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First things first: how did Jobs return to Apple, at all ?I’ve once read that Amelio was actually instrumental in bringing Jobs back to the helm. Influential individuals on the inside and outside of Apple knew they needed a new CEO who would be lenient towards opening Apple up to third-party developers for their new and company salvaging operating system. (Apple used to have a very strict policy in developing everything in-house.)So when Spindler was set aside as Apple CEO (who tried not much more than selling the company to others), and replaced by Amelio, he did the right thing: start negotiations with two competing system suppliers, BeOS and NeXT. It is rumoured that the manager in charge of setting up these negotiations didn’t even know that with NeXT he was inviting Apple’s founder…BeOS asked much more (about 200 M) than Apple would offer (50 M), but it was just half of what Apple paid for NeXT (400 M) ! But the real reason why the BeOS deal was quickly off the table, was the lack of chemistry between BeOS CEO Gassee (also a former Apple executive) and the Apple management.As Gassee said it himself:Thank god that didn’t happen, because I hated Apple’s management.And according to Jobs, Amelio said by that time:Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.After the NeXT acquisition in December 1996 (with Jobs installed as advisor to the chairman) Amelio quickly had been warned that he would not be able to contain Jobs in that moderate corporate position for long. Well, it only took half a year...Here it is:Jobs secretly sold all of his Apple shares in June 1997, bringing the stock value seriously down. The board decided to oust Amelio and installed Jobs as interim CEO first, jokingly called the iCEO, a title he later on upgraded to CEO.So with just one and a half year on the record as CEO but with such an incredibly important decision on his plate, one could doubt whether Amelio was in it for the long run. I think he discretely paved the way for Jobs, but probably didn’t expect to be out so soon.

One of the side effects of being raised within the foster care system is you become very good at standing back and reading situations and people. It is sort of ingrained in you to take the role of outsider, step back and assess a situation, and contemplate the fallout of taking action. This can be a positive or a negative depending upon the situation.Some years ago I was hired by a fortune 500 company which had recently acquired a failing processing facility. It was a bit of an adversarial takeover as the two companies were arch rivals and competitors in the industry. Back then this was a new thing, now mergers and acquisitions are a fact of life!I came in with no job title other than project manager and was placed in a leadership position on the acquisition team. I was told by senior management they wanted me to be their eyes and ears and to report if there was anything or anyone they felt needed their attention. There was no job description. I literally went from meeting to meeting.It was obvious people were uncomfortable when I came to their offices or attended their meetings. Managers would stutter and perspire. I did not get it! I actually had one manager up and quit because I had led an operational meeting that identified he was not ready for a conversion to the new operating systems. He basically had fought the change to the point of doing absolutely nothing, waiting to be told what he needed to do and unwilling to share the concerns he had in regard to transitioning to a new data stream. Well folks, if you don’t have the tools you need to get your job done, are unwilling to investigate and identify what needs to be done, and then throw your arms up in the air to say it is not your fault, are you functioning as a manager? He needed to go! But it was his choice to leave and he made quite the scene doing it.I was asked to investigate what was happening in a department that held a tremendous amount of financial liability if their work was not processed in a timely manner. Again, the arms went up in the air, “We can’t work with the reports we have from the new system and the system is not working.” I asked what is wrong with it to which I got the answer, “everything, this system sucks and this company sucks”. (Nice, this is the company who stepped in on the verge of bankruptcy so you could keep your job. )After spending a few weeks in the department, I filed over a hundred help desk issues for them, and created workarounds. I investigated the workflows used by their counterparts in the parent company, identified best practices and made sure custom task flows they wanted were built for them. At the request of our senior management I implemented a tracking system for their workload.Things were just getting going when I was informed by the Sr. Operations VP, who I now reported to, that I needed to step out of the department as the manager was complaining about my presence there and threatening an age discrimination suit. I felt that I had given them the tools they needed to get on the path to recovery from the conversion fallout. Also, the manager in the department made it clear my presence was not appreciated. I was glad to get out!When the Acquisitions VP called me a month later to ask how things were going I told him I had been told to stay out of the department by the VP of Operations. By the end of the day, he informed me that the Manager had refused to use the processes I had worked