Doug, the Up Front Man.

When last I saw Doug he had graduated from the Simon School (MBA) and had signed on as an Account Rep. at Arthur Anderson. Doug was in the process of learning their current bag of tricks.

We had lunch one day.

Doug says, "So, what's to be done?" Says I, "you could form up a team and redo Kodak Park. Just get a blessing from Carl Kortz". Doug said he didn't think he could do that.

When first I saw Doug he had fallen into my sphere of influence and I was in need of a good pair of hands. One day I asked Doug what he thought his job was and he said "finding things for other people to do".

Doug came to work with me and had sufficient technical skills, and a real talent at bullshit. Having recently graduated from North-Western University, and coming from a family that was in business for themselves (and always had been ), Doug was a bit of an elitist and naturally would come to the conclusion that he had, indeed, been put here to find "things" for others to do (much the same theory as the British in India).

After several months of what I would describe as "maintaining a short leash", Doug became sufficiently aware that he was involved in the actual doing of a plan and that, beyond his uncanny ability to find things for people to do, he was to work with them to help them define their activities

into the planned design.

This set of skills I would now come to call "transferring the Joseph" , after Joe Butkowski. Doug understood what he had to do and did it well. A few miss-steps early on, but Doug became "the up front man", or the first in line for direct questions and the point at which most problems can be solved.

Doug quit Kodak and went to work with a string of small consulting firms, finally coming to the conclusion that graduate school was necessary (hey, I could have warned him of the dangers associated with being a twenty eight year old consultant and, as a matter of fact, I'm sure I did).

It would be a hope of mine that Doug would “Transfer the Joseph” (so to speak) or, teach someone else that the people in ties are not the ones with the answers. The people who do the work know what's up.

I hope they do that over at Arthur Anderson, and I’ll bet Doug has a plan.