The Necktie

For the majority of my working life I was employed as a customer service representative at a printing company. When projects came in for production, I wrote the work order for the plant and communicated schedules back to the customer. I spent a lot of time on the phone. On a rare occasion I might meet with a customer, but more often than that I was talking with machine operators and searching for stuff in the warehouse.

Our business was generally very good, but it ebbed and flowed like all businesses do. During one slowdown management decided that part of the blame was the result of casual Friday. I am not kidding. They honestly believed a decline in revenue was because people were wearing dockers and polo shirts to work on Fridays. We were sent a memo that said: "I am announcing effective immediately that casual Friday, but more importantly the casual Friday mindset is abolished effective immediately."

That's right, the beatings will continue until moral improves. But the very next sentence was the most important to me: "Just remember to dress and act on Friday like you would on Monday." Years earlier, realizing that a necktie was in no way related to my job function, I stopped wearing one. I was already acting the same on those two days.

So I ignored the memo.

This is the memo.

About a month later my supervisor called me into his office.  As soon as he spoke I knew that my lack of neckwear was going to be made the scapegoat for those executives who were experiencing erectile dysfunction.

Dave Richey was fat, bald, wore a closely cropped mustache, and had a limp that evidenced itself by tilts to the right when he walked. He looked like a Monopoly Man Weeble.  He was smarmy and pretended to be Mr. Hotshot Businessman by carpet bombing the place with cliches and jargon, none of which I could stand. When he spoke to me said "paradigm" and "low hanging fruit". He made up the word "growthing" when talking about sales. He must have used the word "leverage" 8 times. We were going to leverage this and leverage that to create maximum leverage. It sounded like he was describing a Rube Goldberg machine. While he spoke I tried to control my facial expressions and not smirk or roll my eyes. After about 15 minutes of a directionless monologue he stopped talking and  I knew it was my turn to respond. I asked: "Is this about the necktie? Because if you want me to wear a tie all you have to do is tell me. Do you want me to wear a necktie?" I made it really simple for him because I knew that was his skill level. All he had to say was: "Yeeeah. That would be greeat."

Did you get the memo about Causal Friday?

Instead he took this as a opportunity to show off some more of his obtuse managementese. He said: "No Jeb, it's really much more than that. There is a perception held by some of the people here that you don't care about your work. I would like you, to work with me, to change that perception."

Did I walk into a fucking séance? How was I supposed to respond to that? If I was trying to create a baseline for performance improvement, I would use some trackable metric, like profit percentage or spoilage ratio. I was not even going to pretend to divine instructions from the inscrutable musings of Dave's imaginary friend.

So like the memo, I just ignored the conversation.

A couple of weeks later he came into my office and said "You need to start wearing a tie to work." I said, "All you ever had to do was ask."

Several weeks passed.

Dave: "Nice tie."

Dave: "Hey, nice tie."

Dave: "Niiiiice tie!"

I usually didn't pay much attention to Dave, either to what he said or the way he said it. That is why it took me so long to realize he was being sarcastic.

A shirt like this with a thin black tie.

When the casual Friday memo came out I owned a total of three dress shirts. After Dave told me to start wearing a tie, I worked them into my wardrobe rotation. So two or three days a week I'd wear a dress shirt. The rest of the time I wore my usual short-sleeved, colorful rayon shirts. The only tie that would fit through their narrow collars, and not clash with the patterns, was a skinny black one, like the ones the Blues Brothers wore. This meant that about 50% of the time I was wearing the same tie. When I got those sarcastic compliments it was an elliptical way of saying that they wanted me to dress like a lawyer every day. But I was not going to buy new clothes just because this was the pathetic way they sought validation. Maybe they should have spent less time worrying about my clothes and more time on growthing sales.

The sad thing is I used to love this job.

PBM Graphics was founded in 1983. When I was hired in 1990 the revenue was around $8  million a year and the plant had recently moved into a new building. The man who started it was really just a Carolina country boy who done very well. His intelligence and personality were perfect for an entrepreneur. He was extremely sharp. He knew how to take risks. And he always thought a few steps ahead of everyone else. He  saw opportunities where others did not and was the company's brains. His wife also came from printing background and was the production manager. She had been around long enough to know what would work and what wouldn't. There was no way to con her. When we were slammed with jobs, and the machines were scheduled 24 hours a day as far as the eye could see, and we could not produce a single extra printed sheet, she would accept work and simply say to us "we WILL make this happen." She jigsawed the schedule and outside vendors to deliver. We surprised ourselves time and again when we pulled off what we originally thought was impossible. This created a very dynamic working environment where our faith in ourselves grew right along with the billings. She created that. She was the company's heart.

