Author: marionvermazen

I am a traveler, hiker, avid reader, Sun alumnus, computer geek, Spanish and French language student, knitter and genealogist. I am retired after working for almost 30 years in the Computer Industry. I live in Reno, Nevada with my husband Duke.

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin

My First Kindle Book!

If you follow me on Twitter or read the Twitter updates on the right hand side of this blog you know that I got a Kindle ebook reader for Christmas and it was just delivered. The Kindle allows you to download book samples to help you decide whether to buy a book. As soon as I got my Kindle I downloaded eight books and read the samples.

Steve Martin's new book – Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life – about his stand up comedy career has been on my to-read list for a while so after I read and really enjoyed the sample I bought the Kindle version of the book.

Kindle also allows you to highlight sections of the book just as if you were reading the paper version of the book but the Kindle can be attached to the computer and you can download your highlighted sections

The first sentence in Steve Martin's book is –

"I DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."

One of the most impressive things about Martin and his career is how long and how hard he had to work with very little success. He also says –

"I was not naturally talented—I didn’t sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive."

and

"my growing professionalism, founded on thousands of shows, created a subliminal sense of authority that made the audience feel they weren’t being had."

How many people are willing to work on something for 14 years? I have a new found respect for Martin and what he has achieved. He created a new unique kind of comedy. When he gave up stand-up comedy cold turkey he went on to achieve significant success as an actor, a writer and a musician. He just released a CD of banjo music -The Crow New Songs for the 5-String Banjo which looks very good.

Born Standing Up is an example of what a good writer Martin is. It is entertaining and compelling. I really enjoyed this book. Steve Martin is inspiring!!

And I really enjoyed reading on the Kindle. I LOVE my Kindle!

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The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

The Madonnas of Leningrad is about a woman, Marina,  who survived the German blockade of Leningrad and is now remembering that time as she loses here current memories to Alzheimer's disease. That kind of a description would normally make me avoided reading  a novel because I find books about Alzheimer's too depressing. But this was the March selection for the Reno Newcomers club book club so I got the book from the library.

I am so glad I read it. It is amazingly not depressing but instead is a beautiful uplifting novel. Marina was a tour guide at the Hermitage, Leningrad's immense art museum. During the German bombing and the blockade she and other museum workers lived with their families in the basement of the Hermitage. Her detailed memories of the Hermitage and its art make them come alive. I especially loved the method one of the old Babushkas taught Marina to help her remember the art that had been evacuated from the museum.

"When I was a girl, we made memory palaces to help us memorize for our examinations. You chose an actual place, a palace worked best, but any building with lots of rooms would do, and then you furnished it with whatever you wished to remember."

As the winter and the starvation of that winter progressed Marina built a mind memory palace of the Hermitage and its art.

I missed the book club meeting because my grandson is here visiting but I'm really glad I read Madonnas of Leningrad. Its art, love and poetry  made me feel good.

This is my 7th book this year. My list is here.

Thomas Jefferson’s advice on how to be interesting.

One of the podcasts I really enjoy is the Thomas Jefferson Hour with Clay Jenkinson. Jenkinson portrays Thomas Jefferson our third president  and has been doing so for many years. A podcast I just listened to is an audio recording of a iChat video conference he did with a fifth grade class in Naperville , Illinois (episode 757). It is great fun to listen to the questions the fifth graders asked President Jefferson and to listen to his answers. I especially liked his advice to the fifth graders in closing.

  1. Read, read read – As a child Jefferson said he read 10 hours a day.
  2. Learn languages – at least two. Jefferson knew 8 languages
  3. Learn to play a musical instrument – Jefferson played the pianoforte and the violin

Jefferson said that if you do these things you can not help but be an interesting person.

Be interesting is one of my big goals in life and I was pleased to see that I am working on all three of Jefferson's suggestions.

  1. I love to read and have been doing a lot of reading lately
  2. I have studied French and I am currently studying Spanish
  3. I play the piano.

Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts

I just finished reading Founding Mother – The Women who Raised our Nation by Cokie Roberts.
Founding Mothers gives a totally different perspective on the revolutionary era and the women who were a part of it. Here are a few tantalizing tidbits from Founding Mothers.

  • Eliza Lucas Pinckney was the mother of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney both of  whom were key figures in early American politics. In 1746 when Eliza was 16 she was left in charges of her family's plantations in South Carolina. She ran them for many years and figured out how to grow indigo commercially in South Carolina when no one thought it was possible. She led a long and heroic life and when she died in 1793 at about 70 her friend George Washington, at his request, was a pallbearer.
  • Not the only, but the most famous woman who fought as a man in the American revolution was Deborah Sampson. She served in the army for three years, fought in several battles and was only discovered after became very ill and almost died. She was eventually granted a soldier's pension by congress and after she died her husband received a special survivors' pension.
  • The British General Cornwallis said that even if he destroyed all the men in America, he'd still have the women to contend with.
  • Peggy, the wife of the infamous American traitor Benedict Arnold was an active participant in Arnold's spying for the British. She claimed innocence and escaped persecution.
  • Elizabeth Monroe the wife of James Monroe, the future president probably saved the life of the wife of the Marquis de Lafayette. The Marchioness was in jail during the French revolution when James Monroe was an American diplomat in Paris. Adrienne Lafayette's mother and grandmother had both been beheaded and she was expecting the same fate. "Elizabeth Monroe, in the official American carriage, went to the prison where Adrienne Lafayette was held and asked to speak to her. That show of interest resulted in the Marchioness's release."

