So Much Time, So Little to Do

For many, many years I was active doing things in my work life. I was almost never allowed to actu­ally touch hard­ware; the tech­ni­cians learned the con­se­quences of that very quickly. But, even they were the first to call me into the lab to observe and sug­gest when­ever there was a behav­ior that oth­ers could not explain. When it came time to develop a com­puter model to explain a phys­i­cal process, more often than not I would be the one to work the prob­lem. As time pro­gressed, I gained more and more man­age­ment respon­si­bil­ity. At first, this was small projects. Later, larger projects. Then even sig­nif­i­cant devel­op­ment pro­grams. After that, man­age­ment of depart­ments. But through all this, there were times I would jump in and work com­puter mod­el­ing, even while I was man­ag­ing a func­tional orga­ni­za­tion of sev­eral hun­dred employ­ees. As an aside, this is not nor­mally a rec­om­mended behav­ior, but you have to find fun where you can, I am a com­mit­ted geek about mod­el­ing, I was (at least in my own mind) bet­ter than any­one else at it and some­times you can get away with doing what you like instead of what you should. I was always busy doing.

But now, oh now. Now, I am upper man­age­ment. And a kind of strange, advi­sory, hard to define, no real bound­aries type of upper man­age­ment - a job where I am expected to stick my nose into every­thing and advise. Some might say I have finally been pro­moted up where I can do less harm; i.e. up where I sit around hav­ing big thoughts and grand ideas, but far enough removed from real work that I do lit­tle harm. Actu­ally what I do is spend most of my time watch­ing, sug­gest­ing, nudg­ing, wait­ing to see, if I have had an impact. It has been a very hard adjust­ment for many rea­sons. Many days I fell like Willy Wonka, “So much time, so lit­tle to do.” But in a mat­ter of min­utes it turns into “Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it!” The timescale for results is so much longer than it used to be.

There is very lit­tle instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. In this job you put things in motion, then you wait and watch. Some­times you nudge them along or back on path. You often do not see results for a very long time. Some­times you never clearly see your impact - good or bad. You just keep try­ing to do the right thing and judge the out­come on the aver­age out­come. Not a lot of cause and effect. And you really can­not step in and do the work. Your job is to teach, to men­tor, to sug­gest. But you have to let the kid­dies suc­ceed or fail. You try not to let them fail too hard (and you cer­tainly do not let them fail as a group - yes, it is very much like rais­ing a fam­ily). Con­trary to what many of the younger employ­ees might think, I actu­ally bite my tongue quite often - they hear a lot from me, but there is a whole lot more I would like to say - if they only knew!

And what do you get for this. You get time to think, and worry, and talk to peo­ple, and worry, and put on a good face, and worry, and encour­age peo­ple, and worry, … And in the end you will get way, way, way too much credit when things go well. And you will get way too lit­tle blame when things go bad (unless they go really, really bad for a long, long time - but by then you will have hurt a lot of good people).

So all you can do is always offer your best advice, always believe every­thing you sug­gest really mat­ters, take each thing as seri­ously as every­thing else and just keep try­ing and never believe you are too impor­tant. And when there is so much time, catch your breath, you never know when it will reverse.

Is Still Here