And then one day Frank was gone.

This one's for you, old buddy, wherever you are...

Dear Frank:

You know, I miss you. We spent a lot of time together this year, and now, suddenly, you're not here. It's as if I'd had a tooth yanked out a long time ago and had finally gotten used to the constant aching, only to find one day that the pain was gone.

We're struggling right now. But sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. Your approach was taking us on a slow and painful boat to hell, and in some sense I'm happier to go there quickly so that we can turn around and move forward.

But I digress; in some perverse way, I definitely miss you.

What exactly do I miss?

Intellectual arrogance. You thought you knew it all, Frank. I was always impressed, oddly enough, with your ability to immediately fall in love with the first thing that popped out of your mouth. But I hated your tactic of trying to intimidate anyone who questioned you � with a stream of technobabble, a scowl, a sneer, a raised voice dripping with scorn, a face red with anger or whatever else you thought might help you win the battle, no matter how small.

Commitment. You were quite a forecaster. Amazingly, not one thing that your group was accountable for was ever complete by the promised date. Worse yet, the quality of your team's work was consistently shoddy. Sure, your staff did a Herculean job trying to fix mistakes. Your best firefighter quit after being burned one time too many � a huge loss to our collective effort.

But were you really unaware that this was connected to the expectations that you set? Your attitude was the gas that lit the fires that they fought day in and day out.

Cooperation. From day one, you were a real pain for all of us to work with. Perhaps your most outstanding trait was your ability to arrogantly discount and discard other people's ideas without offering any solutions. It was always impressive how � with one exception � you were able to permeate your entire group with this attitude.

Trying to get people from different parts of an organization to work together is a huge challenge. Each person brings forth their own values, their own incentives, and their own priorities. When confronted with someone like you, those who can will check out of the process, and those who can't will suffer and grumble, keeping most of their excitement and creativity tucked away in their back pocket, reserved for other projects and other parts of their life.

The task of trying to build a team was a hell of a lot harder with your condescending, obstacle-oriented style in the middle of it.

Complacency. To this day, Frank, I can still hear your voice in my sleep. Mostly what it says is: "No problem"; "Don't worry"; "That's easy"; "We're already ahead of schedule"; "We already know how to do that."

Yet I never saw any remorse when you failed to do something right, or on time, and other people were left to suffer the consequences. I never saw you blame yourself, or your team, for failing to deliver what had been promised (I did see you point your finger at others, and complain about how difficult other people were to deal with, however).

Mostly, you just sort of went along. There was no professional pride, no commitment to excellence or to the people that you were working with. And your old boss, also recently departed, deserves as much blame for that attitude as you do.

Lack of integrity. I remember the first time that you called me up before a review meeting, Frank. You tried to get me to sign up for a fabricated story to tell the execs so that they would think the project was "just fine." Well, the project hadn't been just fine, it wasn't just fine then, and it wasn't on its way to being just fine. For better or for worse, I wouldn't just say that all was well just for the sake of presenting a unified front.

You lied about budgets, about how/why human resources were being allocated, about the status of key tasks, and about the cost of tea in China. You also went to great lengths to deliberately mislead us about company politics, hardware costs, contract terms, and about internal customer expectations. Worse yet, on several occasions, you hassled me for telling others the truth!

And why? That's the part I still don't understand.

Given all that, Frank, it should come as no surprise to you that I'm happy to see the empty space at your desk. You were a swirling headwind, blowing the project in different directions and making it hard for anyone to walk forward. Now, the air is still, and while it's still a long way to the Promised Land, we all have a chance to walk there together.

We'll think of you along the way.

Regards, Vijay

Vijay Mehrotra is CEO of Onward, a consulting firm based in Mountain View, Calif.

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