With coverage of today’s Mega Millions Lottery all over the U.S. news and people talking about what they would do if they won, I thought I would share a story from years ago. This silly interaction at a bar was key in shaping how I view management and organizations. May it inspire you to think about work the way it inspired me:
The Backstory:
In the early 2000s a friend of mine worked for a U.S.-based car rental company at their global corporate office in a call center. He would handle rental requests/bookings as well as all kinds of customer service interactions.
The job sounded like every nightmare call center story you’ve ever heard: being micro-managed for things out of your control, arbitrary metrics for performance evaluations, horrible managers determined to climb the corporate ladder stepping anyone in their way… all for a job that paid slightly above minimum wage. I don’t know how he put up with it.
So around the time things were going from bad to worse at the job, one of the Lotteries got up into the ridiculous range. A group of us found ourselves out at a bar where the conversation inevitably turned to what our Lotto plans would look like. Everyone’s plans were fairly basic until we got to my friend’s coworker. Let’s call him Dave.
Dave’s Plan:
Dave was quiet for a moment and then said, “I’m pretty sure I would destroy [The Rental Company].”
We laughed, but Dave remained stone-faced. “No, really. With that kind of money, I think I could do it.”
He turned to my friend and delivered a monologue truly worthy of an Oscar. This is one of those moments burned into my brain. The only changes I am making are for the sake of anonymity:
“How much would it take for you to get up and walk away from your station at lunch tomorrow and not come back? Six month's salary? A year? More? You could have a different job in a few weeks. My guess is no one in that call center is earning more than $25,000 a year. Maybe $30,000 for some management.
And there’s, what? Seventy, eighty of us there across all the shifts? I’d just go station to station with a checkbook. Everybody has a price. I’d skip over the couple of people I hate. They don't get my money. On my way to lunch I’d swing by the IT department with my checkbook with the same offers. Sure, those guys would cost more, but I figure I could empty out the call center and IT for about $3 million, maybe four.
[His smile turned…harsh.]
And sure, [The Rental Company] would still operate. They’d try and hire and replace everyone who took my offer. And maybe they could. But it would take months to replace everyone and train them. It would be awful for the people who stayed. They’d quit and the cycle would start all over. Customer service would be awful – the company would spend millions in compensation for mistakes. I don’t know if I could truly kill [The Rental Company] but they wouldn’t recover from the market hit they would take.”
[He sat back, relaxing.]
“So yeah, I guess my Lotto plan would be to take the lump sum payout, sped about 2% of it to try to ruin a billion-dollar organization and then travel the world with the rest of my millions.”
There was quiet for a moment before my friend said, “Damn, you’ve given this some thought,” to which Dave replied, “Every. Day. The people they need the most they treat the worst.”
A Follow-up Note:Yes, I realize there are some flaws to his plan and it likely wouldn’t play out in real life the way the fantasy in his head did. But the fact that he’d given it that much thought just highlights how disgusted he was with that company and how they treated the employees. I think about this story all the time – especially when the Lotto is in the news like it is today.