WALK AWAY PEOPLE? KEEP WALKING

The problem with walk away people is what they leave behind: their mess.

Someone will do the clean-up, just not them.

They’re too busy.

Not too busy walking, too busy making their next mess.

There’s always something funny about them:

They don’t think they’re messy. How can that be?

Because they’ve never cleaned up after themselves.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald had this to say:

 

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

 

Growing up in a small Oregon town on the coast, I didn’t know, or recognize, any rich people.

They were probably there, I just didn’t see them, or know them.

What I did see over the years since is how big companies treated the communities where they set up business.

In Coos Bay it was timber business.

Then it wasn’t timber business when the big guys did their well practiced cut and run.

My Grandpa was a logger in Central Oregon. I asked him about it.

 

“I was in the woods when we changed from hand saws to chainsaws.

“The goal was delivering logs to the mill as fast as we could.

“We knew what we were doing to the environment, but that was the job.”

 

He followed orders and made a living for his family.

 

Beginning in 1915, its main lumber production facility was in Bend, Oregon.

For many years, its Bend sawmill was one of the largest lumber producers in the world.

In 1969, the company created Brooks Resources to broaden its business base beyond timber production.

Brooks-Scanlon’s Bend sawmill was closed in 1994. Today, Brooks Resources is the only vestige of the company that is still in business.

 

Cut And Run

Walk away people cut and run, but you get the idea?

The big dog lays down the law, things go to shit, and they take their act somewhere else.

For them it’s nothing ventured, nothing gained.

For those they run from, those who ventured their future, their hopes, their dreams, lose everything.

There’s nothing sadder than a department head, or team leader, getting dismissed in the same way they dismissed others in their department, or on their team.

It feels close to tragic when all the wind goes out of their sails on the whim of a new take-over person.

You hear about the promise and potential of reaching new horizons, submit plans for the team, or department, then get the call telling them not to come in the next day.

Older people in high position have big responsibilities to not only the job, but to their family and community.

When they get cut, they bleed profusely, and they hurt.

It’s not the same when some low level lifer, some schlub with twenty years in, picks up their box of office crap in the parking lot one morning after security cleans out their desk for them.

Most get over it? Sure they do.

 

How To Identity Walk Away People

If a decision maker, the guy brought in to set things right, can’t figure out how to do their job, they bring in someone they believe in.

Or, a fall guy.

Here’s the agenda, they say, do it however you want.

But the guy is a jerk and starts jerking around.

If nothing works out, the decision maker decides to cut them loose, but not after one mess after another like a three year old on a sleeve of Oreos.

 

“I want this, no that, not that that, this that.”

 

Health insurance, investments, retirement accounts, kids’ college tuition?

None of it means anything to the person who laughs in the faces of the insiders now on the outside.

Vacations, new cars, birthday presents?

Some deal. It doesn’t matter to the people cooking in the kitchen.

People put their heart and soul into their work and learn late in life that it was a mistake.

Then get laughed at for putting so much of themselves into their work.

They barely know their kids, have a slew of ex’s who don’t live in Texas.

Their work was their life, now they don’t have their work. What does that mean?

For some it’s a downward spiral focused on who they used to be.

For others, let’s call them resourceful, they take the hit and move forward leaning on the connections and networking they’ve spent a career cultivating.

It’s a different world when all of the connections are networking are in the same boat.

What’s it look like from the top down?

Just another day at work.