Turning a (Big) Page

These are the notes I had prepared for my retirement party on May 14. In the end, because the room configuration and noise didn't seem to lend themselves to a formal speech, I left the printed copy in my pocket and gave a somewhat less formal version of it, still touching on almost all the same points.

Hello.

It’s a pleasure to see so many friends and colleagues here tonight – actually, some friends who became colleagues, many colleagues who became friends, and even some colleagues who remained friends after working for me, working with me, or tolerating my working for them for so long.

It is rumored that we have a Travel Ban right now. Well, I can tell you, based on the number of people who bailed out from this event in the last week, saying that they had to be at the other end of the world tonight, that either we don’t really have a travel ban… or they didn’t like me as much as I thought.

I really want to thank Susan Rosenbaum for putting together this event for me tonight. What would we do without Susan? Well, for one thing, the people in Sugar Land within a 100-foot, no, make that 100-meter, radius of her laughter would be more productive. But she’s been wonderful to work with, and for, and I can’t say enough good things about having the privilege to have her as my last manager in Schlumberger.

A lot of people seemed shocked when I announced that I was going to be leaving. Some of that was the courtesy of pretending that they believed that I am younger than passport states I am. So to set the record straight, I am 57, I am only 8 months short of the famous 85 pension points, and I was already thinking of taking early retirement in a couple of years.

And then I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and the fortune cookie read: “A golden handshake is better than a kick in the butt with a steel-toed boot.” I took that home and thought about it. And then Personnel called. Actually, I just made up the whole Chinese dinner thing. But the idea is still pretty much the same.

After these pleasantries, I do want to say a few things that maybe, just maybe, you’ll take home and think about.

I’ve had an interesting career in Schlumberger. One of the most interesting aspects is that I only wrote two resignation letters in my life. This shows that I must have a high tolerance for pain, but other than that, wait for the twist on that story. The first resignation letter was in 1977, I had worked for Sema for 2½ years as a slav… er, as a software contractor. I resigned to join Schlumberger in Clamart, to write what was, in fact, our very first interpretation program based on the concept of inversion. Yep, 1977.

But in 1987, while I was a research lab manager at Fairchild in Palo Alto, I was “sold with the furniture” to National Semiconductor when we decided that we didn’t know how to run a semiconductor company after all.

So in 1993, after 6 years at National, I resigned for the second and last time in my life… to join Schlumberger again – in this case, the Automatic Test Equipment division in San Jose.

So in fact, I only resigned twice… and both times it was to join Schlumberger. I can tell you that when I have had a chance to tell this to students during recruiting trips (yes, there was a time when we recruited), it impressed the heck out of them, although I was never sure whether it gave them a high opinion of Schlumberger or a low opinion of me.

Well, I’ve learned a few things over those “ten plus sixteen” years of work for Schlumberger. To illustrate them, I will tell you of three “big” things I am proud of having done. But I want to start by telling you about two things I’ve clearly failed at, in part because it’s better to start with the failures and finish with the successes.

First, IT and software are not given the regard they should have given their criticality to Schlumberger’s business. We’ve had that discussion on and on and on… but it hasn’t converged to where I think it should have. And now, we don’t even have a CIO anymore, and our new VP of IT doesn’t report to the CEO. I’m an IT Advisor, so this is in part my failure. It doesn’t help to consider that many other companies are in the same situation. It is still not what Schlumberger should be doing, but I can’t say “Schlumberger” like it’s a third-person pronoun, and “they” did it (well, on Saturday I will have earned the right to say “they” but not tonight). I have been part of IT in Schlumberger, and the improvement in the standing of IT that we had with Saad Bargach and then Sophie Zurquiyah has been reversed, and I regret that.

Secondly, I went to Paal Kibsgaard in December 2006 and explained to him that diversity cannot be sliced and diced, and we needed to look at the way the company treated all the employees who might face unequal treatment – not just on the basis of race and gender, on which we had a significant track record, but also on the basis of sexual orientation. Paal was interested and receptive, I opened his eyes to a number of issues, and he asked Jim Andrews, the Diversity Manager, to work with me on this aspect. The discussion took a while to start, then proceeded at a rather glacial pace. A few changes were made, in particular with respect to health care benefits for same-sex partners in the U.S., and with respect to relocation of domestic partners, whether straight or gay. But several other aspects have seen no progress. Two years later, Jim changed jobs and I had to restart the whole process with Mike Skibicki, who had very little background on these issues… and as you know, a few months later, we don’t have a Diversity Manager any more. I’m pretty sure I could have tried harder to convince the right people, and it upsets me that companies like Shell rate near the top of the Human Right Campaign’s scale of how companies treat their LGBT employees, and Schlumberger rates near the bottom.

