My Career of Good Fortune - Circuit City (The 2nd Time)

How we got here:

It was 2006 and I had just about perfected my InfoSec guy stare at the Federal Reserve in Richmond Virginia.

Hiring managers in other areas of the Fed were reaching out about interesting roles and I was seriously thinking about things like being able to take a pension at 55 and starting a second career after that. Looking back, odds were starting to stack up in favor of me having a long career with the Fed unless something completely unexpected happened. And then, something completely unexpected happened.

Two years after forgetting about writing that strategy document when I was leaving Circuit City , I got a call from someone asking about it. The new management team over the Network Services org wanted my opinion on something. When a conversation starts with “the core network melted down three times over the last two months, taking down both data centers and the entire e-commerce environment with it”, it’s kind of easy to suck me back into the matrix. Thinking about the entities and interconnects of complex systems is my jam, as the kids say, and there isn’t anywhere in the world where that beautiful tapestry is more clearly woven than in the fabric of enterprise data networking.

After the third incident, someone found my document and they wanted to talk over lunch about implementing some of the recommendations. That lunch turned into more lunches with more people, which ultimately turned into me agreeing to go back to Circuit City to lead a cross-functional Infrastructure Architecture group.?

The details about the root causes of the outages and what it took for the team to resolve them wouldn’t be very interesting to most people reading along, so at this point I’ll just say things got fixed and we’ll skip ahead in the story a bit. To make sure everyone is up to speed, at this point I had spent almost 20 years working in the trenches of corporate IT and a lifetime dreaming about getting to do exactly what I was now doing. I was surrounded by a bunch of really brilliant Engineers and we were all hanging out together solving interestingly complex technical puzzles. It was awesome.

And then, just as things were improving towards a state of controlled chaos, I was “volun-told” to be part of something that was truly one of the most awful experiences of my career.

For those people reading along that have read the book “Good to Great” but didn’t happen to pick up the sequel, spoiler alert, Circuit City went out of business. To provide a reference point for anyone that hasn’t had the opportunity to be part of a company in its final days, the timeline was summed up perfectly by Hemingway in “The Sun Also Rises”:

Towards the end of the gradual part of the decline, and right before the sudden part, a lot of large enterprises that are in their final stages follow a few similar patterns. One of those patterns is the wholesale outsourcing of internal IT functions in an attempt to “save our way to success” through extreme cost cutting. In this case, they chose IBM as the strategic sourcing partner and for some reason they chose me to be the lead technology SME on the Circuit City side while the contract was being negotiated.

They locked us in a windowless room for a few months, and I had a front row seat at the table where people were talking about things I didn’t understand. The time value of money, WARN Act compliance, SLA gold/silver/bronze frameworks, operational vs capital expenses, budget variances, etc. It was all brand new to me, and transparently the experience was the primary reason I went back to school a few years later to get my MBA. At the time though, I finally understood what non-technical people must feel like when they join a meeting full of IT people throwing around a bunch of weird acronyms. If it weren’t for the larger context of the meetings, it would have been a pretty enjoyable learning experience.

But there was no avoiding the larger context of the meetings and for me, that was brutal. I don’t want to make it seem as though I suffered through it alone or that my part in all of it was any worse than anyone else’s. It wasn’t. And the fact that I was in the room probably made some aspects easier on me than they were for other people that knew they would be impacted at some point, but had no insight into what was going on inside that room. I can only speak for myself though and I know what I went through during that time wasn’t psychologically healthy.

I felt the gravitas of every statement and decision I made in that room because I understood at the end of the day, moving the needle just a hair one way or another would have life altering effects on real people. Entire families would be impacted. Every single person in that room day to day on both sides of the table took the responsibility seriously and we did what we could, where we could, but the reality was the bottom line financial expectations were set well above our pay grades. Circuit City was going out of business and this was a last ditch effort to try to save the company.?

When it was all said and done, we let over 130 people in IT go because of the decisions I helped make. Many of those people were my friends. Some haven’t spoken to me since. Despite knowing I had signed an NDA, a Director from another area pulled me into their office during the process and threatened to ruin my career if I didn’t keep them informed about what was happening in the room (I didn’t and they didn’t). A few years later, another person told me, and everyone else in line at a local grocery store, what an asshole I am because of what I did. There were other things that happened as well, but you get the picture. I struggled with it for a long time but I know in my heart that I tried to do the best I could with the hand I was dealt.

After negotiating what ended up being a $775M IT services strategic sourcing contract, I was then asked to help manage IBM’s day to day performance against the terms of the deal. My heart wasn’t in it. I went from happily solving puzzles all day with my friends to being persona non grata and babysitting contractors that mostly didn’t want to be there either.

It was 2008 and I was in my first people leadership role with almost no experience or training at a company that was clearly not going to make it. I still loved being hands on doing technical things, but I had also just gone through a very eye opening experience where I learned first hand how those roles get moved around the board like chess pieces by people that have zero clue about what they do or the value they bring to a business.

I was completely torn on what to do next when I got a call from a previous Circuit City colleague that had recently moved on. They wanted to talk to me about possibly taking a role at a small Open Source software development company in Raleigh North Carolina.?

I had no idea at the time how much that company would change me. No one could have predicted that I would be joining a company that would end up changing the world.

** This one is for you Janet. You were the first opposing attorney I ever liked and you were one of the most brilliant minds I ever met. I wish this world could have experienced your wit and wisdom for a lot longer.

“Simply fix it if it's fixable, live with it if it's not.” - Janet Gadient