Tag: career

Pop Culture Impediment and Career Advancement


The-economist-cover-facebookA couple of months ago I was working with a client, primarily concentrating on the improvement of accounting policies and the transition from QuickBooks to ERP. In the process, I interacted a lot with the company's staff accountant.

She is a sharp and ambitious young woman from Pacific Asia. I liked her very much and was particularly impressed by her outstanding work ethics (a rarity nowadays). She's been with the company for nearly two years and this was her first job after she got her BBA in Accounting.

Her knowledge of bookkeeping basics was pretty solid, which gave her much confidence. She was determined to leave the company and look for a job that would give her a faster career track. Never mind the fact that I've discovered a lot of errors and holes in those areas of company's records that pertained to somewhat more sophisticated concepts, such as Inventory/COGS conversion and revenue recognition.

It wasn't entirely her fault. She didn't have a benefit of working with a seasoned supervisor and wasn't savvy enough yet to understand that accountants were expected to look for standards pertaining to a specific industry. She is a capable individual, though, and most likely will get better with years. Hey, under contemporary standards, she is probably in a top 10% of quality workers. Those experience and knowledge gaps are not the reasons why I think it's unlikely for her to have a high-level career in an average American company.

Here is what happened during that consulting engagement.  Facebook filed S1, thus making public its hopes for a $5 billion IPO. The 02/02/12 issue of The Economist arrived at the client's office with a cover spoofing Mark Zuckerberg's profile on his own website, completed with Caesar's boast as a "status" and comments from various "friends," including Bill Gates, Matt Romney, etc.

Unfortunately, the "author" of the most amusing comment was obscured by the embedded subscriber's label – one could only see two letters "ge." I read, "The Death Star is fully armed and operational" and laughed, "This must be Google." The girl was standing next to me. She said, "It's 'ge,' not le' we can see." I explained, it's Larry Page of Google. She looked doubtful and also didn't understand, why I found it so funny. Something hit me and I asked, "Do you know what the Death Star is?" She shook her head, "No."

I didn't show it, but I was very surprised.  I understand that she was isolated from the rest of the world back home, but she graduated from high school and college here, in the States. I took her out for lunch and spent 40 minutes explaining: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Google – Facebook competition, "Stars Wars," the Dark Side, Jedi, the irony of the reference – all fresh news to her.

This incident put me into an inquisitive mode and from time to time I threw well-camouflaged, unobtrusive questions at her.

"What kind of music to you like?" "Pop." "Like who?" "You wouldn't know them." "Try me. I am extremely eclectic when it comes to all arts. Who is your favorite band?" "They are all Asian."

Some time later she ventures, "What are your favorite bands?" "It's a long list, but there is a Top 10 that I can never rank – like Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Queen…" She said she'd never heard those names. I am ready to give up, but still, "The Beatles is one of my Top 5." She has heard the name, but never listened to their music. My heart aches in utter pity.

Every night she watches funny videos from her home country on YouTube. How about TV? (C'mon, people all over the world watch American TV shows . In 2004, I flew from Amsterdam to Istanbul and saw a Dutch girl watching an episode of "Six Feet Under" on her laptop). Alas, not this girl, "I don't watch American television."

The question is, does this hard-working, diligent, and fairly bright person have a chance of ever becoming a partner in an accounting firm, or a corporate CFO, if the said companies are not under Asian management? Unlikely.

The higher you advance in your career, the more you have to communicate with people around you. Nobody sticks to just business, there is always the small-talk. People will be discussing the latest "Homeland" episode and she won't even know what it is? When everyone starts noticing, what will they think? In this country, pop culture is like English – a common language of the melting pot, and you must be able to speak it, or you will devalue yourself in the eyes of others.

To tell you the truth, in spite of my religious belief in the merit-based system, I don't think that this is wrong. You don't have to like pop culture and, like me, you can criticize its prevailing weaknesses all the time. Yet, not to be aware of it entirely – that's just strange. Someone who does her job well, but is so disinterested in her immediate surroundings, will be considered a reliable functionary, but unlikely to climb too high up the corporate ladder.

How Far Can They Push Us?


The post about infringement of freedom in the workplace generated further discussions among my peers. 

Some people actually said that I made them very depressed by putting into words realizations they try to avoid.  I would like to remind these people that the Welcome page of this blog, Reason to Share, clearly expresses my belief that sharing frustration gives us therapeutic relief.

Others felt that my "uplifting" statement that one can always quit was clouded by the suggestion that most CFOs and Controllers cannot afford to do so.  Indeed, I keep talking about how difficult it is to find a CFO/Controller level job nowadays.  That's why I don't suggest quitting without lining something else up or having sufficient funds to keep yourself afloat during the job search.  The truth is, you need to establish an emergency fund anyway – as I always say, there is no such thing as job security for anyone in this new world.

But let me tell you from my own experience, there comes the time when you just know you cannot deal anymore.  You are so frustrated, anxious, depressed, angry and hopeless, you cannot breath.  No matter what you do to get a grip, it feels like your balance is slipping away.  If that's the case, it is time to make your move, because otherwise the suffering is going to destroy you either psychologically, or physically, or both.

I have many stories about people pushed too far and, hopefully, I will be able to tell them here at one or another point.  However, for this particular post I decided to use, as means of a more familiar illustration, a Hollywood classic by Billy Wilder – "The Apartment" (1960). 

The main character (forever great Jack Lemmon) is not a CFO or a Controller, but he is an ambitious person and the gist of the story is very relatable to subordinate employees on all levels.  You see, he really wants to climb the career ladder.  So, he lets the VPs to use his apartment for their extramarital encounters.  He even lays out snacks and liquor for them to enjoy. 

When he allows himself to be convinced by his boss to leave his apartment on  a rainy Christmas Eve, he is angry and frustrated, but he keeps his mouth shut.  And finally he gets that "big promotion" he'd wanted.



Jack's character falls in love with the elevator girl.  He doesn't know that she has been to his apartment with one of his bosses as well.  When the moment of truth finally comes, he feels so overwhelmed, he realizes that he cannot be a doormat anymore.  The time has come to be a human being.



So, gives up his job.  Of course, as in all Hollywood fairy tales, he gets the girl (an adorable Shirley MacLaine) as a reward for his courage.  But it does not matter: rewards or not, everyone has their own threshold of pain tolerance.