He sent us all home with our desktop hard drives (laptops weren't universal yet). For three days, while the power flickered and trees fell, D ran the team from his basement. He called each of us on our flip phones and burner Androids to check on our families before he asked about the spreadsheet. When I lost power at 9:00 PM, he drove twenty minutes in the storm to drop off a portable generator battery at my apartment door. He didn't stay for coffee. He just handed it over and said, "Be online by 6:00 AM."
In 2012, the myth of the "hustle" was king. We worked late because we were told that the recession was over but the competition was global. D bought into that myth fully. He worked 80 hours a week, so he expected 60 from us. He didn't apologize for it. But he also never took credit. When the client presentation went perfectly the next week, the CEO praised D. D pointed at our row of cubicles. "They did the math," he said. "I just drew the line." my boss 2012
He was brutally fair. He never yelled, but he also never smiled until the clock hit 5:01 PM. He had a habit of reading your email drafts over your shoulder. "Cut the fluff," he would say, pointing at a sentence. "We aren't poets; we are shippers. Get the product out the door." He sent us all home with our desktop
My boss in 2012 taught me the uncomfortable truth about the early 2010s: the line between exploitation and leadership is very thin. He demanded everything, but he gave everything back. He lacked the "empathy" workshops of today's managers, but he showed up with a generator in a hurricane. When I lost power at 9:00 PM, he
The defining moment came in October 2012. Hurricane Sandy was barreling up the coast, and the office was buzzing about shutting down. Everyone was refreshing weather websites on their bulky Dell monitors. D called a meeting. He looked at the radar, looked at our deadline for a client presentation, and said, "The internet doesn't get wet."
The whiteboard was his brain. Every Monday, he would sketch out a "waterfall" project plan in red dry-erase marker. He was obsessed with the waterfall method—a linear, rigid way of moving from A to B. In 2012, Agile and Scrum were still jargon for software nerds, not office managers. D believed that if you drew a straight line on a board, the universe had to follow it.