Walking away from "Good"

It's been official for a couple of weeks now, although the paper work was just put in place last Friday. The announcement was made to the team this morning, and the job posting will likely hit LinkedIn this afternoon. Let me know if you know anyone that would be a good Tektronix account manager in New Mexico because I'm quitting my job.

I'll be joining a couple of friends at Epimedia.  At this point there are four of us full time with a couple of contract programmers.  We write software to control hardware.  

I've alluded in my blog posts to the fact that
my job at Tektronix has been a dream position. The pay is good. The projects are interesting. The products I sell are best-in-class. I have flexibility in my schedule. I'm not micromanaged. My customers value our relationship. There is a lot to like about what I have been doing. Let me address why I'm leaving.

I'm a vocal proponent of people pursuing careers that will make them happy. I've worked with too many people that are stuck in an okay job that they don't love because it pays the bills. (I've heard this referred to as "the golden handcuffs.") I've vowed to never be in that position. As Jim Collins said in his influential book Good to Great, 

“Good is the enemy of great.” 

The idea is that when we get to the point that things are going good, we seldom keep progressing. We don't want to risk ruining a good thing. This is exactly the situation that I have been in with my job at Tektronix. It was good in every way. There was nothing bad about it. But there was one missing element that kept it from becoming great.

I have huge respect for people that innovate. There is something so refreshing about people that create what was not there before. In our post-industrialized world, with ever increasing emphasis on efficiency, it has become increasingly rare to see individual contributors in a position to truly innovate. Gone are the Skunk Works of the world. As businesses grow, they can be counted on to develop a culture where job titles are defined, people are replaceable and research projects are bounded. I read the following recently in Fast Company regarding the problems facing big organizations:

"There's a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve... Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They're absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems--when you don't know what you don't know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

"Uncertainty is when you've defined the variable but don't know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don't know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you're not even sure what the variables are. You don't know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything."(Fast Company, This Is Generation Flux, by Robert Safian, January 9th, 2012.)

The thing that has largely been missing in every job I've ever had is the ability to decide what the variables are. In my job at Tektronix, I am free to solve any problem I want, as long as the answer to the problem is selling more oscilloscopes in New Mexico.

Please understand that this is not a criticism of Tektronix. Tektronix is a respectable company that focuses on making their customers successful by developing amazing new technologies. (Tek's new mixed-domain oscilloscope is one of the most clever uses of existing technology I've ever seen, and the architecture of the new 33 GHz scope is art.) I've worked with brilliant people during my short tenure here, and I hope that I can maintain the connections that I have made.

I've written previously about how every good opportunity has come from people that I knew, and this job change is no different. As long as I have been in New Mexico, I have been feeding business to a friend of mine, Dean Cyphery. When my customers needed a programmer to automate the hardware that I sold, I brought in Dean because I knew he would get the job done. From the beginning he joked about hiring me. Just recently, he was finally in the position to make an offer, and I was finally in the position where I had developed enough professional confidence to make the jump.

I am coming to Epimedia as a true business development manager. Along with finding new contracts and growing revenue, I will be helping make the strategic decisions about what our company even does. We have valuable expertise and I am very excited to find innovative approaches to solving complex problems. More importantly, as was mentioned in the quote above, I look forward to solving the ambiguous problems as well.

(In anticipation of questions from my current Tektronix customers, I'd like to point out that I have made arrangements with Tektronix to maintain the role as New Mexico Account Manager at least through March while my successor is identified.)