The Symbol Years (1993-2003)

“Man, are you even here?,” Barry Issberner scowled at me, 45 minutes in to a team meeting on my second day at Symbol Technologies, in Bohemia, Long Island.

This was to be my first lesson in a genre best described as “New York.” I needed to have a point of view and had an obligation to speak up. Soon I was to learn that the more intuitive, the more provocative the point of view on matters of strategy and operations, the more one had the right to exercise one’s thought. There was no hierarchy, no pedigree at Symbol. Only ideas and effort. Symbol was America, as I had come to see my adopted land—a people focused on where you were headed and oblivious to where you came from.

At the dawn of my professional career, in a decade of association with this incredibly innovative start-up, that was listed on the stock exchange, and now thrives in its current avatar at ~$4 billion in annual revenues, I found a lifetime of learning.

I had first started working with Symbol Technologies ~2 years earlier as an analyst covering the industry. I found Symbol’s leaders distinct. They were bold, vocal, confident and contentious. The company was piling up patents and suing entities that lingered in its space.

In one of my first interludes with Symbol and its leaders, I remember being invited to speak at Robinson Humphrey’s investment conference, as an industry analyst, hosted by Bob Anastasi, a reputed banker. My prepared remarks about Symbol were deservedly generous. I had however woven in a couple constructive points. After the session ended, the founder and chief scientist of Symbol walked up to me and put on a full charm. Then he went on to shred my two constructive points. When he was done, he put on a smile, shook hands and walked away, only to walk back. He took another 10 minutes and unloaded passionately his views before finally walking away.

I was smitten.

Already charmed by the company over the years, I decided to leave my job as an advisor and jump in to the fray. I wrote to Rob Durst who led an innovation area at Symbol. Rob approached Barry who came to Boston and offered me a job as a product manager over lunch. The two other companies I was speaking to were based in Akron, Ohio and in Des Moines, Iowa, respectively. I assumed my bride-to-be would be more supportive to New York as our first home than the alternatives.

On my first day at Symbol, I was handed a Motorola cell phone and an IBM laptop—both cherished belongings at that time. I was a young man, still working on my professional stride, as I walked the halls of the new place. Barry was gracious and rushed when we met. He said off you go and pointed to Lenore. Lenore turned around and spoke in a loud, hushed tone “what’s with you…don’t you see I am on the phone?” Craving for an empathetic encounter, I went to the leader who ran public relations, who I knew well from before. Nancy gasped as she saw me and asked what I was doing there. I told her that I was now employed at Symbol. Nancy’s response was “what a travesty, we could have done with you better where you were.” I remember going home, pulling my dictionary out and looking up the word “travesty.”

The decade ahead brought adventures. And yes, it added to my vocabulary as only New York can contribute to. I rotated from product management to sales and to an expat assignment in Europe. We bought our first home in Long Island and ended my tenure at the company with our first born. Traveled the world. Learned how to speak, how to dress, how to persevere, how to hire, how to fire, how to run meetings, how to engage with customers and stakeholders. Met and worked with incredibly kind people, incredibly smart people who became friends for life.

In Long Island, at an early professional age—in my 20s, learned to survive in a primal, aggressive culture that would spit you out in a New York minute if you did not exhibit resilience. The good days were euphoric. The hard days left you with a sucker punch on a sofa. Never since have I experienced stress at that multitude. 20 years after leaving that shop there are observations that merit sharing.

1.   Choose a small company: In recent years, I have found myself counseling 20—24 year olds. They come from my alma maters, and they are kids of friends and from my network. I tell them to go work at an early stage company that is trying to make it versus a large established entity. I am glad I ended up at Symbol where I was thrown in to product development, sales, business development, acquisitions and with direct contact with customers to deliver value. I have friends who spent their formative years in corporate rotation programs and then working on an aspect of a six sigma study. At Symbol a customer confronted you on Day 2 (not the other way around). Smaller entities expose you to the fundamentals of business and this learning in early years one harvests from, forever. I am also glad that I stuck it out at Symbol through the years. There were episodes that made me think of quitting; a lever that I see the current generation pull too often, too soon. In the travails and toil, lies one’s growth and from that emanates great learning for the future. Don’t give up. Too soon.  

2.   Meritocracy, always: Symbol was an immensely political place. It was New York. Symbol was as close to absolute meritocracy as I have experienced. If you took measured risks, made an impact and held your own, you prevailed. Survival of the fittest was the norm and there are some who did not. The new cafétaria faced a large wall full of patents. The names on the patents mirrored the languages and accents heard in the cafétaria—Russian, Yiddish, Chinese, Jamaican, Swedish, French and of course the local tongue “LongIsland” itself. These scientists and business folk made Symbol what it was. Team meetings were loud, animated and argumentative, over ideas. The learning I took away was that innovation is a messy process.

