're fired.' It hurt more than I have words to say. These were/are my friends. Then there was Continuum Resources. Again, I avoided management responsibility, just like I avoid working on finances. I expect there is a common theme here, and I avoid in order to avoid the emotional trauma of discord and disagreement. So when the Board set out a new plan, and it was obvious to me it wasn't going to work, I told the Chairman of the Board my thoughts, and he basically told me `You're fired.' Actually I quit before he could fire me and he attempted to hire me to work on another one of his projects. I chose not to because it was in Iran and it was and still is illegal for U.S. citizens to do anything that supports Iran's economy. I guess the only time I have actually been told You're fired' was in the letter from Bob Sneider, which was waiting for me when we returned from the family church history tour about the summer of 1994. When I later told Bob he was the only person who ever fired me, he said he didn't fire me. So maybe I do not know the pain I know others I have been associated with have felt.
On Monday, the 14th of February, I called Rob and asked him if he would like to digitize well logs for GDC (0509.html). He was interested, and rode into work with me the next day. However, he was too sick to work the rest of the week. The following week, he did not come to work one day because there was no work for him to do and he needed to go to traffic court. He slept in and was a couple of hours late another day. Rob found the work very boring. He would come down to my office and talk to me. He was in my office talking when Paul called from Germany. Rob seemed very proud that his first day he came to work with a mohawk, and no one ever knew. I couldn't help but wonder what else he was hiding. On the other side of the story, GDC's well log digitizing process is broken, and Sam LeRoy, as a consultant, is reinventing it. A big part of what happened is Rob was hired just as this transition went into implementation phase. On Wednesday afternoon he was having a hard time digitizing, and kept repeating the same section of the log over and over, only doing 25% of what he had done most afternoons. And his boss told him to come and talk to me to see if there was some work he could do and still be paid. I did not want to be in the middle of keeping my son busy, and so I passed him off to Sam. As he left on Wednesday, Rob did ask me to come by and pick him up the next morning. He left his CD player and earphones in my office.
Then Thursday morning when I went by to pick him up, he wasn't home, and Marti did not know where he was. He did not call in all day and did not show up for work. It turns out, because I am one of the bosses, his boss had told the other digitizers there was no work for them, and had given priority to Rob, one of the bosses' sons. Then they could not get any of the other digitizers in when Rob did not show up. Rob did not call his boss Pravin all day to tell him where he was and why he was not at work.
About lunch I talked to one of my bosses about it, and he told me I had no choice, I had to tell Rob `You're fired.' He pointed out that I could not ask Rob's boss, Pravin, to say this, because Pravin only hired him because I told him to. For this level of a job, the company can not tolerate someone not showing up when they are scheduled. And so once again I found myself in a box of having to say `You're fired.' I also had to sign Rob's termination paperwork at GDC. It tore me up inside, as Maureen, who brought me the paperwork will concur.
It was about 9:00 on Thursday evening when I finally got hold of Rob. He offered no excuses, and I did not ask for any. When he told me he would see me in the morning, I had to say the words `Rob, you're fired.' In fact, I had been stewing, and wondering, and crying about what I was going to say all day. Maureen, Mike Bennett, Mike Dunn, and others all recognized how much I seemed to be hurting. How do you tell your son, someone who you love and who you already feel like you have failed, that you are terminating him from a job you helped him to get? Andrea had arranged for the missionaries to come to dinner Thursday evening, and she called me at 6:00 to find out where I was on the Katy Freeway. I was still at the office, buried in some of my work, trying to figure out what I was going to do about my feelings of once again failing someone I love. I packed up my bags and made it to the house in time to say the closing prayer, just after the missionaries left their spiritual message. Oh well! After they left I played the guitar and worked on the computer. Andrea came in and said she could tell by my actions how much I was hurting inside. Oh well!
This experience definitely trumped anything else that happened this week. I'm sure I will hear repercussions of this event for the rest of my life. The good thing that happened Thursday afternoon was that Pamela West sold all of the Tile studies to a company in Dallas. This is a $350,000 sale, and we thought it was about to happen, which was why there has been such a crunch on getting the new well logs digitized. However, President McKay's statement kept ringing through my mind:
As far as my week went, Monday Matt did the Family Home
Evening lesson. He had us each build a paper airplane. I
built one of my cylindrical airplanes, and he loved it. I
helped Andrea get the tax material on a zip drive so she could
take it to the accountants.