I think people can be overly impressed with business planning and strategy. Mike Tyson summed up best when he said, "Yeah, everybodeeth got a plan 'til they get punsh in da mouth." Business strategy may look great standing on the bridge, wearing that fancy uniform, and steering the boat, but it is corporate culture that is down in the boiler room shoveling coal. This is not said to take anything away from Terry. He was, and is, a brilliant businessman, but I don't think Joanne ever got the credit she deserved for her part. It's not that she was deliberately snubbed. Rather very few people understood how her quiet power and positive attitude, when infused into the workers, was the main reason that everything was possible. That company-wide can-do attitude was her. Strategy may know where it wants to go, but it is culture that will get you there. Sadly, she died suddenly and prematurely in 1999. She was just 45.

After her death her spirit remained with us. We kept chugging along and churning out the work like we were The Six Million Dollar Man....better...faster...stronger. The orders got larger and the customers more recognizable....Starbucks, Nintendo, John Deere, but the place started to change, and not for the better. It became colder and less personal. It was no longer expressed as what "we" were going to do, rather it was what "the company" was going to do. We were just there to serve it.

As the plant grew so did the ranks of management. It seemed like someone wanted to maintain a constant manager-to-sales ratio. More and more executives were hired, sometimes several at one time. Dave Richey was brought on as part of a whole group of new guys. They always came rappelling into the building on a line of bullshit. With them came new procedures, new paperwork, and a stupid amount of meetings.

Dave loved his meetings. They had no agendas. No one took notes. And the business buzzwords swarmed like clouds of mosquitos. Often there were issues that needed "backfilling" and other subjects that needed to be "handled offline." The translation for both of these comments was "I don't have a clue what I'm doing." It was under these circumstances that casual Friday took the last chopper out of Saigon.

Dave: "What tie does he have on today. My favorite!"

 I finally said, "I'm glad you like this tie, because you are going to be seeing a lot more of it."

Iconic neck wear.

From that point I wore my skinny black tie every day. If I wore a pressed Van Heusen, I wore that skinny black tie with it. If I had a client meeting I wore that skinny black tie. I wore it to the office Christmas party. When it started to fray I repaired it with duct tape.

I stayed with that job longer than I should have, another four and a half years, but it was so hard to leave. I worked there for almost 17 years and maintained a great deal of fondness and respect for my co-workers. The Photoshop technicians spent the entirety of each day balancing the dual roles of artist and magician. The cutter operators had eyes like micrometers. The schedulers were able to Tetris thousands of blocks of time together to make the plant run like a sewing machine. Printing is visceral. When the boxing tape seals the corrugated flaps on that last box, I could take home a sample and say: "This is what we made and this was my part." I was very proud of that. When I quit I didn't give a notice, because by then the company changed the policy and would no longer accept them. Whenever someone presented their resignation management would immediately march them to the door like they were perp-walking a pedophile. I wanted to leave on somewhat my own terms, so I dated a piece of paper and wrote "I, Jeb Sturmer, resign effectively immediately". There were more things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell these people that they really had no idea how the company had become so successful and that they had nothing to do with it. Their policies and procedures were slowly strangling the best thing about the PBM, the thing that made it work so well, which was the people. The human element was the thing that made it fun to work there, the thing that made it special. I wanted to say that they had never even met the person who was responsible for that, and that their arrogance would have made them blind to her anyway. But I knew it was pointless to say anything.

As I walked by my cube I left the tie on my desk. I hoped that said enough.

Someone posted this cartoon in the break room
and labeled the guy "Jeb".

Epilogue

About 15 months after I quit, PBM was sold to the appropriately named Consolidated Graphics, a Texas-based holding company. Terry was the only shareholder and he retained ownership of the building.

Then 5 years after that, my new company, RR Donnelley, bought Consolidated.

By 2015 Donnelley had been on a multi-decade spree of buying other companies to "leverage synergies". Then, in 2016, they decided that it was time to "unlock value", so they broke everything up and sold off the companies off again. In the process no customers, employees, or share holders benefitted, just a few choice executives, and of course the lawyers.

Terry never could retire. He tried it before but his mind was too active and he enjoyed the process too much to stay away. He started another company and was off to quick success. Unfortunately, for some folks his success was both too quick and too much. Earlier this year he was sued by PBM Graphics for poaching employees, customers, and trade secrets.