Canadian Bacon.

So I’m currently the Marketing Director for a multinational corporation that builds backend software for variety of products. While it sounds impressive, it's really not. I ended my fast track Agency career and joined this company for several reasons. Here are my top 5.

(1) Smaller, entrepreneurial environment. (Big fish, small pond)
(2) Ability to focus on one core product or idea. (Pro-A.D.D.)
(3) Tired of the consistent Agency finger pointing and blame gaming. (Pot meet kettle)
(4) Opportunity to effect organizational change in a big way very quickly. (Look mom, I’m a Do-Gooder)
(5) Oh yeah, and I immediately realized that the owners of this business have little to no business acumen and my input and contribution, while minimally required, would result in a god-like reputation in very short order. (100% Ego)

Now, obviously number 5 was an attention grabber. I have managed my career very carefully up to this point. Only taking on opportunities that in some way elevate my status professionally and/or most importantly financially. When this opportunity presented itself, I couldn’t grab it fast enough. The first month or so really highlighted reason # 5. After coming off the 60+ Hour a week schedule I was maintaining at “The Agency”, this seemed like a dream job realized. I showed up, said some shit, watched the owners swoon at my ideas and got a paycheck for it. Beautiful! I knew this wasn’t going to be a career move, only a nice breather in-between more exciting, more professionally focused opportunities.

Well the honeymoon was short lived. We recently made an acquisition of a Canadian company that provides a complimentary service to some of our products. Along with this acquisition came a new CTO. A Canadian, asshole, MBA who clearly wiseguy’d the owners into a purchase. He’s like most MBA’s I know; overly eager, self-assured and completely lost without Excel and PowerPoint. Granted, I should be concerned that the owners of my company actually fell for his MBA bullshit and bought his company as quickly as they did. And even more concerning is that this isn’t the first flippant financial decision I’ve seen them make since joining the team here. BUT, the bigger issues now is that this Mr. MBA has single handedly ruined any chance he and I have at a professional or personal relationship.

I walked in today (Monday morning no less) to a shit storm of comments from Mr. MBA about a marketing item I managed last week. I’ll spare you the pathetic details of our exchange, but it resulted in him calling me an unmotivated liar. He then stormed out of my office, slammed the door and refused to conversate in a manner becoming of an adult. He sulked for about 1 hour while I supplied him an endless amount of evidence supporting the fact that I did manage the issue in question with professional acumen.

His apology didn’t come as a surprise, and it was even followed up with an offer to buy my lunch. I love it when I win!