Last Tuesday at around 3pm, at a travel oasis in Dallas, my manager – let’s call him Bob – explained to me what the Doppler effect is. Now, if I were incompetent in technical subjects, I would have appreciated his dedication to my learning. However, the bulk of my higher education has dealt with signals, systems and waves. Bob’s brief explanation of the oh-so-hard-to-understand Doppler effect really irked me. I wonder if he even read my resumé when he hired me.
My predecessor – let’s call her Mitsy – said that Bob was the best manager that she ever had. I believed her the first time she said that and subsequently signed on to work at Cannon. When she asked me to nominate Bob for the Outstanding Manager award, she echoed the praise she gave to him before. I was reluctant to support this nomination after just one month of working with Bob. He seemed disinterested in me professionally, and I did not receive any guidance from him. At least, not the quality of guidance which seemed to have impacted Mitsy so much. Despite my conscience, I submitted my nomination, thinking that it was more valuable for me to stay in my own colleague’s favor than to stick with my belief. This was the wrong thing to do.
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| via Magnum |
This past Friday, I finally met Nancy. Nancy is the Director of Ideation and Innovation of our business unit. ‘What is that?’ you might be wondering. For this, I have no professional answer, but I can speculate that the president of the aforementioned entity simply wanted to work with an attractive “cougar”, the term which a good college friend of mine likes to use to describe those women whom most guys describe as MILF’s. I mean, she may or may not have graduate from a certain University with a bachelor’s degree in marketing; does this give her the credibility to make high-level decisions for a multi-national organization? Coming into this first meeting with her, holding this general opinion of her and Bob, she goes ahead and says, “You couldn’t ask for a better guy to work with”, when I told her for whom I worked. Well, that was the icing on the cake! Right after I replied, “Yeah, he’s great!”, I could not figure out what the big deal about Bob is. What is the big deal about him?!