The recent announcement of General Motors plant closings brought back memories of my career with Illinois Bell. During my 22 years at the company, sweeping changes in technology and the court-ordered breakup of AT&T resulted in serial downsizing.
During my rotational assignment at Western Electric in the 1970s, factory layoffs cut the Hawthorne Works from 16,000 employees to 12,000. The cuts finally ended the long-outmoded plant beauty contest after most of the young women were laid off.
At Illinois Bell, the company of 40,000 employees I joined in 1968 had dwindled to 24,000 by the late 1980s. A series of voluntary incentives trimmed the management force as long-service managers jumped at the chance to retire early. Downsizing was becoming part of the corporate culture. Buyout rumors cropped up every year, and the career aspiration of some employees was to be bribed to leave.
Executives tried to call these force reductions “rightsizing,” but nobody could say “rightsizing” with a straight face. They also claimed the cuts would make the company more innovative and entrepreneurial. This rhetoric inspired some of the most innovative managers to take the buyout offer and leave the company to become entrepreneurs.
Because I was the public relations liaison to the human resources department, my department head walked into my office at one point and asked what I’d heard about downsizing plans. “Would you be interested?” I asked. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Since we live in the same suburb, I would ask you to drop the papers off at my house.”
So it came to pass that I was called into a confidential human resources meeting in 1989. It sounded ominous, but I walked into a conference room brimming with happiness as the HR managers discussed a new downsizing incentive. It was quickly apparent that these folks, all nearing retirement, were exchanging high-fives because they were eligible for the offer. At age 46, I did not share their jubilation.
I walked back to my office, closed the door and began working on the communications package that would announce the downsizing offer to employees. As I wrote up the details of the downsizing plan over the next couple of days, I began to get interested.
My job was secure but my career path was narrowing. I was nowhere near retirement, but the downsizing offer would enable me to walk away with a year’s salary. Everyone was surprised when I took the buyout.
For several months I had been working with a task force to recommend ways to reorganize the company. Taking the buyout required me to leave the company at the end of January, and my department made preparations to fill my job. But the task force asked me to stay until its project finished in April.
So I remained at Illinois Bell as a kind of free agent, a man without a department. Human resources transferred me to the president’s staff to keep me on the payroll, and friends in another department gave me an office to use. When the task force concluded its work, my last act before turning in my employee badge and leaving the building was to drop off the final draft of the president’s speech.
That graceful exit turned out to be a long goodbye. The terms of my voluntary buyout permitted me to work for the company as a consultant. I soon began a series of consulting assignments at Ameritech (Illinois Bell’s parent company) that helped me transition to a new freelance career.
One of the HR guys who had designed the downsizing plan took the buyout but was called back periodically to consult on future force reductions. Whenever he was spotted in the building downsizing rumors circulated. He grew a beard but was still recognized.
A couple of years later the company downsized again and this time the offer was not voluntary. Most of my former peers and all of my former bosses were pushed out and were not allowed to come back as consultants. Meanwhile, Ameritech and its affiliated companies remained on my client list until 2002. Some of my clients were former Bell System colleagues and people who had worked for me at Illinois Bell. My last major client, Unilever, was the result of a referral from a former Illinois Bell colleague.
My experience at Illinois Bell made me useful as a consultant to companies going through major reorganization and change. Where they were going, I had already been.