Do More

When I worked at American Express, I had some of the best co-workers in the world. Smart, driven, professional. We all worked exceptionally well together -- which was incredible given that our incentive structure actually encouraged us to compete against one another for the biggest piece of the "bonus pie." Regardless, one of my co-workers and I used to spend early Saturday mornings together, with our laptops, drinking coffee and compiling research at the now defunct DT-UT on the Upper East Side. And it was fun.

In addition, our senior management team was also amazingly strong. Very intelligent, strategic and fair. With that said, I believe Amex may have coined a "skips a generation" talent management ethos. Our directors were completely clueless, spineless, and devoid of inspiration.

One of my first directors used to ask us to go around during our staff meetings and share what we were working on. One of my co-workers stated, week after week, "Nothing. I'm bored out of my mind and you need to give me more work." No joke, one day he came in and announced that he had hired a new guy to offset our workload. No discussion beforehand. No input in the interviewing or hiring process. And a complete moron, to boot.

This same co-worker, Marsha, and I spent months working with HR (mainly her effort, not mine) to develop a new sales compensation model that was equitable, controllable and would drive the right behaviors. After presenting it to our team and requesting feedback, I stopped by my boss' office where he and Andrew, the new hire, were writing numbers on the white board. "What are you working on?" I asked. Their response, "We're assigning bonuses to the sales reps." Completely arbitrary. Pulling numbers out of their @#*. Not even a piece of paper to highlight anyone's performance. Nice work. I'm glad I worked so hard at nothing.

But my favorite boss at Amex was a woman who didn't give a crap what any of us did -- as long as we made her look good. She would sit in her office, feet on the desk, and shoot the breeze all day long with anybody/everybody. She told us about her weekend blow jobs, abortions, dates, bowel movements, etc. She would break in the middle of meetings and ask urgently if anyone had a tampon. And she insisted on repeatedly sharing with us how she personally molded Henry, a successful co-worker who had been with Amex for years, into who he was today. I'm surprised he never killed her.

The straw the broke the camel's back for me came when, after working hard all year, I had lunch with this woman. I drank iced tea; she had two glasses of wine. She was wearing blue jean overalls and Candie's shoes; I was in a suit. She proceeded to tell me that she fought hard for me to get a fabulous bonus but that two things worked against me: 1) I was too nice and smiled a lot and 2) I wore a brown sweater that was too big on me.

Note to self: stop smiling, wear spiked heals and start talking about my sex life. Or leave the company.