Problems and Issues
A Turkey Tech Tale
For my US readers, welcome to a special Wirepine Turkey Tech Tale. For my friends outside the US, welcome to Friday! Let’s talk turkey. I uncovered a little wisdom to dish with your leftovers on how to handle problems and issues (they’re different) in your life.
But first, a short story about the biggest project I was ever on, at what was once the biggest company in the world.
General Electric was the company and the project spanned 3 years of my career, culminating in an unexpected trip where I got to see the Eiffel Tower. I changed jobs in the middle but still couldn’t shake this project.
GE was the biggest of the bigs - a titan of industry from the Gilded Age like the ones I talked about in last week’s Tech Bends the Knee. GE’s origins go back to 1892 and Thomas Edison’s General Electric Company. GE peaked in 2000 after an astonishing 20 years of growth and acquisition under homegrown hero ‘Neutron Jack1’ Welch. When Welch retired, GE was worth $600B and the behemoth he built did everything from financial services to media to consumer products to making jet engines. At it’s peak, GE was everywhere - hundreds of countries, thousands of offices, hundreds of thousands of employees.
My non-tech knowledge of GE is largely informed by watching Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy go at it in the TV show 30 Rock. Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy played a bigtime GE exec plotting to sell ever more microwaves:
Welch knew a few things, because GE started to unravel the minute he left. The next twenty years saw the deconstruction of the empire Jack built. Earlier this year GE did the unimaginable, splitting into 3 separate companies with a combined market cap of $200B, less than a third of what GE was worth when Jack left.
Marketing got busy with pretty colors and typography creating three new brands anchored by the iconic GE logo. The purple company makes healthcare equipment, the green company builds energy solutions and the biggest - the midnight blue company does the core GE stuff like building building jet engines.
My project with GE took place before all this when they were trying to get their mojo back, so it was aligned with an initiative to modernize the company - embracing software and services to complement manufacturing. Meant to capitalize on the emerging Internet of Things, it was the brainchild of CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who was trying to pick up the pieces after Neutron Jack.
The initiative was called GE Digital and Immelt tagged it as an Operating System for manufacturing just like iOS was for phones. He named it Predix.
GE’s bet with Microsoft was that we would help them build and host these new services in our data-centers on Microsoft’s cloud called Azure. This is similar to the relationship Microsoft has with OpenAI today.
While we weren’t sending astronauts to the moon - arguably one of humanity’s most complex endeavors - it was a big deal for Microsoft and, as their diligent foot soldier, for me. Complimenting the cloud or Azure side of the deal, we were going to migrate every office, factory and employee at GE over to our stack of collaboration and communication tools. My bit was Skype for Business, which in the middle of the project turned into Teams.
Big boss man (guy who ran Skype) took me in his office, pointed his finger at me, and told me it better go well. It was a stretch - as a first version non-native server product that we were forklifting into the cloud, we certainly weren’t ready for the likes of GE. But the logic was a big visible corporate deployment would battle test us. It helped that the project took three years.
Project kickoff was at GE’s sprawling HQ in Fairfield Connecticut. All the big dogs came and GE’s CIO was extremely combative, so that was fun. I wrote about that trip in Why I have nightmares.
In subsequent years, progress was made over weekly calls and reviews and code drops and project plans. When an issue would blow up we often got together in offsites to whiteboard it out, gathering in hot spots like Atlanta and upstate NY. Things progressed nicely thanks to a small army of project managers that kept track of all the moving parts.
The last trip was Paris. GE had just bought the energy side of a company called Alstom2, so we had a final huddle to bring them into the fold at their headquarters.
The best thing about that trip was that JFran came out after all the meetings and we spent a frenzied three days running all over Paris. I remember those three days better than the prior three years.
With big projects, it’s issues all the way down. Who needs a project to get something done if there aren’t a bunch of issues? Project managers hunt and kill issues on the daily and so can you. Know they’re coming, look for them, track them and, for the ones that look like they might bite you in the @$$, deal early.
Try to minimize the bit where you worry or wish issues didn’t happen - they make doing the big things interesting.
Problems are either an issue that wasn’t dealt with correctly or something no one saw coming. You don’t want a lot of those. Over the three years I worked on GE I can only remember one problem. Early on in the rollout we took GE’s network down. Entire sites went offline. That was bad. We slammed on the brakes, pushed through all the yelling to fix it and carried on.
Life constantly serves up issues and I wish you lots of them. If you have a bunch of issues to deal with, your life is interesting! Just like a big project, take them on, pick them off and they won’t turn into problems.
Thanks for reading! Here’s a dad joke:
What sound does a turkey’s phone make? Wing! Wing!
best, Andrew
The ‘Neutron’ moniker referred to Jacks ability shed employees like a neutron bomb while keeping the factories going delivering shareholder gains.
GE bought Alstom’s energy business but the other thing Alstom did was make trains and we got to ride some in the French subway. Alstom made the new fleet of BART trains, on time and under budget, what!?
GE really gobbled all those companies up, didn't they?
I learned about Neutron Jack from Bloomberg Game changers, I think, and then fleshed out a more well-rounded picture years later. Corporate America is currently using some of Jack's old tricks today, like cutting the bottom X percent of performers. IIRC, that was one of his big initiatives with GE.
Speaking of logos, I remember when GE decided that its iconic cursive-circle logo just wouldn't do on its jet engines and came up with that awful sans-serif parallelogram monstrosity. I believe the classic original now graces its engines.
I also remember how my first real exposure to the Internet was GEnie. The user manual was a small, loose-leaf binder.