My 3 Corporate Lessons

Project #6: Vocal Variety
Manual: Competent Communicator (CC)
Jul 17, 2009

[I repeated this project at TGIF Toastmasters]

Every one of us has or had at least one boss in life: it could be our manager at work or our spouse everywhere else. Bosses at work are typically more experienced and we would have learned something from them that we could make use of in our life journey. I too had few bosses in my career. The three key lessons I learned from three of my bosses are outlined in this speech.

It was my first job after my school. My friends and I always thought that life would get better if we land up in a job and we don’t have to work as hard as we did in school. In those days email is not widespread, so we were thrilled to have email access that helps to communicate with many friends, who are remote. First couple of days, I learned to send and receive emails. Whenever I got bored I also read through few pages of the test tool manual, which I was supposed to complete by end of that week. On the third day, my friends and I got very excited and started bombarding each other’s mailboxes with flurry of emails. I spent the whole day, except for the lunch and restroom breaks in sending and receiving emails. Close to end of the day, I sent almost 220 emails, which is one email every 2 minutes. At the end of the day, my boss called me to his office and asked me “how am I doing with respect to the assignment?” Well, I had read only few pages. So, I stumbled to answer. Before I could open the mouth, he threw other one: “are you playing with emails the whole day?” I was stunned, but recovered soon and told him that I would complete the manual before the deadline. Next day, I focused and gave my 100% on reading the manual. At the end of the day, which was a day ahead of the original deadline, I completed the manual and informed my boss that I am ready for the work. After that, I was never sloppy at work and received outstanding rating in performance appraisal for that period.

This incident taught me the first lesson: Duty first; never loose the sight of it.

My next venture was working for a startup. Well, as usual startup environment was challenging and hectic. I spent countless nights burning midnight oil churning code. Many days, I came home only to sleep. Some days I even slept in office and came home only to take shower. My only goal in life at that time was to make the company successful at any cost. Fortunately, I was single at that time. Otherwise, my wife would have killed me. J Amidst hectic life, I got engaged when I went to India for my sister’s wedding. On return I went to my director to convey the news. My director congratulated me whole-heartedly and told that my life will not be the same. He mentioned: “Sud! There are 30 employees to take care of this company, but you are the only one to take care of your family.” Oh boy! That was an eye-opener for me. From then on, I trimmed my working time close to 8 hours per day and began balancing other activities: family, my MBA, etc.

Well, I learned the second lesson: the importance of work-life balance.

Few months later, I quit startup and joined a midsize company. The new company culture is totally different from the startup and I am glad that I made the switch. Though this experience reinforced quite a few lessons: importance of hiring right people, time management, proactive planning, etc, I learned an important lesson from my manager. Couple of years back we hired a senior person to the team. He was assigned to implement a feature using the framework I have written; hence I was assigned as a feature buddy. That feature was supposed to be completed in less than 3 months, but it dragged on and on, even with all the support and got completed after a year. I was frustrated and went to discuss this with my manager. He said “Look at your hand; are all your fingers look alike? Each one is different, but meant for different function.” On that day, I learned my 3rd lesson that all are not created equal.

The three lessons: duties first; maintain work-life balance; and not all are created equal from my 3 bosses have made my life better than it was before. Thought, I would share these lessons that could be helpful to you as well.