I’ve told you about those two failures because I’m still a little naïve, and I think that some of you in this room can pick up the baton and carry on, especially with respect to an issue like the role of IT in Schlumberger.

And also, regarding the second story, because I want to impress on you that we’re not just technical or managerial beings, we’re also social and emotional beings, and it’s OK to bring that aspect to the workplace in order to improve the workplace. It took me a very long time to make up my mind that I could ask for a meeting with the VP of Human Resources, rainbow-colored slides in hand (I’m not kidding you), look him in the eye and say, “I’ve asked for your time because as a Schlumberger employee and a gay man, there is something I need to discuss with you about how Schlumberger handles, or rather does not handle, the issues we face.” But when I did, and notwithstanding the ensuing inertia, there was no problem per se with my doing so. So you shouldn’t abandon any important part of who you are when you walk into the office.

Now, I’ll tell you about the three successes I think are most significant over these 26 years.

First, in 1983, after I had formed the “Information Systems” research lab for Measurement & Systems in Montrouge, I plotted with two other rather undisciplined guys, Arnold Smith at Drilling and Production Services, based in Cambridge, England, and Claude Barbe, who ran the computer center for Wireline in Clamart, to connect our fledgling networks together and make a larger, interconnected, Schlumberger-wide network. There is a long story about the sneaky ways we did this, involving a dusted-off PDP-11/34 (think of a 100 kHz processor and you’ll get the picture – your microwave oven probably has a faster CPU) that ran a non-routing version of DECnet, which we connected to both the Wireline network and the non-Wireline one in order to overcome the security objections raised by Wireline. But I’ll fast-forward to the point when management got scared. Not about security, but about the cost of this thing we were building. So “they” took it over – there is another long story about this, for another evening – and as a result SINet was born, a professionally managed and planned company-wide utility.

The second story is that in mid-2000, after attracting me to Houston to start an IT Innovation Lab (which ended up not being funded), Xavier Flinois, who ran Omnes, the networking joint venture with Cable & Wireless, told me “there is this thing called Eureka, you must run the IT community.” My first reaction was, “what is Eureka?” and my second one was, “you’re not named to this position, you have to be elected.” Well, by September 2003, when I finally decided not to run again, we had built up that community from 650 members to 4,500. And of course it was a collective effort with Laurent Etur, Mohammed Rupawalla, Christophe Causer, Catherine Mifsud, all the other SIG leaders, and support from Henry Edmundson, Anh Kuhn de Chizelle, Gordon Shudofsky, and Susan in her role as Global Métier Manager.

The third story brings us to the end of 2006, when some vague discussions about Web 2.0 suddenly gelled into the concept of SPEEDIA. Here, the co-inventors are Sally Boyd, Fred Hugand, Louis-Pierre Guillaume, and the one who then really made it happen was Laurent Butré. As you know, two years later, we have 20,000 articles including 1,900 abbreviations, and 3,300 people have contributed at one point or another by adding or editing at least one article.

If there are any lessons to derive from this, for me they would be these:

1. You have to challenge the status quo. Our secret network connections between groups were not authorized, but once they became a fait accompli, they caused SINet to be invented. Some of you know some of the naysaying that accompanied the growth of Eureka, or the notion of a collaborative encyclopedia. In each case, there was a crucial moment when we decided to ignore the negativity and forge ahead.
2. Communicating and sharing knowledge has been a constant theme for me. And I hope it is for you too. To know how much energy it is worth expending on a project, always consider the communication and knowledge sharing impact.
3. It’s good to work with people you like, and to like the people you work with. It makes your day easier. So try to get yourself in that position.
   

By the way, in case you were wondering, since you’re here, it means that you all are people I liked to work with!

So finally, what am I going to do now? When Danièle Cuzin retired a few months ago, she proudly explained that she wasn’t looking to doing anything specific in the short term, other than arts and leisure. I’m not as good or sane as she is. My plan is to follow the well-trodden path of becoming a consultant, still in the areas of IT and KM, and trust me, I will keep you posted about what I do.

Thanks for tolerating me for 26 years, 2 months, 13 days… and the last fifteen minutes. Please stay in touch, and right now enjoy yourself.