Getting Fired

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On this day three years ago I was fired from Bloomberg. This is the first time I’ve written about it.

My boss booked a Zoom call with a woman from HR. He read a script saying they were eliminating my position and she would walk me through a severance package. “Did I understand?”

I nodded. It was a lot to absorb. I had been at the company for 32 years. I was the fifteenth reporter hired in 1990 and rose to become Managing Editor for the Americas. Later, I became Global Head of News Product.

By any measure, I had had a fantastic career. I got raises and glowing evaluations. I dedicated my adult life to working there.

And in a five-minute call it was over. 

No reason was given except to say it wasn’t for cause.

It took some time to process and get around to writing about. Bloomberg was my first real job; It felt like my entire identity.

You can know you are disposable but not really understand it until you have been disposed. 

Getting fired teaches you a lot. It was my blessing or curse not to gain that knowledge until I was 57. 

I wasn’t angry at the company or my colleagues, including the dingbat who fired me. Its an amazing company and Mike Bloomberg is an entrepreneurial genius who I was lucky to have worked directly with on projects.

Instead, it felt like a car crash. You don’t blame the automobile because you know 40,000 people are killed in America in motor vehicle accidents each year. Statistically, it has to be someone. It happened to be your moment.

As I was leaving, I stopped by Mike’s desk to thank him for the opportunities I had been given. He stepped out of a meeting to talk. He told me to reach out if I ever needed anything.

One piece of advice I took from Mike was to not look back. 

From the moment I walked out of the building, I started thinking about people to meet, places to go and things to learn.

I started posting on LinkedIn. I wrote about finance and media, my career at Bloomberg and life lessons from my father. 

That created opportunities. I got an email from a woman I met five years earlier at a conference in Boulder. She read something I wrote about my dad and hired me to help her team become better storytellers.

The more I wrote, the more people reached out to hire me. I realized social media allowed anyone to tell their story directly and it could be a business. 

I founded a writing agency, Principals Media, to help CEOs and other executives raise their visibility by writing online. 

Lots of people are getting fired these days, both in the public and private sector. 

It can feel devastating, especially when there is no good reason. Often the people being fired aren’t underperforming and the companies aren’t struggling.

Someone somewhere just decided to cut costs or rearrange the org chart.

My experience has been that there’s not much use in dwelling on why.

It doesn’t matter and no one cares. 

What counts is what you do next.

There’s a reason 400,000 professionals read this daily.

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BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

PROFOUND TREND: This is probably the most underreported profound trend in business: the steady erosion of publicly listed companies that the vast majority of people buy shares in and the gradual increase in private companies which the professionals own.

WHO’S IN THE NEWS: A friend put together this nifty application which measures who is in the news on any given day. It’s visual evidence of how Trump dominants the news cycle.

FEAR OF FLYING: Scott Galloway has been raising this concern for some time.

THE GOAL OF AI: Interesting take about the impact of AI just “nodding you along.”

CS LEWIS: “A zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions.” The man can write!