Tuesday Merrill Littlewood, Bill Golden, and Andrea called me to talk about the ASI Loan and the inheritance money from Dad's farm. I was encouraged to get an estate inventory in writing, and was told that Sara might not own the farm after paying me the money if things had not been probated correctly. I called Aunt Sara and she told me she has no legal reason to pay me anything. The farm was transferred to her name before Dad died. Her agreement with him was to pay money to Mom until Mom died, and then to pay me annually until I received half of the amount Brent Matheson had offered for the farm. The accountants got me to stop and see that this is a small fraction of what the farm is worth now, and once again I realized how poorly I do business stuff. Oh well! I don't intend to give any of you kids an inheritance, so why should I expect to get even the money to pay our house taxes each year, which is what the money Aunt Sara and Uncle Des send us each January? When I called back the accountants they asked what happens if Sara dies and the `annuity' is not paid off? I told them I expected Des, Bridget, and Brian would continue to honor the agreement. They they asked, "What happens if you die?" And I do not have an answer, nor do I want to ask Aunt Sara. To top my financial discussions off, I could not find any paperwork on the ASI loan. Oh well!
When Tony Traweek arrived on Wednesday night, he had some interesting news. Halliburton is going to get rid of the Landmark name. Tony was told Halliburton will be renaming Landmark as the Halliburton Integration Services (HIS). So there goes a big chapter of my life up in corporate smoke. Oh well! It turns out, Merv Swan on the High Council told me the new name of the division is Digital Consulting Solutions, and Landmark will be kept as the name of the software, because there is so much name recognition with Landmark (0511.html).
Thursday was Rob.
Friday I wrote a paper for Hart's E&P magazine and sent the draft copy to the three guys from Anadarko for review. Mike Dunn assigned me to take on all of Geokinetics/Quantum Geophysical/GDC's web site pages. Jialin sent a note and said that the Tarim contract has been undone by BGP, and he is going out to Western China to find out more this next week. He continues to refuse to answer his phone. Needless to say my frustration level is raising higher and higher. I tell myself all of this is not mine, nor anybody else's fault. It is just normal stuff that happens. Cultural differences, spatial differences, etc. However, it can be pretty intimidating when there are piles of stuff handed out in one week. There was no Enterprise nor JAG on TV, and Numb3rs was a repeat. So Andrea had checked out some movies. We watched Flight of the Phoenix Friday night, and I worked on my Infinite Grid(SM) stuff in response to the Strategic Paper on Earth Observation Data by IW-GEO (the Interagency Working Group for Earth Observations). I enjoyed the movie, but the extra's were R-Rated. Oh well!
Saturday turned out to be another challenging day. It started out OK. Andrea and I went for a walk down to the first bridge on the new trail in Barker Reservoir. This is over over 2 miles each way from the house. We also raked leaves. There were unintended consequences of independent decisions at the end of the 2 hours of leave raking. Oh well! Saturday evening Andrea and I went out to dinner with my friends Frank Hamtek and his wife Cindy Overton at Rio Ranch next to the Westchase Hilton. I enjoyed the evening and the conversation and I think Andrea did also. When we got back we watched another movie Andrea had rented called `Shall We Dance.' It was a good movie with a good moral, and it is not for Grandkids, it's more for those experiencing the 7-year itch and beyond.
Church was nice. I wrote the following possible stanza for Prime Words from comments by Alice Beckstrom (a) in Fast & Testimony Meeting:
I caught up on thoughtlets this afternoon, and decided to wait
a week before sending of this one. Sunday evening Andrea and
I watched `Friday Night Lights.' Then I placed my Sunday
night phone calls. I figured it was better for you kids to
learn that I said, `You're Fired!' to Rob from me than from
some kind of rumor mill. There were some nice discussions
and a lot of concern all the way around. There was especially
concern for Rob and how he will react to being told
`You're fired.'"