About Steve Putnam, author
Climbing Up and Down the Corporate Ladder
Tech of the year; Performance Improvement Plan Recipient
Steve Putnam grew up in Western Massachusetts, on a pre-factory poultry farm with his parents and four brothers. Early on, he discovered how you could wow any conversation just by mentioning the farm had 6000 chickens—unless you were talking to Roy Gaynor, a neighbor who was also in the chicken business.
On a cool August evening, Roy and his wife drove into the yard in a new maroon, Chevy Super Sport convertible, its top down. Roy, sporting a long wool topcoat and scarf, and Rita wearing fur; both looked like 1930s movie gangsters. How could this be? Roy used to deliver eggs driving an old shit-brown, Divco milk truck with a swing-away seat you could drive sitting or standing. How could a dirt-poor farmer, working too hard for too little, afford a brand-new convertible?
Unbeknownst to Putnam, the world was already going factory. The big-assed grain company that sold chicken feed to Roy invested in the co-op that bought surplus eggs from farmers. They hijacked Roy’s wholesale business, buying his surplus eggs, and then reselling them to local stores, forcing him to sell more eggs to the co-op. Financially upside down, Roy and Rita could almost afford to feed the chickens the same eggs they laid, keeping them alive long enough to make the truck ride to the slaughterhouse.
Critics sometimes accuse Putnam of distorting fiction with surplus fact; he claims to remember Roy telling him where the money to buy the Super Sport Chevy came from. Roy and Rita saw the end coming. They diversified, and reinvested in the stock market to hedge against losing the farm. To grab a piece of the local action, they bought shares in the co-op that was screwing them, making money on the eggs they were losing money on. When enough was enough, they sold off the chickens to a dealer who resold surplus chickens to the Campbell Company, famous for their delicious, over-salted, chicken noodle soup. A victim of its short-term success, the co-op folded.
Putnam was fourteen or fifteen. Who knows if Roy was joking? Maybe Putnam changed Roy’s takeaway to make hard work sound overrated. A good attitude turned bad can sometimes be salvation. Never give up. If you have to, funnel your money backward. Capitalize on capitalism itself.
After high school graduation, Putnam worked at a small-town Chevrolet dealership with a one-car showroom. He ran his big-block 58 Chevy at Lebanon Valley Dragway a couple of Sundays. The car burned so much gas he couldn’t afford to see much of America. If you can’t see the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet, join the Navy and see the world. The first rule according to his drill instructor: is “Your soul belongs to God. Your ass belongs to the Navy.”
After serving on a 739-foot aircraft carrier with almost 3000 men, the GI bill paid for Putnam’s education at U-Mass, an institutional factory farm of more than 20,000 students, most housed in high and low-rise dorms. Majoring in psychology, he learned a little about the personalities of humans and the science of educating pigeons. A hard-to-pass course in research statistics later helped him understand how Academy performance metrics could create false realities.
To illustrate the dismal job outlook for liberal arts grads of the 1970s, a Time magazine cover featured a capped and gowned college grad pumping gas. Married with one child, Putnam landed a job as a mechanic with his former employer, the same Chevy dealer whose new facility featured a display of factory-fresh cars in its four-car showroom. He worked in the shadow of a cardboard statue of Mr. Goodwrench, listening to a beat-up transistor radio. A coat hanger its makeshift antenna, it blared rock or country depending on who got to it first to turn it on. The sales manager would walk by and shut it off to save electricity, making the mechanics afraid he might not go for another pay raise. Another sign of things to come; an old air jack blew, its axle-shaped piston breaking out. As it rocketed toward the ceiling, it just missed the head of the mechanic who was working the control valve. The radio also survived.
It could be that a four-car showroom was no longer big enough to dazzle prospective customers. The family sold the business to a larger dealer who later sold it to a bigger dealer. Today, the building houses the town’s Department of Public Works. Restless, Putnam got a job on a framing crew with old high school friends. He remembers tired morning muscles gradually warming up with movement; the end-of-day fatigue and satisfaction you get by doing something that’s tangible, real. He remembers the sense of freedom leaving a job, its first phase completed, and moving on to the next job site: Always the same boom box blasting.
On a staging, making an overhead cut; Putnam’s circular saw nipped his finger, severing a nerve. A hand specialist examined the damage as if pretending to concentrate on the x-ray. ”I can reconnect that nerve,” he said. “But I’m not going to. Not this one. Workers Comp doesn’t pay enough to cover it.” He laughed. “Maybe you can find a guy who works out of a cellar somewhere.”
Out of work while his hand was healing, bill payments were overdue; a charge card collector called weekly. “How much can you send now,” she would always ask.
Putnam found a job with a small business equipment company that provided a car, health insurance, and a small pension. The place seemed like the American Dream. Unlike farmers, so-called hippies, mechanics, or carpenters, technicians were required to wear neckties. On the first day, he attended an early service meeting. No coffee and donuts, the service manager explained that the technicians had failed to meet their sales target, selling parts to billable customers. Putnam wondered what kind of scout troop he had joined. The framing boss doesn’t wait a month to tell you what’s going wrong a month later. That would be almost as bad as counting leftover nails to measure progress.
After completing his training, Putnam was assigned to work on-site at a large insurance company. An instance where big business deserves recognition for supporting the arts, the new copier fleet didn’t require much service for the first year or so, allowing time to draft The Academy of Reality.
In a few years, the local office equipment business sold out to an international corporation that soon changed its name to IKON. Still an on-site tech at the insurance company, Putnam won the title of Tech of the Year, along with a trip to Tucson, Arizona. Ten years later, IKON sold to an international company, RICOH.
By then, Putnam had forgotten how many times his employee number changed.
Unlike office equipment companies of the past, RICOH never served coffee, no matter what the occasion. A sales manager announced that there would be layoffs if the company failed to sell more copiers. Shortly afterward, a service manager presented Putnam with a frivolous Performance Improvement Plan, intended for near-retirement employees. It included “Catch 22” corrective steps that were impossible to implement.
He left the company a year later. In his letter of resignation, he wrote: “As of September 1 st , my ass won’t belong to RICOH. Let the Gods of different religions fight over my soul.” Kind and forgiving, or just “wise-assed,” he suggested a couple of good reads, pertinent to responsible corporate operation:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: You can’t quantify quality.
Freakonomics: On the unintended consequences of metrics: Statistical measurement and numerical objectives don’t always change behavior in productive ways.
B.F. Skinner: “No one goes to the average circus to see the average dog jump through the average hoop.”
Tom Robbins: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. “If a chicken and a half lays an egg and a half in a day in a half, how long does it take to stamp all of the peas out of a pod?”
Tech of the Year, Performance Improvement Plan Recipient; the titles are meaningless. Work in itself can be satisfying and rewarding. Putnam worked with good people—farm kids, mechanics, sailors, carpenters, technicians, all surviving the way Sid Sidney and his fictitious friends, Mia, Smith Jones, and Jonson did, with offbeat humor, sarcasm, and friendly politics unpolarized.