to establish for her and as a result she was being demoted and I would be taking over and reporting to a different VP.The manager retained her leadership of half of the department but I took over the area with the most liability. She did not leave quietly! The Supervisor in the department quit, followed by several key employees. It was not fun! Fortunately this was a period of technical evolution and office automation so we were able to establish online training and paperless processing to fill the training gaps. I brought in some new people from the local competitor who had hired our staff, it was quite the employee swap. HR forced us to take on several employees who were needing to be internally moved and because I had openings, I got them. It was a challenge to identify their strengths and place them in a position matched to their skills, but we did it.Within six months we had eliminated the $100,000 per month losses hitting the department. We were audited regularly because they could not believe we had been able to reduce our losses so quickly and maintain the quality of our processes. Of course the previous manager remained a thorn in my side. She even contacted the FBI to insinuate I was mishandling unsettled funds. Fortunately for me that account was managed by our accounting department. I learned from an employee that one of the leads in the department was serving as a mole for the operations VP and had been sending emails to the staff about how they were monitoring closely what we were doing.Thankfully the Sr. VP stepped in again and made sure my reporting structure was with the home office. The mole quit when she was outed. This led to stories that the Sr. Vp and I were having an affair. I am sure you can guess who started that rumor. The General Manager ended up resigning, but on his way out the door he paid me the compliment that they had not made it easy on me but I had managed to salvage the department and recover. I was recently told he is now a school bus driver.I stayed on with the company for several more years but eventually left when it became apparent the division was to be sold. I had accomplished what I had set out to do there and my family needed me more! I submitted my notice and went about wrapping things up. Two days before my end date I was escorted out of the building. It was totally humiliating but deemed necessary to prevent a loss of data. I was angry and sent a scathing three page dump of what I thought of those who remained at the company focusing particularly on the HR representative who made it her focus to trip up my staff where ever she could and of course the thorn in my side who was the original department manager.I learned the HR representative was let go the following week and the “thorn” left the week following. Now I really do not wish ill will on anyone but these two really needed to go. I also learned my manager was eliminated as well.It has been years since and no other job I have held has matched the challenges nor the achievements we made in that department.There were many critical learning experiences gained during that time and one really important one is that firing people is a failure both on the part of the employee fired as well as the leadership. Of course, there are special circumstances such as the fallout from mergers and acquisitions. There were some really bad attitudes and there was a bit of house cleaning that was needed but once you build your staff the task is to draw on their abilities and strengths and to keep them progressing in their careers.If you do not have the money in the budget for raises, figure out a way to work more efficiently to save on expense so that you can reallocate those funds and justify the increases. Your staff is the most expensive budget line item and your attention to their job satisfaction should be a priority. If you have hired someone who is not making the grade, you must face as a manager that either you have not trained them well, been successful with coaching or you just plain made a bad hiring decision.In my time there, I had a few decisions I wish I could go back to. I had one woman who had been with the company quite a long time. While everyone around her had been cherry picked from the department and hired away by the former supervisor and manager, she remained. She made mistakes and caused losses and there was good reason why they were not hiring her away. Between her attitude and errors we had to terminate her. I still feel as if we could have and should have done more to put her into a position where she could find success rather than letting her go.It has literally been years since I left that company and recently I have come into contact with several of the other middle managers who served on the acquisitions team with me. I was surprised to learn that I was identified as the henchman and that is what these managers remembered of me. On three separate occasions I received the same feedback. Really people I was just trying to do the job I was hired to do.At the time, I did not see this as my role at all, but in hindsight, I see that I was used very well by management to get those who were not happy with the merger to get back to work. While it was not my role to fire anyone, my presence in a department, often lit a fire.I am proud to say several of the staff I hired, and promoted to leadership roles have gone on to their own management careers in some pretty high places. They were awesome!

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