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Seeing End

A long time ago, I worked for a company much like this one that is now going out of business. When I was hired, they sold me a vision of a leadership team that was chomping at the bit to become a modern company and go toe to toe with the competition. That too was a family-owned business with many tenured folks. A lovely place to be as far as how comfortable they made me feel as a new hire but that is where the loveliness ended. There were a couple of IT leaders who had built the systems that ran the business they had today - these were systems that had served them well decades ago and were long in need of complete overhaul if not outright replacement. 

That was exactly the recommendation that had heard from the consulting firm they had hired to help them create a modernization strategy. It was the recommendation I wholeheartedly agreed with. As it turned out it was impossible to execute in that environment. The old guard refused to let go of what they had built and refused to what it took to modernize it. So management found themselves in a situation where if they had to build a company that was relevant to the times, they would need to build from the ground up with a team that knew nothing about their heritage, their customers and what made them successful. 

There was simply no way to make that happen with the team they had it place for decades. I preserved for almost a year to get the holdouts in the technology team to see the writing on the wall - that they would either adapt to the times or not have a business left. That did not work out, I moved on as did many others who were more recent hires. The consulting company continued to produced lovely strategy decks full of  "actionable recommendations". The brass perused the decks with great interest and used some of the content to promote their agendas. 

But none of that made any dent on the technology team that was backbone of the company. A few years after I left, news very similar to this came through my LinkedIn feed. I could claim clairvoyance and say I saw this coming many years ago - it was a matter of when not if. But this was so very obvious that just about everyone there could tell how the story  would end even if some chose to be in denial to the end.

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