I've added Founding Mothers to my list of books read in 2009. I'm working hard to finish the traditional books in my reading pile  so I can start using my Kindle 2 when it arrive in the next day or two. I can't wait!

Lessons Learned When I was fired by Carol Bartz

I admire Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo. A week or so ago I sent an email to reporter Kara Swisher who has been covering Bartz at Yahoo about the time I wasfired by Carol Bartz. Swisher published it on her blog here.

I was in my early 30s and had never failed at anything in my life. I had a Computer Science degree and had been a programmer at Boeing and Sperry Univac. I had managed groups at a small Medical Information System company and at Digital Research, the makers of CP/M the fist PC operating system. I had taken a job at a young Sun Microsystems as a manager of the US Answer Center, the group that supported all of Sun's software products. My organization consisted of 35 fantastic people. But all was not sunshine and roses. After two years Sun was growing quickly and I had grown my group to well over one hundred people. On top of that we had just released a new Operating System, Sun OS 4.0, and it was full of bugs. the Answer Center was overwhelmed with  calls and we were failing. I was failing.

A sales person went on a customer call and the customer used the speaker phone in the middle of the table to call the Answer Center. He was put on hold for over 30 minutes. We had a lot of very angry customers. These customers were paying big bucks for their support contracts. It was so bad that when I met a new VP of Sales at an all hands meeting he said  "So you are the eye of the storm." … not a great way to be known. Although I was in way over my head and didn't know what to do to get out of this mess I liked Sun and wanted to stay with the company. It is was an amazing company full of amazing  people.

So when Carol Bartz was named the new VP of the services organization and she scheduled a meeting with me I was not really surprised when she said "Marion, we are not going to take you out and shot you but you are not going to doing this job any more.". She said it directly and with compassion. I had to find a new job. Luckily I found one at Sun. But as I said earlier I was devastated. I cried for a week.  I was totally knocked off my feet.

For years after this experience I spent time thinking about what I could have done differently, what I should have done to succeed. Even though the support situation was an enormous mess and pretty much all of the management in the service organization was replaced there had to have been a way to succeed. 

It is a measure of the magnitude of this experience in my life that I am writing this post today. I thought I would share with you my lessons learned from the experience.

Lessons learned

  1. Sometimes good people have to go – I probably  could have been coached to success and I know some of my peers who were fired could have been successful in the Bartz organization, but what was needed at that place and that time was focus, action, and a clean slate. By cleaning house Bartz sent a message that could be sent no other way. At the time I didn't think anyone could be successful in service at Sun but Bartz was and her first step was to start fresh.
  2. You need a team who will work together as a unit – At the time I had two people, Sharon and Bernie, in my management team who hated each other. They were each good people but together they drained energy from the team. I should have got rid of one of them. We needed a cohesive team focused on results and working on team building defocused us from working on solving our problems.
  3. Measure, Measure, Measure. You Manage what you measure. – We had a horrible home grown call management system with virtually no reporting. I should have hired someone to just focus on reporting and then we should have managed to the results. Everyone including product development should have been able to see the spike in calls and the reason for the spike.
  4. Ask for help up the line. – When I asked my boss for help he said he didn't know what to do. I should have taken my metrics to his boss  and his boss. It was not only my problem but it was everyone's problem. They needed to help own it.
  5. Always have a war plan – In hind sight I realize that we were under attack. I should have had a war plan in my drawer developed by me and my staff that we could pull out if there was a big buggy product release. Having a plan is very important.
  6. In time of war treat the situation like a war – I tried to manage my way through the problem in business as usual mode. Instead we should have been in war mode. All hands on deck, calling for reinforcements, putting other priorities on hold while we repelled the attack.
  7. Leadership – I should have called an all hands meeting and asked people to rally around. Everyone needed to know that we were at war and everyone needed to go above and beyond. I needed to lead the forces. Lincolnesque war time leadership was needed.
  8. Communication – The whole company needed to know that we were at war. Much later in my career at Sun my boss (he came from the Department of Defense) had daily red alert calls that all the VPs attended. Most people hated these calls but they did the job and focused on our failures. Support calls. are failures and we should have been treating them as such and making sure that the root cause was identified and eliminated.
  9. Life goes on – Even though this experience seemed like the end of world to me at the time. It wasn't. My daughters still went to school and grew up to be wonderful people. I got a new job at Sun and eventually became a Director in Sun's iWork Group. I had ups and downs but I fondly remember my almost 20 years at Sun.

I'd be interested in any ideas of perspective any of you who read this have.