A year ago, on a crackling autumn day like this one, I turned in my badge, performed my exit interview, and tried my best to start a new life, a life without Microsoft. With a year behind me now, it’s hard to resist examining the choice and the lessons I’ve learned from life outside.
I’ve heard others describe Microsoft as a kind of graduate school; a place of practicum-meets-theory among unconnected vats of boiling hard drives and college graduates. I always imagined towering vertical pressure cookers. Turns out that’s mostly what I got.
I hear that the fall of 2003 – when I joined Microsoft full-time as a junior technical writer – was a strange season for the company ranks; a type of reorganizing that coincided with new language around collaboration, and less about cutthroat internal competition: in short, the Type A’s were no longer driving the bus.
Lesson #1: I’m a Rotten Type A
Maybe I had a spell of bad luck over 1/10th of my working life, but Type A’s were the only people driving from the moment I swiped my badge. Even if there were relaxed, collaborative people taking care of me, they were always at the mercy of the screamers, the yellers, the keyboard-throwers, because they used their few weapons – the axe of layoffs and the scythe of program cuts – faster and with less concern for collateral damage, and every thoughtful lead and manager knew it well enough to keep out of the way.
But I admit, it gets things done – just maybe not the right things. Still, it looked like success to me, and I fell for it. My arsenal of shirts and pants from Express hail from the days that I mistook histrionics for proxemics. I dressed up. I took Dale Carnegie leadership courses (when you could still get the Company to pay for them). I signed up for the University of Phoenix to finish that 4-year degree and move on to a – well, go on, guess.
That’s right. An MBA.
I don’t know what I would have become, but I wouldn’t have liked me much.
It’s not that aggressors are the only inhabitants of Microsoft. And it’s not that aggressors always go for the MBA. It’s this.
Me + Microsoft = Angry, Competitive, Feudalistic Me.
I believe more and more these days that it’s not the corporation, and it’s not the man, it’s the corporation plus the man that encourages one type of behavior or another. You are the company you keep, and I realized quickly that the competitive bile had nowhere near been drained from the Company by the time I arrived, and for all the talk about the New Microsoft, it wasn’t going to.
It was part of their lifeblood, part of what made them – and continues to make them – unique, innovative, and successful. To cut it off would be suicide.
But as the Psychedelic Furs say, there’s a world outside.
You might accuse me of threading the needle of Bolshevism by my own words, but I’ve seen collaboration work magic in the past year, and I believe there is a case for the listeners, the consensus-builders, and the just-plain-hard-workers to make a goddamned good product.
This past year has been my conversion to a steadier platform of innovation, and my own personal evolution to a calmer way of being.
Maybe it was the pain of losing family members, maybe it was the sickness, but I realized there are things you can’t plow through.
For five years, I didn’t think there was any other way.
Turns out there’s a world outside.