I’m leaving Deloitte.
Actually, it’s an even bigger deal than that, since I’m retiring. I’m not going someplace else (though I do have a new direction, more on that later), not taking a prestigious new job, or even a mediocre one. I’m just leaving. Leaving the world’s biggest business services organization, which employs more than 400,000 professionals and had earnings of nearly $60 billion last fiscal year, which paid me well to be the global industries communication lead and sent me to places like Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Hyderabad, Lima, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Montreal, Philadelphia, and more. (Still unhappy about how the pandemic ruined the Prague trip!)
I’m jumping off the cliff. God knows I’m old enough, more than a year past the US government’s notion of my retirement age. (I generally find, BTW, that people think I’m significantly younger than I am, which is a nice compliment, unless it is due to my lack of maturity.)
I joined Deloitte in 2014. I came from EY, where I had spent a dozen years (I started when it was still called Ernst & Young). EY was a terrific place to work, until it wasn’t. When it was time to leave, KPMG wanted to bring me in to do essentially the same thing I was doing at EY, mostly internal technology communication, which wasn’t all that attractive. Deloitte, on the other hand, wanted me to be the marketing and communication lead for the global consumer industry and that involved a bunch of new responsibilities and new challenges.
There were some bumps. My original boss was a managing director who had the worst personnel leadership skills I’ve ever seen. She drove me nuts and I was about to quit after six months, but I knew there were some top executive changes in the works that, I heard, would lead to organizations shifts, so I held on. Sure enough, there was big restructuring of my corner of the organization, my boss was rendered irrelevant and left the company, and soon after I was asked to take on the role I have now.
I was having dinner with a friend last year. I was telling him how one of the best things about working at Deloitte is that all my colleagues are smart, skilled, capable and trustworthy. That there isn’t anyone that everyone knows, “Don’t give it to so and so, it will never be completed if you do, it will fail.” What’s that like, my friend asked (he’s an academic and that world functions, uhm, a bit differently). I laughed and told him I didn’t know exactly how Deloitte does it, whether they are just careful in who they hire or use subtle ways to pressure people to change for the better or leave. Whatever, it works.
I just spent over eight years at a high-powered and hugely successful organization that functioned with immense competence. It was good job, even if it was a bit of a trap; because of my age, and where I sat in the organization, there was no career path forward. I’d have to leave that team, or the organization altogether, to go “up.” And why would I want to leave?
In any case it’s now time to move on, because I have unfinished business. As my friends know, I used to be someone else. I was a widely exhibited media artist and arts journalist, and also had my own marketing communications consulting firm. I was living in the Outer Richmond district of San Francisco, sliding past Lincoln Park toward Sutro Heights, in a large sort of tudor-style house with a library and an office downstairs and a patio where I put up a basketball hoop to work out some of the stress. I had big contracts with major corporate clients, was developing a significant exhibition about northern California funk and pop artists for a museum in Hawaii, and I was consulting on a senate race.
Most importantly, however, my creative life was on a roll: I had a literary agent who was shopping my novel, I was publishing essays in journals and magazines, my films were being shown and winning awards. I was being written about. Good god, I was sometimes even mentioned in the society pages of the morning daily. And then all of that disappeared because of some really ugly circumstances. I walked away from all of it. I buried a huge chunk of my life (and myself) in an unmarked hole in the woods. I need to return to that part of things to reclaim at least a portion of the person who I used to be.
So there will be fiction and nonfiction projects, and some media projects, and a few other things. I’ll be once again grappling with the power structures of American culture – for example, a novel is out on submission to agents and independent publishers. I’m attending and speaking at writing conferences. Plus I’ll continue to earn a few dollars based on my experience and accomplishments in organizational communication, doing work under the business name of Vague Apparatus LLC, but on my terms and according to my schedule.
This new phase is both exciting and a little frightening. When I was in my early thirties I could do pretty much anything I wanted, I knew how the machine was put together, and I always seemed to find a way to success. The arts landscape is much different now, both in its structure and how it will allow me to engage with it. I know I’m a good fiction writer – my previous experience showed me the kind of writer I am and how New York editors responded – but the publishing business has become uncertain of how to go about its daily work, has shown itself to be dysfunctional in its strategy. With such an elusive target I’m not sure I can figure it out these days, not the way I used to do. But we’ll see.
Stay in touch with me. You can reach me at vagueapparatus[ATSYMBOL]gmail[DOT].com. I’ll be adding a mailing list shortly (as soon as I can work out some technical bugs over here) and I hope you’ll sign up for it. I won’t be sending out a newsletter, but the mailing list will be how I let my friends and colleagues and anyone else who is interested know what I am up to, whether it is a new story in a periodical, or a book deal, or podcast launch, and so on. And as always let’s connect on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.