Bondage, Gunshots and Mergers

Friday, 8AM – Reykjavik, Iceland

While lying back on the narrow twin bed of our tiny but typical hotel room near the city center, my eyes had just started to close when I was startled by the sound of television channels changing in the background.  Don, my buddy from Chicago and current traveling partner had zeroed in on the European version of CNN headline news.  Still groggy after the long night flight from Boston, I felt myself drift off again until I heard the words, “And PeopleSoft today announced the removal of CEO Craig Conway.  The board of directors has named company founder and former CEO Dave Duffield as the new chief executive officer effective immediately.”  “Wall Street analysts feel this could clear the way for Oracle to complete its takeover.”

No caffeine needed, I was fully awake.  “In other US news, the latest presidential debate saw a major shift in the post-debate polls showing John Kerry gaining ground, and Mt. Saint Helens erupted again spewing ash and hot gasses thousands of meters into the air.”   Overall, a slow news day.

The ramifications of the Conway / Duffield swap didn’t really start to sink in until I had gotten some sleep, but my mind was racing with all that it might mean.  There would be nobody to call and no way to find out what was going on until we returned to the US that following Monday.  I laid my head back down on the small flattened pillow and contemplated the news.

There never seemed to be enough time for the mind to evaluate the events that were taking place and then process how to best deal with them.  You got to a point in the software consulting business, where survival meant to keep running.  New things to learn, new challenges to surmount, new bosses to please, and new customer problems to fix.  There wasn’t a whole lot of time to sit back, relax or reflect on anything professional or personal.

In this same time period, the never ending hostile take over attempt by Oracle was a constant reminder that our careers could end at any time.  It felt like a bad dream that occurred each night, while the Oracle offer deadlines kept passing then were endlessly renewed.  The employees all knew, or at least suspected that the only way Oracle could realize any margin from the buy-out was to take advantage of the license maintenance revenue and dump the salary expense.  For those of you keeping score, that meant most of the PeopleSoft employees. Oracle had even estimated the PeopleSoft terminations around 6000, when early speculation was released to the press.

Other more personal challenges had started to pile up during the same time frame.  There was turmoil everywhere.  Exhausted in the morning hours at the “Hotel Reykjavik”, I started to think back to the last nine years of hotels with bad room service and a constant struggle to remember rental car colors, room numbers, customer vice president names or my own kids birthdays for that matter.  The time simply flew by like nobody’s business.  After 25 states and 7 countries, the artificial glamour of the job usually condensed down into a  black and white crime scene photo of a 44 year old male alone in his underwear, on a hotel bed with remote control in hand.  Its not an attractive picture.