The Element of Dealing With Change and Its Hope for Being Part of the Solution, Not The Problem

“Pack your bags.  You are moving.” These were words I was used to hearing when I worked for Palm Inc. We moved offices, we moved buildings, we moved from cube to cube.

The first move I experienced was a move from Mountain View to Santa Clara. This happened after our company was sold to 3 Com by US Robotics. 

We vacated our Mountain View offices and moved into 3 Com's swankier offices on Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, not far from the amusement park Great America. 

With the move out of Mountain View, I said goodbye to a building, in which many friends and memories were made.  I met my friend Gerri at Palm’s Mountain View office.  I met my friend April at Palm’s Mountain View office.  And I met my friend Nina at Palm’s Mountain View office.

Even today, I can recall the layout of the floor where my cube was housed.  It was right next to April's cube, which was what sparked our friendship. My friendship with April, while brief, was a gift that kept on giving.

Today, some Googler sits where I sat in that Mountain View office, because Google moved into the building we vacated off of Shoreline Boulevard.

If I could send a thought to that Googler, it would say, “Hey Googler, who sits where I used to sit, what is it like working at Google?”

I can never be a Googler myself.  I wrote and sang my way out of the possibility, with ditties such as “A tooter who tooted the flute tried to tutor two tooters to toot” at a key juncture in my life.

The Mountain View office of Palm, is where my Commissions Analyst career was birthed.

I started out as an Administrative Assistant to a Sales Manager. In spite of my bungles in that role, such as the bungled sandwich orders (read my post on Gerri to find out more), a Commissions Analyst position opened up, and my manager thought I would be a good fit for it.

So when we made that first move from Mountain View to Santa Clara, I was established as the one-woman Palm Commissions team.

The move from Shoreline to Great America was the first of 6 or 7 moves I would experience at Palm.

Each time, I had to box all my stuff, so it could be moved to the new location, and as soon as the boxes reached the new location, I had to turn around and unbox all my stuff. 

Cloud based commission systems such as Xactly, Callidus and Varicent, and electronic signature technologies such as DocuSign, were still in the future. Everything had to be printed and filed.  A Commissions Analyst had more files than they would have today.

It was a pain.

I did not enjoy the boxing and unboxing.

But Palm was growing so rapidly, HR had to continuously move resources around to accommodate its growth.

It was the giddy dot.com days. Palm’s star was in the ascendant. To realize its value, 3Com spun it off, splitting it into two companies.

When the company reached 1 billion in revenue, there was a big party on the Great America campus to celebrate.

And then the music stopped.

And suddenly there were too many Palm people for the business Palm was doing.

So after 2000, we kept moving, but now it was for the opposite reason.

It was because Palm had to downsize.

Palm Inc had begun to decline, and with each leg down, people were let go, and vacant space was given up.

Each time, those of us who were still there, had to box and move. 

Eventually, Palm moved out of Santa Clara to cheaper office space in Milpitas. The buildings we vacated on Great America Parkway were occupied by the newly prosperous Marvel.

Palm continued to shrink. 

By 2003, were down to two small buildings in Milpitas. In the move completed just before I left the company, I was no longer assigned a cube, because “you are in office less than 3 days a week”. I was instructed to use one of the guest cubes when I was in the office.

In reality, I went into the office only one day a week, and I decided to express my reservations about using a guest cube on that day, to my manager.

I said, “Hey, Milo, what if I come to the office on my one day a week and the guest cubes are all occupied?. What do I do then?”

“Just work from home all 5 days” he said, sighing.

My telecommuting had never sat well with him.

Change is something we all have to deal with.

Professional changes, personal changes.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves” said Viktor E Frankl.

This is what happened to me when I moved to America.

I could not get an advertising job.

I could not get to work by public transport and get back to my daughter's day care, before it closed in the evenings.

There were no maids in the US to cook my food, to do my laundry, or to keep my house tidy.

I was challenged to change, and do all these things myself.

Where I had been chauffered before, I learned to drive.

Where I had had a cook before I came to America, I learned to cook for myself.

I learned to do laundry, I learned to keep house.

And I reinvented myself in a brand new career - Commissions Administration – transforming from a writer into a bean-counter.

I learned Excel, I learned Microsoft Office, I learned the language of commissions.

And I successfully navigated all these changes to make a decent life in America.

“If there is no struggle, there’s no progress,” said Frederick Douglas.

Dealing with change will have its struggles.

There will be many moments, when we will want to give up, thinking to ourselves, “This is just too hard”.

But we have to plow on, putting one foot in front of the other, doing the best we can.

When we leave school and go to college, we will have to cope with changes.

College may be tough, but we have to show our resilience, and our persistence.

When we leave college and get a job, we have to cope with changes.

Getting a job, and proving ourselves on the job, may be tough, but we have to cope with the new demands on our time, personality, habits and ability, and succeed at our work.

When we get married, we have to cope with changes.

Living together and making everything work may be tough, but we have to cope with our new responsibilities and obligations.

When we have kids, we have to cope with changes.

Parenting is not an easy business, but we have to try to be the best parents that we can.

It is the same when our kids reach college age and leave home.

We have to cope with being empty nesters, and not having the kids to focus on any more.

And then there are the overwhelming changes in our lives.

Such as when a marriage or relationship ends.

Or when we get sick, or a family member gets sick.

When changes happen, we should be strong, not dissolve helplessly into weakness.

We should be part of the solution, never part of the problem.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance” said Alan Watts, a philosopher whom I can't get enough of, for reasons such as this speech he made to IBM engineers in 1969.

