Yesterday while raking the leaves from my yard I had the chance to reflect on being jobless for the third time in my life. I suppose after the first two times, I should have seen number three coming, because there are some interesting similarities between all three companies that let me go.Each one faced dire enough circumstances that casting off employees became a necessity. Each one blamed everything except itself for its problems. None made any wholesale changes to the way it operated after casting off talent. Each one put a focus on little things when big things needed to be examined first (one company passed an edict that all paperclips had to be removed from paperwork that was being filed, then returned to the front office to be reused. I’m sure that held off bankruptcy for about … two minutes).
I admit I wasted a lot of time yesterday revisiting the sins of companies past. I then decided to apply the same standards to myself. Am I at fault for what happened to me? To be honest, yes, I could have done some things differently. I’m making some wholesale changes to the way I operate and it’s already paying off. I’ll go into some of those later this week. I’m taking time to focus on big picture items, though some may say I still have some improvements to make – things like family relationships, my own work skills, getting out of the comfort zone, etc.
Not that it’s necessarily a big thing, but ever since I started my photo hobby ten years ago, I’ve been about color. Intense, saturated, rich, deep color. With nearly two thousand photos published online, I don’t remember more than one or maybe two that I posted that are black and white. Here’s a challenge – try to find them in my archives here. If nothing else, it will boost my page view count (mwah hahahah).
Anyway, for this week at least, I’m going to look at the world in black and white. I have a backlog of photos to process and I’m going to play with the color desaturation button a lot more than I have previously. We’ll see if anything interesting happens.
Stay tuned.
Click on this post’s headline for image EXIF data. Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.
3 comments:
Don't be too hard on yourself. Doing things differently doesn't necessarily change the outcome when it comes to layoffs.
However, I do like the results of you doing things differently with the photography ... though I will miss the saturated richness.
joan elizabeth,
Thanks for the encouragement. I agree with you that doing things differently would not have prevented the layoffs. Although, I did see the layoffs coming six months before they happened. I saw the trend lines and they didn't look good. A year before that, I tried to warn the company that their new marketing strategy (which they paid a consultant a lot of money for) wouldn't work because of some wrong assumptions about the market. I took a big risk and explained it to my boss, but apparently she didn't do anything with the information, or if she did, it was ignored.
If there was one thing I could have done differently, I would have prepared myself better for the inevitable.
Thank you for the peek into your life. I have loved your pictures since I found you a long time ago, and now I feel I know a little more of the man who makes these marvelous pictures.
Sometimes, life is black and white, and that's OK, I'm loving your rich b&w shots.
LOL:Wanda
Post a Comment