🧐 Facts about my 26 bosses

I have had 26 different bosses in 20+ years of working.

1. Brands I worked for are from:

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🇭🇰🇭🇰🇭🇰 🇨🇳 🇦🇺

(I have yet to work for a European company or boss.)

I sold 📱, 👟, 🏀, empty promises and humans.

2. Ethnicity of my bosses:

👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼👨🏼‍💼

🙎🏻‍♂️🙎🏻‍♂️🙎🏻‍♂️🙎🏻‍♂️🙎🏻‍♂️🙎🏻‍♂️

👩🏼‍💼👩🏼‍💼👩🏼‍💼👩🏼‍💼

👨🏿‍💼👨🏿‍💼👨🏿‍💼

🙍🏻‍♀️🙍🏻‍♀️🙍🏻‍♀️

27% were female. More than half was Caucasian. 9 were Asian, of that 1 was from China and 1 was from Taiwan, the rest were from Hong Kong. 3 were African Americans.

3. 1 fired me.

4. 1 lost his company and I went down with him.

5. I went through 3 significant downturns and or re-orgs.

6. A few significant “moments”: Windows 95 launch, Beijing Olympics, a few cool products from the fruit company, the journey of LeBron James, and a beautiful little thingy that counted steps in the most fancy way possible (Nike+).

Other random memorable moments:

1. Cutting newspaper, yea, real papers. It was my first real job so to speak. It was for my mom’s company. Yea. She was my first boss. I had to find relevant articles from a stack of daily newspapers, cut them and put them into summaries for her team. It was the first time I went from “this is so pointless” to “oh someone is reading it for more than 2 minutes.”
2. The first time I became a manager, on the 2nd day of my job, one of my teammates, a tenured one, asked for a chat, and she wanted a pay raise.
3. My manager advised me not to get a sports car and should keep my civic instead. I ignored him and got my sports car. My memory of that car is when I drove back home, with the top down, carrying the boxes from my office, after they let me go.
4. When I was working for a Chinese company, one of my projects was to get the grandson of the chairman of one of our state owned bank customers to study in the UK. This project involved getting him to get a good enough score in TOEFL, picking out the school, filling out all the admission crap, taking him to the school, getting him settled down, and then taking the grandparents, who tagged along, to visit Istanbul and Cairo.
5. One of my manager feedback to me was, “You are asking for a feedback? Here is one: Stop asking for feedback.”
6. I only witnessed one of them cried. In fact he cried during a leadership meeting. He was a white man. Others called him cry baby. He didn’t last very long, but I still admire him a lot.

26 down, 26 more to go?