I met my friend after couple of months. He is one of the few people who became instant friends with me even before we met. He and I worked in the same company but in different countries. He was one of the subject matter expert in the field of business i was dealing with, so i spoke to him almost everyday for an hour either officially in the conference call or for individual questions.
We sometimes spoke about the cultural similarities and differences between his country and India. Since both of us are not from the US, all our fun ends with poking someone from the US. Anyway he somehow came to the US last year for another position. So i met at last after knowing him for about couple of years. I moved to a different company now but we still meet once in a while off the work to discuss something that is not related to work and of course some office gossips.
This time when i met him, we went to a bar near the south sea side in the NYC. It's a fine bar where they serve refreshing home-brewed beer. The names of the beer are really exotic to me but they are nothing but typical native American like 'Cherokee Bash', 'Indian River',' Apache Slide', 'Dakota horse', etc (translated names). The trend in that bar is to order a 'season five' or a 'voyager 7' beer. You can make out from the names they are a set of 5 or 7 beers brewed in-house. They are served in a 1/2 pint glass (approximately 250 ml) in a circular plate with numbers from 1 to 7. They advice you to start from 1 and move up the number. They also give you a description of each beer. Its really fascinating to drink different varieties of beer in a single sitting. You feel like a brew master tasting the beer. We can easily make out the taste of the different ingredients of the beer. The beer made out of barley tastes different from the one that is made from wheat. Some strange ingredients that a beer could be made are from oats, rice and sugarcane. I knew that they made hard-liquor like rum from the sugarcane but never knew that they could make beer out of it. Anyway i liked the light-fine brewed wheat beer than any other beer. The close second is the traditional barley beer. Enough of the digressing from the topic, me and my friend were enjoying the beer and sharing stories from our side. We spoke about food, wine, history of warfare (both of us share this interest) and office politics.
My friend was telling me that our CIO left the company after 29 years of service. I knew our CIO really well. I mean my cubicle was next to her room. So its impossible for her to avoid me. Also i have seen her in some presentations and conferences of which i was always a passive listener. I always had a great respect for her as she is extremely brilliant. She had worked on every aspect of the business from procurement to marketing and from inventory management to IT. Although her style of approach is debatable and old-fashioned according to me, she is definitely brilliant. Also her influence on the other senior executives and the board was always very high. So i always thought that she is one of those people who would never retire and never get fired from a company. The news of her resignation sure did catch me by surprise. I asked my friend what's the official reason and what's the actual reason for her resignation.
Like any other company, our company always had an official stand on anything and then there is always a rumor mill. Most of the time the rumor mill is intentionally started at the level just below the senior executive to get the truth across the company. I have witnessed this few times myself. In one of the meetings with a senior executive in marketing, he told me over the lunch that the reason for one person leaving the company may be because he stepped into many people's foot, meaning he pissed off his bosses. When i came out and verified with few other people i found it to be true. So in this case my friend is close to people who are in the level to start the rumor about our CIO. So i asked him the truth or the rumor version of the story. He told me that our CIO was asked to report to the new COO who recently joined the company. There seems to be a clash of ego there. I was told that our CIO was eyeing for that job but the board needed a change in the senior management and intentionally rebuffed her and made her report to the new COO. This enraged her and she quit. This incident makes me to conclude one thing.
It doesn't matter what position you are in the company. Your immediate boss and (or) one above (may be) is one of the main reason for you to be in the company or leave the company. This is time tested and even across nations, culture holds good. In my limited personal experience and from experienced people whomever i spoke with have all agreed with me on this.
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