Working in Tall Buildings

Vol. II- I Get Serious ... About Communications

How, after only playacting my way through college, I used a stint teaching high school journalism to launch a career in the newly emerging field of Organizational Communications was covered in Vol. 1 of this personal memoir. Now we get to the meat of the story: the bologna.

A guy secretary? That I had not seen coming. But the job came with a vast Organizational Communications laboratory and a captive audience of 50,000 employees. I was still using what I took from the experience at the end of my career thirty years later. By then, a lot of other people were too.

In this volume I'm carried away by corporate winds to a place I'd known earlier only as the evil empire-Southern California, recruited into an industry at the same time that industry was giving 250,000 other people there the heave-ho. Go figure? No. Go communicate.

This is where I'd learn that work in the big organizations can get you more than moolah. And also that there are more important skills to a career in communications than writing; what running up to touch a dead horse can get a person; and where, some say, I created my own stage and then performed upon it. For moolah.

This is where the second half of my story is going.