Whether you are working in a young company, or in an old established company, plunge into change, move with change and join the dance, as Alan Watts said.

Organizational changes, technology changes, cultural changes - embrace them all.

Learn to be part of the solution, not the problem.

Whenever we resist change, we can become a problem, without even recognizing ourselves as such.

We can resist by dragging our feet, being non-cooperative, or by being subversive.

What is the point?

Eventually, someone is likely to say to us, “Shape up or ship out”, that is if we are lucky. If we are unlucky, we may just get marching orders.

Say, you are used to using one set of systems in your work, suddenly you are told you have to use another.

Plunge into change, move with change, and join the dance, as Alan Watts said.

Say, your company was going in one direction, and has decided to move in a different direction.

Plunge into change, move with change, and join the dance, as Alan Watts said.

Say, you are being asked to take on a different role.

Plunge into change, move with change, and join the dance, as Alan Watts said.

But Minoo, what if I don’t like the way things are going?

Yes, that is a conversation we should have with ourselves.

Sometimes we may decide we don’t like the change.

We may decide to hop off the train.

Nothing wrong with that!

The postal lady who delivered mail to our apartments decided it was time to hop off the train.

Here's her story…

As you know from some earlier posts, I have lived at the same apartments for 15 years.  I didn’t think I could be admired for this, but one of my friends who does admire me for this, compared me to Mr. Money Mustache, making my day.

But anyway, back to my story of the postal lady.

For the first 10 years of living in my apartments, we had the same postal lady delivering our mail.

I didn’t know her name. But I often ran into her when she was putting the mail in our boxes, and I would chat with her.

At times, I caught myself envying her job.

In my Commissions Analyst job, I had to run fast to stay in the same place. 

Her job seemed less frantic in comparison.

After the dot.com bust, her job became even more appealing to me.

“I wish I had a job for life like the postal lady has”, I thought, “It seems so stable and secure.”

This idea was soon proven wrong.

Email, and mobile phones, and online banking, shopping, job hunting was soon to make the bulk of paper mail redundant.

It soon reached a point where the USPS postal service couldn’t afford to have so many postal delivery people anymore.

The lady who delivered our post was told, she could keep her job, only if she was willing to take on 2 routes, instead of her current one route.

She decided she couldn’t do it - it would be too much for her - and she left the job.

Yes, sometimes we may not like the changes we are being asked to be a part of.

We may decide it’s time to get off the train.

Before I became a Commissions Consultant in 2010, I was employed as a Commissions Analyst at a company for 5 years.

But in 2010, after a series of layoffs, the company wanted to make some changes in our department.

My manager's manager told us we needed to take on additional work, which was unrelated to the commissions function.

I decided it was time to quit.

There is nothing wrong with thinking it's time to move on.

Sometimes, when changes happen, we become clear about what we want and what we don't want, and we find the confidence to go after what we want.

It was one such moment for me.

Back when I was an advertising copywriter, too, I changed jobs many times.

Some of these changes were in response to a changing of the guard. 

When there is a changing of the guard, the new guard, who does not have any ties to you, may not appreciate you, or be able to bring out the best in you.

When I became a Commissions Analyst at Palm, my first two managers were very committed to me. Laura because she made the decision to hire me, and she trained me and believed in me, Scott because when Laura left and I reported directly to him, he was so grateful I was able to keep the commissions function going without his help. When the need arose, he readily agreed to get me a laptop (I was one of only 5% of people at Palm who had a laptop at the time), and to allow me to telecommute.

My next manager did not have the same obligations to me.  He had not witnessed the hoops of fire I had jumped through earlier to learn how to do commissions, and then to keep it going on my own, after Laura’s departure. 

All he saw was someone who came in late, left early, and worked from home one day a week.

He never developed the same appreciation of me as my previous two managers.

But being Palm's one woman Commissions Analyst team  - a humbly paid one at that - I had leverage, and so I stayed, and used the leverage to get what I valued more than anything else – more telecommuting days.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself,” said Andy Warhol.

It is good to be one step ahead of change.

We should try to discover new systems and new ways of doing things.

And we should never assume the status quo will be the status quo.

If we are in the vanguard of change, that is the best position to be in.

Sometimes, there will be change upon change.

Even while we are working on current changes, the carpet may be pulled from under our feet.

We are keenly involved in a project, but it is suddenly sidelined and there are new priorities.

When that happens, we should be able to eat humble pie - with the same gusto we eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

This happened to me when I was on assignment at White Hat Security, and “3 deer drinking from a stream” was how I dealt with it.

Coping with change requires awareness, acceptance, faith, trust, willingness to learn, and above all, optimism.

We should never feel hopeless about change.

There is always the possibility of new opportunities brought about by change.

Every assignment I have handled since 2010, has brought both change and new opportunities.

Change is good.

The more changes we negotiate, the broader our knowledge and skill set, the more nimble we are.

“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens.  The sleeper must awaken” said Frank Herbert, author of the Dune science fiction series.

Steve Jobs looked at himself in the mirror every day for 33 years, and asked himself the following question:

“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

He said whenever the answer was “No” for too many days in a row he knew he needed to change something.

You and I can do the same exercise.

We can look in the mirror and ask, “It today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

If the answer is yes, great – we should go ahead with our plans for the day, just as they are.

If the answer is “no” for many days in a row, it’s time to make a change. Like Steve Jobs did.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week. ….M…..a Pearl Seeker like you. Thanks to Aarathi, Ajay and Anita, for their feedback and compliments on my last post…..and thanks to the rest of you for your readership, likes, tweets, pins and votes.  Much appreciated.