... like it's 1999
On December 5, 1999, I was learning about all those little computer programs that were going to fail on 1/1/2000, causing the end of the world as we knew it. Meanwhile, a veritable plethora of COBOL programmers were busy writing the necessary code to fend off the apocalypse. I had the opportunity to get tickets to Wisconsin's trip to the Rose Bowl. I chose to stay home, just in case the world ended. My bad.
Anyway, as I was looking through my contacts, trying to track down a co-worker from 1999, I noticed that a bomb literally went off during the past seven years. Few of my contacts continue to work at the companies they worked at in 1999. What the heck happened during the past seven years?
If you used to work with me in some capacity, use the comment section, or e-mail, to let me know where you landed. If you didn't work with me (that's most of you), use the comment section to tell me if this has also been your experience. What happened to you and your co-workers, during the past seven years? How did your career evolve? How did your company evolve? How did your industry evolve? How did you stay in touch with people? Please share your thoughts.
Labels: 1999, career, co-workers, contacts, Y2K
posted by Kevin @ 9:38 PM
1 Comments:
Coming from the vendor side of this, I have seen this phenomena as well. In fact, I know of one person who is still with the same company that they were in 1999; and I have a pretty extensive network.
Some use this information to say that loyalty is dead. My take is that loyalty is not dead, in fact many individuals seek to belong to something and show extreme loyalty to brands and companies. My take is that many companies fail to understand what generates loyalty from individuals and thus never find it from either employees (and thus customers). For the best explanation of this, see Fredrick Reichelds "The Loyalty Effect" which, even though it was written over a decade ago, is about the most accurate view on how Loyalty creates profit that I have ever read.
While I could write about this for hours, my main point was to let you know how I keep in contact with my network.
I use LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) to stay in touch with my ever changing network. I literally get at least a few emails per month with updates of new jobs in my network or just simple reconnects from my former colleagues. It is the best tool so far for staying in touch with my network and keeping my outlook contacts up to date.
By the way, I don't get a kickback from either Fredrick Reicheld or LinkedIn...I am just a loyal reader, user and advocate of both brands. How's that for loyalty being dead?
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home