I’m not Michael Corleone and the places I’ve worked at could hardly be compared to the mob; but I did have an interesting, brief discussion this afternoon with the president of the company for which I’m working. For the record, I don’t think that any discussion which begins, “you used to be management, right?†can be characterized as anything but interesting.
It seems that the company (like the family, only smaller, legal and less profitable) might have a need for some management and there is some interest in me filling the role. Unfortunately, in taking this job, one of the big pluses for me was that it was not a management position. On the other hand, there are some good things about management and the company is much smaller than the university. I would still be expected to do technical work and the management is anticipated to be about 5-10% of my time (if I did it).
I don’t have many details yet, mostly because the president wanted to get my initial reaction before we got into details (fwiw, my initial reaction was close to, but not quite, eek!). At the very least this means that I need to figure out what I didn’t like about management at the university so I know which questions to ask in this case. It’ll probably be a good thing, but I hadn’t been planning to do a systematic exploration of my feelings in this area any time soon.
C’est la vieÂ