A Slap in the Digital Face

I joined Nortel Networks in July of 1988. My path into the corporate world had been long and maybe a little aimless. Having earned my MBA from Texas Christian University, in 1985, I embarked upon an unrewarding and frustrating wilderness in a handful of Southeastern Michigan small technology businesses. People kept wanting to hire me into Sales. A mentor told me, years later, that it was assumed I would be good in Sales because I looked honest. 

Years later . . . in 2020, I began to see an impediment in my career path, a giant, invisible boulder that prevented positive movement on my part. It was a boulder put their, beginning with two initials traumatic experiences of abuse, followed by a third major experience in the 1990s, that amounted to severe emotional abuse and trauma. I was making counter-productive decisions and plans. I was doing things that made me more vulnerable to predators (they are more prevalent than we think), which in turns made me more vulnerable yet. With edits to my blog beginning in mid 2022, I am pointing out elements of my decision-making, that involved The Boulder. 

They say not to judge people by appearances. I daresay that my outward look of honesty may have been accurate, at least in this case. I knew enough about my products to know that I could never make my numbers if I told the truth. I knew about the technical limitations of our products. I knew how they stacked up in terms of value, to our competition. I knew that I would not be a buyer of most of our products, if I wanted to purchase the best thing for myself. My results were predictable: lackluster, underwhelming. 

I wanted to get to the end of each day and get home as fast as I could. I was still involved in musical pursuits, as a church musician and accompanist for youth music festivals. I was active in a church-planting project. I knew that all of these activities were more important than selling whatever goofy product I was supposed to be hawking. My managers figured this out, about me. They would coach me: "Just work hard for a few years, and then you'll have lots of money that you can put into your charitable work." This became a pattern: "inspiring" advice and "encouragement" that was well-intended, but that felt patronizing to me, under-valuing of me, as if I had locked myself into a cage of my own doing. This advice, through the years, was a model of events that would freeze me in my steps. I might lose one or more days, not doing anything productive, just processing the "helpful comments" of people that did not understand me. I didn't even understand myself. 

In fact, making money sounded okay. But I didn't like what it would take, to make the money. And my other interests were always more urgent. I was motivated to meet current needs, to connect with people now; to connect with people with urgent needs. 

I never doubted the value of my M.B.A. I was glad I had it. I just didn't like the business world, at all. 

Through research and professional connections, I became interested in the world of Telecommunications, which was an industry in an explosive phase. In my networking, I got to know people from Nortel Networks, a Canadian company that manufactured state-of-the-art digital switching equipment. Their customers were the big telcos, like AT&T, BellSouth, Ameritech, GTE. Everything was still mostly in voice communications, via an old-fashioned telephone. The Internet was not a thing yet. Email was in its embryonic stages. At Nortel, I became an early user of email, interacting with scientists that in a few short years would provide everything we would need to launch Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix. 

It was a very exciting time. And everybody was very optimistic about the world's future, when we would be able to communicate with anybody in the world, instantaneously. 

I began working those connections, and finally got hired by Nortel, into their Marketing Management Program, a rotational program that provided management experiences for MBAs from top colleges and universities. 

By August of 1988, I was well-established at the Richardson, Texas location of Nortel, in Product Line Management of the DMS-100 switching platform. I had a good salary, a good job, and a great future. Best yet, I was in a corporate culture known for being "nice." I never dreamed I would be faced with my first ethical challenge, within weeks of my first day. 

There was a pattern developing: I would immediately do things to undercut my relationship with my peers and management. Without realizing it at the time - - - with the best of intentions, I had more than just an interest in corporate ethics: I had an overall problem trusting almost anybody with authority over me, or that had some expertise that could, or so I thought, be used against me.