Hitting Refresh

I woke that Tuesday around 4:30am. Heated coffee quickly in our stovetop Bialetti. As I drank it, I remembered the strong Dominican coffee I'd loved in the Peace Corps. During the two years I'd been Villa Fundacíon de Baní, my host mom Freda had prepared it in stovetop grecas just like this Bialetti I'd found in NYC somewhere.

Coffee finished, I showered and dressed, then drove to the office. The roads were clear on the chilly, grey morning. By 6am, I'd finished putting everything into the box I'd brought. It didn't take long to throw everything in. Scattered around my office I had some books from business school, one or two photos, and a few lanyards from the conferences I'd attended. Once everything was inside, I brought the box down to my car.

I'd left only my laptop in my office. Back upstairs, I opened it and logged onto LinkedIn. Made a few changes to my profile. Found my resume, still in "Wharton format" from the last time I'd touched it a few months prior. I updated a few lines, double-checked everything from long habit, then printed 20 copies. Looked at the time: just over an hour left. I wrote some emails and attached my revised resume. I didn't send them yet in hopes my intuition was wrong.

A few minutes before 8am, I walked down the long Studio G hallway. I found the random conference room that'd appeared on my calendar the previous evening. Took a breath, straightened my back, and opened the door. Inside sat my then-manager Eric and a woman I didn't know. Probably because I was a few minutes early, they looked surprised to see me. "I feel like a turkey on Thanksgiving," I managed. To his credit, Eric smiled wryly. The woman grimaced. She introduced herself as working in HR.

Then they laid me off.

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I'm excited to read the new book Hit Refresh by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The website says the book is "about individual change, about the transformation happening inside of Microsoft and the technology that will soon impact all of our lives."

On his LinkedIn post announcing the book, Nadella requested that people share their "hit refresh" moments, those "moments in between defeat and victory." I found the example by my colleague Rob Wolf to be well-honed, thoughtful, and a good insight into who he must be as a person. You should read it. It's great. He describes applying for a job at Microsoft--his third stint here. His candor reminded me of one of my own "hit refresh" moments: being laid off from Microsoft.

As you can see from my profile, I still work here. I was re-hired to Microsoft days later. Actually, that's passive. I moved my butt trying to find a new job. Immediately after being laid off, I marched determinedly right back to my desk, jaw set. I hit "send" on every single one of those emails. I wandered the halls of Studio G like a nomad, handing out printed resumes. I knocked on closed doors. Interrupted meetings. "I've only been here three months. I was just laid off. Want to stay. Can you please help me?"

And help they did. Amazing people like Margaret Arakawa fought hard for me, opening up their networks. Friends and colleagues around the company found me interviews literally within hours of the "turkey meeting." I was laid off on Tuesday; by Friday I'd gone through about 50 (no joke) informational conversations and interviews, and had received three job offers. Three.

I accepted one of them. It was an excellent decision. If you know me, you know I love my job, love working at this company. Yet I remember that coming back here was a choice. Staying here is a choice. I do not take this job for granted.

At the time, much of my family and my now wife recommended I take the hint. Microsoft didn't want me. Only a few months after they'd brought me into the firm with great fanfare from loud trumpets (not really) they brought me into a small, windowless room and fired me (really).

But I wasn't done yet. I wasn't just going to lay down and take it. Two thoughts helped me struggle back from that defeat towards a victory I feel is still out there. First: I would overcome this. I'd survived worse. Second, no matter how it felt, it was not actually personal. If I could see past the pain, the experience offered me a lesson. If I could just learn it.

I would overcome this. I had survived worse.

I don't want to overstate the case. Being laid off was embarrassing. It was humbling. Hell, it stung. But that was just pride. Even at the time I knew the pain would pass.

Two decades before, I'd been lucky enough to get into college. Despite generous financial aid, my family couldn't really afford it. To remain, I worked up to seven jobs at a time. At first I couldn't code, so my jobs were all unskilled. One was waking up at 5am to cut pickles for the Columbia Business School deli. My hands smelt like vinegar for hours afterward, no matter how much I washed them. Other pre-code jobs included sorting books, folding t-shirts, grading papers, and writing letters to alumni, thanking them for donations. During pre-code summers I was a cashier at a Florida grocery store.

Eventually I learned to code: in C, Perl, Java, PHP, and several others. During my time at Columbia I pulled many all-nighters to earn a degree in computer science. I didn't own a computer growing up. I didn't own one in college. I'd head to the freezing computer labs under Harvey Mudd with a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola for caffeine to ward off sleep. I struggled with semicolons, memory leaks, and Emacs under flickering overhead lights. As the sun rose on a new day, I'd head back for a long shower to end the previous night.

