A couple of weeks ago my family had dinner with a friend and his family. This is a friend that I worked with at my previous job. I hadn’t spoken with him since I’d left nearly 15 months prior. It was great to see him again. We talked about some of the current geeky movies, our thoughts on the upcoming FOX series, Gotham, and some of the creative projects he was working on on his own time.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the conversation turned to the stuff happening at my former job.

Since the time that left, the company hired a new president. They were without a president when I left. When the previous president left, I started reporting to the director of operations. He was and is a great guy, but he didn’t have a lot of knowledge about what my department did. Remember what I told you about my last review back in episode 64? Here’s a recap:

At one point I was asked to make a list of ideas [by the previous president]. The ideas could be anything. They wanted ideas on how we could increase sales, improve efficiencies, serve our in-store customers better, serve our on-line customer better, improve the functionality of our website, do a better job with our marketing, you name it.

I was heading out on a business trip about that time so I spent that trip coming up with idea after idea. I wrote them all down in a notebook that I kept with me. By the time I returned I had over 100 ideas. I presented the ideas to the leadership of the company. The next year I was asked the same question. I thought it was odd because nearly none of my ideas had even been explored. I came up with a few more ideas, refined the first list of ideas, and presented another list of over 100 ideas.

A few months later I was given my annual review. One area that was specifically addressed was an area called creativity and ideas. On a scale of 0 to 5, I was given a score of 1. I was told that I had very few creative ideas and almost never shared ideas.

At one point in the conversation, my friend asked me if I remembered the list of ideas. He was one of about half a dozen people that had been given a copy of the list. Read More...

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