Tim Berry audio story: leaving a consulting firm to write books

In 2010, I had a long conversation with Palo Alto Software founder (and superb blogger) Tim Berry about mistakes. (The entire discussion can be found here.) He related one story about leaving a comfortable job in a consulting firm for a life as a freelance writer of computer books. Things turned out very differently from his plan, but not in a bad way. A "brilliant mistake," perhaps?

Tim Berry: leaving a consulting firm to write books (mp3 - 4:19) - right-click to download.

Transcript:

One of the dumbest things I did had really good serendipitous results. So I can easily think of a mistake that I deserved to have suffered for but instead it worked out very well.

I left Creative Strategies; the entrepreneurial compensation wasn't enough for me. I really wanted to do more. This was a time - this was 1983 - when Stewart Brand had just won a $100,000 advance for the Whole Earth Catalog. And there I was, having a fancy MBA, I had fallen in love with computers. I built my first computer; I became very computer literate. I could program hex memory. But I had been a journalist; I could also write. The crazy mistake I made was leaving Creative Strategies on purpose in order to write computer books to seek my fortune.

And that was a horrible mistake, because Stewart Brand's $100,000 advance was an aberration; it was a moment in history that didn't repeat itself.

So there I was, with 4 children, a good strong marriage; we are still married, 40 years later, so at least we had that. I had left a high paying job to write these books. (I was on contract for three books which I eventually wrote and got published.)

The mistake turned to a serendipity event. About three months after I left from Creative Strategies, I got a call from the GM of Apple Latin America who had been my best and most favorite client while I was at Creative Strategies. He said, "Tim, I need you to go to Venezuela to do a market study." I can remember this conversation almost exactly as it occurred.

I said, "Hector, I left Creative Strategies. I'm in a home office, writing computer books."

And Hector said, "Tim, don't be an idiot. I never liked paying Creative Strategies for your work. It was just you I was hiring. I'm delighted to just pay you directly. Now seriously, how soon can you get to Venezuela?"

Leaving a good job to write computer books was a stupid mistake that had a very nice end result. And I'm not that dumb, because at that point in the conversation I said, "I'll call you back in five minutes." Then I got on the phone and booked tickets and went off to Venezuela. And in the next 2 weeks, I wrote a market study for Apple Latin America that created an invoice that was more than the total I got for the 3 books I wrote. And I did it in two weeks. I realized that consulting was going to generate the real revenue in the family, whether or not I was a vice president.

So there's a mistake that turned out well.

Tim Berry: Trying to quit the wrong way

Tim Berry, president & founder of Palo Alto Software, shares this story of a mistake he made much earlier in his career. This story first appeared on Tim's blog Planning, Startups, Stories.

I've made a lot of mistakes. This one wasn't my worst, but it's perhaps one of the more memorable, and one that might help you avoid the same thing. There is a moral to this story. It was August of 1981, early morning, in the office of John Lutz, managing partner of McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City. I was three months out of Stanford with an MBA degree, working for McKinsey Management Consulting in Mexico City. The McKinsey offices sat in a very stylish high-profile office building overlooking a critical freeway junction over Chapultepec Park, linking the fancy Las Lomas residencial area with Polanco and the Paseo de Reforma main business district. The streets were wet from rain overnight, and the freeway was, as almost always, jammed. The sky was dense, a mixture of rainclouds and smog.

I needed to quit. It was so embarrassing. I didn't like to see myself as the archetypical fancy MBA blowing off the first job. I was 33 years old, married, and my wife was expecting our fourth child. I was way too mature for this stuff. But still ...I had arranged a job waiting for me with Creative Strategies International in San Jose. From where I was, returning back to the San Francisco peninsula, Silicon Valley, seemed like returning from exile back to paradise. I liked Creative Strategies, and liked living back in the states. I wanted out of McKinsey.

I really didn't like the job with McKinsey. It was stupid to have taken it. It was a job meant for a 26-year-old single person blinded by ambition untrammeled by relationships. Like most professional firms, success involved putting up with a corporate culture that spent 12 to 14 hours a day in the office, whether or not there was work to be done. The firm actively discouraged families by encouraging long-term business travel but without families, and by running 5-day strategy meetings at beach resorts and forbidding families coming along, even at the family's own expense. I was not supposed to disagree with partners on well, you get the idea.

I certainly didn't belong. I'd been entrepreneurial for 10 straight years, making my own way with freelance journalism and, later, my own consulting, and I wasn't up to faking awe for the partners. And as a family, we didn't belong in Mexico City. I had loved that place for nine years in the 70s, it had been good to me, but I was done. My wife is Mexican, she grew up in Mexico City, and had family there, but she was tired of it too. The city was too big, too hard to deal with. We had left in 1979 and shouldn't have gone back in 1981. I fell for the money and prestige, stupidly, because it wasn't enough to keep me.

So, back in the office with John Lutz, did I tell him why I was leaving? That I didn't like the job, had made a bad decision, didn't like Mexico, I'm sorry, it won't work.

No. I didn't. I told him I needed a lot more money.

This is one of the best arguments ever for telling the damn truth, even when it's embarrassing. I'm still embarrassed, but I'm older now, and, well, I think this is a good lesson to share.

So they gave me more money, and then how dumb did I look?

I still left, and I left looking really stupid. Why didn't I just tell the truth in the first place?

So there's the moral to the story. You'll be in a situation where you're tempted to slant away from the truth to make it easier, but remember before you do how bad you'll look if the other side answers the wrong issue, forcing you to admit it was never the real problem. So here there is. It bothered me for a long time but that was 25 years ago or so, and hey, I've made a lot of other mistakes since, the sting has worn off on this one. I hope you find the story useful.