Out of college as a strategy consultant, I spent many hours fighting with Excel and PowerPoint in taxis and airports and airplanes and crowded conference rooms. I was consulting for an investment bank on September 11th, 2001. My office was on floor 62 of Tower Two. Since Tower One was hit first, I watched the horror close up from outside. I fled the dust cloud pursuing me up Broadway. Sufficient for one lifetime.

Eventually after 9/11 I joined the Peace Corps. Mosquitoes gave me dengue fever twice. I caught regular fever more times than I could count. Kept going through food poisoning. Sunburns. Ant bites.  I will never regret the choice. It was more than worth the discomfort to teach 30+ kids to repair computers and network them. To found a community computer lab lasting for years after I left. To combat rolling blackouts with solar panels, biogas digesters, and battery banks. To care for my adopted stray dog Nacho, then bury him in the ground after goat farmers murdered him with rat poison.

I had overcome steep challenges before. I would overcome being laid off.

No matter how it felt, it was not actually personal. It was a lesson.

The other thing I kept in mind was this: Suck it up and learn this lesson.

Let's set some context. It was 2011. For over a decade I'd believed strongly in the importance of mobile. Back in 2000, my buddy Gavin and I had rabidly followed news of the forthcoming Treo, predicted to combine email, calendar, AND phone functionality! For years, I'd been amazed by smartphones and their apps. The magic they offered. These devices were low-cost computers with portable access to the internet. They could provide crucial services like communication, transportation, and money transfer. I believed they could help struggling communities develop rapidly. 

So of course I went to work at Windows Phone.

I don't have to remind you of all the challenges the platform had to overcome.  Our obstacles and mis-steps have been well-documented elsewhere. I will say that I compare those days to what it must have felt like during Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Cannonballs flew everywhere. Grapeshot.

I'd known this going in, of course. The market Windows Phone sought to challenge was dominated by two strong competitors. The dynamics of the mobile space were complex. Especially in the US and much of the developed world, mobile operators like AT&T and Verizon, Vodafone and Telefonica exerted tremendous pressure on other parts of the ecosystem. And there were these little things called "apps." I knew all this.

What I hadn't paid as much attention to--and the lesson I'd need to learn--was MY role in this organization. What value could I, Jeremiah Marble, add to our business? Why should Microsoft pay ME to come into work every day? Sure, I was surrounded by great people. I had some fancy degrees. I truly enjoyed my day job. I got to play with cool gadgets. But what was MY value to this company?

The Windows Phone business was struggling in 2011. The role of Marketing, where I sat, was especially scrutinized. Our organization changed leadership relatively frequently. Because our execs changed fairly often, our goals, objectives, metrics, and priorities also shifted.  These changes flowed down to me, as a line worker.

In my first three months at Windows Phone, I had four managers and four jobs. My first was a highly-driven, successful, excellent manager who left two weeks after I'd joined, to go run another part of our business. My job for her during those initial few days was essentially to make sure my badge worked, that I had a working computer, and that I could find the cafeteria.

My second manager was a highly-driven, successful, very analytical man who worked extremely long hours. My job for him was to read through massive amounts of information on what our competitors were up to (oh, things like buying Motorola and launching Siri), summarize it into reports, and then try to find the right folks within Microsoft who could use that "Compete" information to help our own efforts.

My third manager was a highly-driven, successful, master storyteller who could extole the benefits of snow to the Inuit. My job for him was to give presentations in front of internal audiences, highlighting our competitors' capabilities and explaining why Windows Phone was better.

My fourth manager, Eric, had only arrived from the UK a few days before he laid me off. He didn't know me at all. Given my diversity of experiences and relatively short time to build a dossier of work, I don't think that even I could have told him what I did there. It wasn't his fault at all I was laid off. In fact, it was none of my managers' fault.

If it was anyone's fault, the fault was mine.

I couldn't tell you why Microsoft was paying me. I couldn't tell you now, and couldn't explain to my managers then, how my work led to our selling more Windows Phones. Or how my work made Windows Phone better, or faster, or more reliable, or easier to use. I couldn't articulate what I stood for, or what my work was building up to achieve. I couldn't tell you who I was really helping with my work. I couldn't tell you the ROI of my salary.

That was my lesson: Know why you're there. Have your own personal goals. Know how you are making the place better. Know what you're working towards. Know what your metrics are. Know whether you're hitting those metrics. Don't do it for your manager, or your manager's manager. Don't do it for your CEO. Do it for yourself. Write it down. REVIEW it with your manager, and your manager's manager, and the CEO. But if you don't know what you're doing there, no one else will either.

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I worked hard to come back to Microsoft, and I'm very happy that I did. Not every moment here has been daffodils and radiant sunshine. But I will say this: good day or bad day, I go to bed each night proud of my colleagues and our mission: to empower every person on the planet to achieve more.