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August 04, 2007
Leaving Toronto
It's been over a week now since I've said good bye to to Toronto for the final time. My last day at work was greeted with a minor prank. The Summit wouldn't start, so I thought the boys had drained my battery. In actuality though, they only removed a fuse from the car. This was tame compared to their other ideas of potentially removing the driver's seat, putting an inflatable woman in the passenger seat and parking it up front or going down to Kingston road and getting the much dirtier, cracked out non-inflatable version. I suppose the tameness of this prank was too little for one Bradley Allan Waller. Brad has taken it upon himself to give me personal wake up calls between 6:30am - 8:00am every day this week. This would be nice under any other circumstances except that Brad finds himself in EDT, while I'm in MDT. A full 2 hours behind him. Waking up to a cellphone at 4:30 in my time off is no treat.
My old company has treated me reasonably well in the five years that I've spent there. I belive that I was incredibly lucky in getting my first big break as a co-op in the labs. From there, my career has been a string of fortunate coincidences leading up to London Business School. It's bittersweet to be leaving as there are difficult times ahead for the company. There's light at the end of the tunnel, but it's going to be a hard road ahead. There are a number of issues which will make it difficult for people there - The most of which I've experienced is that for a mid-sized company, it's rather fat and slow.
Operations and compliance wise, there are more streamlined ways of achieving the same results. I have faith that there are good people that are able to institute change, unfortunately everyone is so swamped dealing with/working in the existing inefficiencies to do so. Compounding the isssue are some of the newer policies around personnel. The best and the brightest are filtering out and for the most part, they won't be replaced. Eventually people will be scrambling to get day-to-day operations under control will open up even bigger issues for the company. This is particularly evident from a suggestion from a director heard just before I left which has potential SOX implications. It is unfortunate that the company is hanging its hat purely on six-sigma for process change rather than empowering the people who work within the process every single day to drive improvements.
Best of luck to my friends still there. In spite of everything else I've said, I still beileve the company is still trying to do the right thing and it's comforting to know that employees are protected.
Comments
~sniff~, bro. you make a grown man sad. hehe... When are you moving to London??
Posted by 
-tvu
7/8/07 1:28 AM
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