3.   Unfettered Innovation: The company had exceptional regime to focus on its three core competencies. Beyond that, it was the wild west. People, including I myself, operated in realms of pursuing markets, partnerships and customers without permission or budgets. Competing priorities were a norm. There was no talk of disruption. We were disrupting nothing. We were creating totally new things from fundamental science and research that impacted daily lives of everyday folks. Beyond the technology itself, approaches to market, direct access to customers and through partnerships were pursued—some with great success and some with utter failure. Organizational design of the company was at times hard to decipher. From that imperfect construct emerged technologies from Symbol in the 90s that have dominated commerce ever since—the QR code we all live off, the shopping experience and wifi that we use sitting around in our homes.

4.   Customer and user experience: Today, in spite of stories of Apple and Jobs, there are an abundance of companies that do not see the primacy of user experience as I experienced at Symbol. In this deep technical house with physicists, optical scientists and wireless experts, the industrial design lab had precedence ahead of everything else. Anthropological, ergonomic studies, the routine of human workers and its study prevailed. Along the way, new innovations, some incomplete, were released. And then iterated upon from fire drill to fire drill, each and every day. Late evenings around densely aired conference rooms smelling of garlic pizzas, chocolate chip cookies and sweat, listening to a thick accented scientist ridiculing everyone around was any day, everyday at Symbol. Management was obsessive about delivering great experiences to customers. Even after we crossed a billion dollars in revenues, customers invoked their direct access to the senior leadership team. And that would start another fire drill. My learning—new innovations need to be put out there sooner rather than later and then iterated upon with great gusto.

5.   Making a bet on people: I saw untraditional bets made on people. A patent lawyer transitioned overnight to run products. Head of quality running the wireless division. The chief evangelist running the Americas western sales region. Somehow a large software development center emerged in Pittsburgh, seemingly overnight. A non-indigenous person exported to go run Europe, at the age of 31, with little experience, leading a team of 800 employees. Provocative moves then which in positions of increased responsibility in later years, I have not had the courage to make. Pure passion, desire to succeed, grit mattered more in selecting leaders than the experience on the curriculum vitae. There was no prejudice at Symbol, none at all. There was abhorrence for those who could not take measured risks, lacked conviction and passion.

6.   Do what is right for business: Ruffled by sensitivities around peers and bosses, on a certain situation to do with a customer and a product offering, I fretted the matter with the head of the industrial design lab. Phil’s advice stuck with me. “Do only what is right for business and be dogged about it, risking popularity, promotion, even your employment.” Ever since, I have found myself going back to those words as I have confronted situations. Primacy of the company, the business, the ship should be the only navigation tool to look at when making decisions that seem entangled. Brings to life the words of Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist: “I prefer to be true to myself even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

7.   Understanding Ethics: From across the Atlantic, I saw the company unravel driven by investigations. A period of toil and hurt as I saw my role models get swept up. Even two decades hence I do not confront in my mind what the wrong was, the scale of it and the collateral damage that occurred. I elect to live in my state of a romantic, perhaps a hopeless one at that, that the churn came as a result of overzealous prosecutors in a post Enron era. Yet, from that abyss, came observations and learnings that I have since incorporated. Learnings that cannot be taught in an ethics course at a University or in compliance training. Ethical stumbles are more complex than mere stealing or bribing. Reality of doing business in the modern era is that ethical transgressions are a vast, ambiguous field of real and perceived outbounds. Expanse of grey areas. At any level, in an organization one is exposed to these real and perceived ethical vulnerabilities. One can do much to stay alert and stay well within the guardrails. Ensure in writing and have absolute transparency to requisite stakeholders. That coffee mug you got as a gift from a business partner should make the threshold of documenting. That lingering doubt on a business deal should be deliberated with the general counsel and the finance lead. Modern day business administration and governance has become incredibly complex for any of us to be left to our own judgment. A learning.

The Symbol years are long bygone. My greatest inheritance of the Symbol years are the small, tight cohort of friendships that have and will last a lifetime. The most prominent cohort of them meets each year in a reunion of sorts. Over the years these friendships have become a moral, emotional shock absorber as life for each of us has taken its course.

My wife and I made it back to Long Island from my assignment in Europe, as we awaited the birth of our first child. I became increasingly dismayed seeing my idols fall and disillusioned by the business, corporate world. In 2003, I made a decision to leave a career in business behind, forever. Idealistic pursuits seemed worthy.

2 months after our son’s birth, on a fine summer day, I invoked my contractual rights and departed. The next morning at breakfast in a nook in Port Jefferson, my life partner and I talked about the future. She was supportive of the unstructured path I pondered.

I enrolled in to a class at Stony Brook University to study Thucydides and Nietzsche during the day and spent evenings in Manhattan at the French Culinary Institute learning to make something out of nothing. In a post 9/11 era, New York was jittery and America was changing. With long intellectual interest in public policy, I started writing a Statement of Purpose for admission at one of the top schools of my chosen field--The Fletcher School, Columbia University and The Johns Hopkins University—feeder schools to the nation’s intelligence services.

In a flannel shirt, jeans, sneakers and a back-pack I emerged atop from the long escalator off of the underground train station at DuPont Circle and walked on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, with a radiant smile on my face. Seated in the back-bench of a classroom I started taking notes listening to John McLaughlin, the ex-head of the CIA, who had spent a lifetime working in the nation’s clandestine service.