Recently spoke with Alan Siegel regarding my work with company X. Not for very long, mind you, just got our feet wet. Oh, hang on a sec. I forgot the header.

Thinking about my time with undisclosed large company with two letter stock symbol

There. Anyway, my time with this company has not gone smoothly. I've been working with them since Nov 2005, trying the whole time to crack the not-in-HQ ceiling, knowing that I could move up if I could get traction with the Denver office. This never happened. And I'm somewhat bitter about it, but I didn't want to tell Siegel this. Nor did I want to give him my true assessment of just how misshapen the organization is. I left it at, "It's been interesting." Still thinking about the conversation two weeks later. At some point I'm going to have to tell someone something about my time with this company and it can't be as negative as I feel is accurate. So I came up with the following.

I have spent the last 3 years in the belly of the beast. I have been a mole in large, waste-ridden corporate America. I know how conservative, large-scale companies operate and can relatively quickly identify and diagnose communication coming from the other side of the table. I hear the code words for things like ignorance, waste, fear, shame, depression and hubris and can decode it for companies like Alan's. The beauty is this is not putting a spin on this thing. It's the bleeding truth.

Funny what some uncomfortable pressure can do to the story.