Used to work at this hellhole of a place called Virtuoso — I liked it for six months, hated it for 12 months, and got laid off, and in those 12 months my bosses hated me for probably six of the 12, so a nice little dance overall — and one of my dudes at the time was this cat named Tony Corneto. Almost too many stories about this mf’er to share here, and some of the worst ones are unabashedly not mine to tell, but this one is pretty good.
This guy sat in Seattle and I sat in Texas. I think he was over something called “customer experience” or “user experience,” but goddamn if the whole thing wasn’t a complete cluster fuck. My boss’ boss, who seems to now be retired in Park City (nice!), managed one silo. His boss’ boss, who was a beautiful gay man everyone respected even though he couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag, managed another silo. My silo was all about beauty and colors and “branding elements.” His silo was supposedly about data-driven solutions and sprints and lead generation optimization and all this stuff. I found out later that during the interview process, this ass clown called me “Stoner Ted” because I talk slow. I still got the job, so I guess that’s cool, kinda.
These silos were supposed to collaborate daily and we honestly barely spoke, and then every five months there’d be a blow-up and the executives would get involved, we’d make nice, and nothing would change. This went on for my entire 18 months there, I accomplished maybe three-four things of relevance, and then I got laid off. So, a good year and a half. It helped drive my divorce too, so that was cool.
Anyway, that’s the background/intro.
The core story is that once, when I had been there about six months, Tony is giving a presentation to the execs on customer experience and what we need to be doing. This is probably late 2014, like December ’14. Customer experience was becoming a big topic, but it wasn’t a huge thing like it is in ’20 and ’21.
So Tony opens this deck on the virtual presentation, and I shit you not, this deck has quote after quote from the big names, including:
- Bezos
- Gates
- Jobs
- Ford
I think at one point I counted 18-20 quotes from those four guys spread throughout the presentation.
Near the 30-minute mark, this thing is dragging and it’s just quotes and whatever, with a few slides of action and website screen-shots and what have you.
One executive barks: “Tony? Tony? Can you hear me?”
“Yes sir.”
“Need you to get to the point, man.”
I muted and LOL’ed.
What’s funny is … I’ve sat in so many presentations where people quote Jobs to death because, ya know, iPhone is a big product and he’s considered a world-class innovator.
But Jobs himself hated slide decks:
LOL.
I personally think slide decks are awful, and a conversation about big ideas and topics and what needs to be accomplished would serve everyone much better, but … people are comforted by slide decks, even though they don’t help move new ideas along, so it’s often a model that persists. I’ve been working about 17 years, and I’ve probably been told to “make a deck” about something over 3,000 times. At some point, it’s all a little bit meaningless.
Nothing really happened with Tony’s deck. When I got piped out of that job, we were still doing the same nonsense on customer experience and pretending that it was working like gangbusters, which is what most middling companies do: create metrics that executives don’t care about, report the metrics falsely because everyone knows it doesn’t matter and the executives don’t care about those metrics as is, and then just rinse and repeat the next year.
What happened with me and that job was: people started to dislike me, for various reasons (I am easily not liked, I’ve learned over the years), I got fired, I applied for a job months later somewhere else and used Tony’s boss as a reference and he claimed he didn’t know me (LOL), and then about 2.5 years after all this, I ended up sleeping with someone from the Seattle office when we were both divorced. We both married now, it’s a new decade, and ya know what? People are still quoting Steve Jobs in slide decks, even though he doesn’t want ya to!
