With Labor Day fast approaching I felt it was a good time for me to finally write this blog. Labor Day is the day we set aside to show appreciation for the workers in our country and all they do to make our world work. Appreciation is nice to have, but so often it is not shown the other 364 days of the year by our company heads. Too often they love the work we do for them.... they just wish it didn't cost them so darn much.... and they find ways to stop that from happening.
As Christians we are
taught to "Forgive others as God has forgiven you". That
is all good when you are sitting across a table from someone you have a
relationship with and they pour their soul out to you that they have wronged
you and want your forgiveness. It's a whole different thing when
you get a check in the mail from a law firm saying your company settled out of
court (along with Apple and Google) to a tune of $415 million because they got caught
creating a "No Hire List" to prevent workers from moving from one
company to another and driving up wages (this was done from 2005 to
2010). The money is nice, but where are the tears? Where is
the "We are soooo sorry!"? Where is the "We did
something wrong!" (by the way, part of the agreement was that they did NOT
have to admit to any wrong-doing).
To describe my
feelings when I got that letter I can only say it would be like coming home and
finding your wife in bed with your best friend and then finding out it's been
going on for 5 years (no, my wife has never cheated on me and loves me to
death... but that is the only comparison I could come up with). By
2015, I had worked for Intel for 25 years. It was a dream come true
to work for them. I proudly wore Intel Inside T-shirts and loved to tell
people I worked for Intel. I worked long hours at Intel and put in many
50 to 60-hour work weeks. It was so great it didn't even feel like
work most of the time. During the Microprocessor War years with AMD I
would urge friends and family to buy Intel over AMD and loved sharing our
latest product release information. I was one of Intel's best
cheerleaders. The check from the law firm was a gut-check and not a
pay-check.
Fast forward to
today and here I am writing about what some would call "ancient history"
or "water under the bridge". But I keep finding myself drawn
back to this like a dog to its vomit. After much soul searching and
discussion I realized the answer was in a past blog I wrote to my daughter
about graduating from college. The blog was titled, "Swinging
from the monkey bars". In the blog, tell her that moving
through life is like swinging on the playground monkey-bars. The trick to
making it across is to not lose your momentum and to "let go" of the bar
you are holding onto as soon as you "grab hold" of the next
bar. My advice to her was simple: Reach, Grab and Let Go! I
told her that if you don't let go, you will lose your forward momentum and you
will be "stuck between two bars". As I read that advice,
it occurred to me that I was the one that was "stuck" and not her. I
needed to "let go" of the past with Intel with forgiveness. Yes, I am
wiser now to the world and will never be 100% the same again, but I need to
move forward and let go of the bitterness.
Maybe someday I
will wear the Intel T-shirts again......after I put some distance between me
and the "2015 bar". For now, I am at peace with
myself. I love my co-workers, my projects and my work. I enjoy the
challenges that are given me to work on every day. I hope that maybe this
letter will serve as a guide to others who find themselves in a similar
predicament as me. I hope that maybe it will serve as a guide to
other CEOs or VPs who need to be reminded of the relationship they have with
their employees who work for them and to not take them for granted. Maybe upon reading this they will have a new appreciation for their workers who invest not only their time and energy into them but also their passion and emotions. Maybe they will see that money can't buy that kind of allegiance or fix all wounds.
