Don’t let what happened to me happen to you

Or how a couple of million bucks bought me the worst day of my life.

So there I was. A freshly minted Director in the Cardiac Rhythm Management division of one of the largest medical device companies in the world – whose name I won’t mention to protect the very dubious. 

And fresh off an incredible new product launch that earned the company $500 million in its first year.

Naked ambition

Then a senior executive got greedy. He wanted a prediction of market size that would allow him to dramatically expand his division. Because in big corporate, the more he hired, the more important he would look in the company’s eyes. 

So he threw millions and millions of dollars at one of the most respected consulting companies in the world – who I will also not name, but if you find one whose founder probably had Scotland in his bloodline, you’d be on the right track.

And this executive wanted the consulting firm to give a prediction as to where the Cardiac Rhythm Management market would be in five years. They did their due diligence and because of a couple of suppositions about the aging population and a whole new class of doctors coming into the field, boldly predicted that the market would double in the next few years. What do you expect? You don’t hire a consulting firm to say the market is going to shrink, right?

Great, said the executive, let’s double the workforce. And let’s get me promoted.

What the consulting firm didn’t do was ask enough questions of those in the company who were out in the field.

The consultant never gets it wrong, right?

We knew how hard it had been to sell our newest implantable cardioverter defibrillator into the market. And how far we had pushed the envelope in terms of getting hospitals and doctors on board. Our field staff thought that market growth for our device would be around 10% per annum. Not 30+%.

In actual fact, the market shrank slightly.

As a result, the company announced it was laying off between 1500 and 2000 employees worldwide.

Here’s what one analyst had to say.

“The fact that they’re driving more efficiency out of the business is not surprising, While it’s not something you’d want to go through as an employee, it will make the company itself more efficient compared to where it was a year ago.”

What “driving out efficiency” actually means we’re not sure. 

The worst day of my life

But “While it’s not something you’d want to go through as an employee…” No kidding.

In my own area, I had to lay off about 75% of my team, including two single mothers.

It was the worst day of my life.

Not long after, I was downsized too.

As for the executive who started this whole thing? He was promoted because he was instrumental in getting 400 or so employees to take early retirement

What did I learn?

First off, I’d had it with large companies, where politics were more important than products and services.  And that could offhandedly ruin so many people’s lives.

Second, that I wanted to work for small and medium-sized businesses where personal responsibility was ever-present. 

Third – and perhaps the most important – every pilot is going to get shot down at some point. That’s not important. What’s important is how quickly they get back up and fly again.