Playing "What If" and Living in the Past

Two things that it's commonly known that you shouldn't do is play "what if" and live in the past. Despite the wisdom in that, I occassionally do a little both of those things, as evidenced by my browsing through the mobile news sites of philly.com and the Detroit Free Press.

To be frank, I've had these news sites on my Blackberry largely because they were, at least a few years ago, two of the only regional news portals that were available in mobile, or WAP, format. My interest in Philadelphia is understandable given that I spent four intense years of my life there going to college, where my spiritual growth really took root and I established some of my sweetest friendships.

Detroit? Okay, maybe that one is more of a pure "ooh, they have a WAP-enabled site where I can read on my Blackberry regional news and read with schadenfreude the laments of sports columnists when New York sports team whip Detroit sports teams." But I do actually have a connection with Detroit that might be even deeper if life had unfolded a little differently.

In my second year of business school at Columbia, I was recruited by Ford and subsequently given an offer as a Financial Analyst. I was flown out for the "sell" weekend, which was unique from any other recruiting junket that I had been on. For one, the sheer volume of people that Ford was recruiting was off the charts. There must have been literally two hundred people who they were "mass" selling, mixing undergraduate recruits and advanced degree recruits.

We were in Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, and the entire hotel seemed to have been bought out by Ford for the purposes of the weekend. Jacques Nasser, at the time the head of Ford, gave a standard pitch about the benefits for working for Ford, and somehow in the course of his speech mentioned that he drove an Aston Martin, which at the time was part of the Ford family. The afternoon activity consisted of us going to the Ford test track to test-drive vehicles, having the opportunity to run the slalom or speed around the oval track. Later that evening, me and five other recruits were driven by chauffeur to a Ford executive's house for dinner. Nice touch.

After the weekend, a Ford recruiter, who was Columbia Business School alum called me told me that one of the reasons that I should come was that "you'll be someone from a top-tier school and have advantages over the many others here who don't have your pedigree. There are a lot of people here who are from mediocre schools." Yup - either appeal to the supposed poor caliber of my prospective co-workers or my insecurity of competing against and working with the best; that's the ticket. Why he took that tact to sway me I'm still not exactly sure (it probably had more of a negative effect on my decision, which was unlikely to be affirmative in the first place given my previous employers sponsorship of my MBA and the fact I had started dating my wife-to be), but I ended up declining within a week.

Even though I always felt that me ending up in Detroit was a one in a hundred chance, I wonder what life might have been different. For a second, even if I were to isolate this musing to just my professional life, I shudder to think about how much more I'd be in the eye of the storm of the economic crisis. Reading today about the loss of 3400 white-collar jobs at GM and have read through the years of the slow disintegration of the "Big Three" automakers and the devastation of the local economy - I feel both compassion for those who have been affected and relief for myself. From the executive with whom I had dinner, to my recruiter, to the all the people who I met that sell weekend who ultimately took jobs at Ford - I wonder how many of those people were unceremoniously but traumatically dumped in the past year. Maybe it's summed up by the strange and morally questionable lyrics sung by Bono in Band-Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas" in reference to famine victims starving in Africa: "Well, tonight thank God it's them instead of you."