Work can be a lovely place–such a lovely place!–that you might want to never leave. And this is one of the beautiful cautions that the American poet Don Henley cautions us about but his warning implies a question: why? Why couldn’t you, wouldn’t you, check out of your work place, or in the metaphor of his poem, the “Hotel California”? There is a great nugget of a lesson nestled in his poem, but to unravel it, we have to go verse by verse, and doing so tells the story of the arc of the consultant’s work. Let’s dive in.
The poem opens with the poet seeing “a shimmering light”. This is exactly how work starts: you see a light in the distance, and you get excited by it and go towards it. Maybe it’s a new job, maybe a new project within your job, maybe it’s a new team you’re moved to or a new boss — but something happens at work and you get excited by it. This is why you do it; without enough excitement, you’d leave and do different work!
So then, you get closer to the thing that excited you, standing in the doorway to approach what’s exciting, just as you’re about to start it, you always have the same thought:
There she stood in the doorway
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinkin’ to myself
“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell”
Well said, Don Henley: This could be heaven or hell. In other words, your new project your boss put on your desk, that is really exciting–a moment after you calm down from that initial adrenaline rush of the excitement of a new project, one of the first things you always do is a risk analysis, even in an informal way. You start seeing the dark clouds in the distance and thinking about all the things that can go wrong–and hopefully how to minimize them.
Then Henley continues that, in this new project, there’s plenty of room for you, at any time. And it’s quite lovely, too:
I thought I heard them say:
“Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year (Any time of year)
You can find it here”
This warm welcome, right after your risk analysis, should start making your red warning colors get a bit darker. If it’s so lovely, why do they need to convince you so hard it’s so lovely; loveliness should radiate self-evidently. And why is there so much room there, now and at all times of the year? In other words, why don’t any other consultants like you want to work there? Why is everyone else except for you and your naive self running far away?
But of course, being a young consultant, eager to please and eager for great results, you keep going forward and then the next act in the life of the consultant happens: you start seeing the signs of luxury around you (a Mercedes Benz!) but you’re not seeing any of it (she’s calling lots of boys “friends”–but why aren’t you one of those friends? Why is there such a big party and you are not invited?). As all consultants and project managers grow, they start seeing these confusing signs from the people around them, that are hard to read: why are they engaging in such challenging behavior? And Henley frames this poetically:
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted
She got the Mercedes Benz, uh
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys
That she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard
Sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember
Some dance to forget
“Some dance to remember, some dance to forget.” In other words, as you get into the intensity and heart of the work itself, surrounded by all these ambiguous signals from the humans around you about your relationship with them, some people deal with it by diving deeper in to understanding it (dancing to remember) but some dive deeper in to their work precisely to avoid thinking about these bigger questions (dancing to forget.)
So now, you’re full on in the Life of the Consultant or Project Manager. Doing the dance of work (be it to remember or forget), with the people around you giving you ambiguous signals and never really inviting you into the club, so how does the young consultant deal with it? Henley continues by coloring the fun of the consultant life (emphasizing the wine, partying like it’s 1969), but then there’s a hint of a twist:
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They livin’ it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (What a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis”
Bring your alibis? That’s a dark twist but an important one. Every young consultant is eager to please, works hard, does their best–and then gets smacked in their face. Sorry, it’s going to happen to you. This one reason why one of the most under-rated pieces of advice I’d give to any strapping your professional is CYA: Cover Your Ass. Document, track, be clear, cc: people, make comms public and shared within your team, and so forth. CYA is the business equivalent to the real-world need to always have an alibi–even if you are as innocent as they come. Indeed, especially if you are as innocent as they come because, if you were a bad guy, wouldn’t you want to take advantage of the most innocent young ones out there because they have the least defenses?
So Henley continues:
Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice, and she said
“We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast
So now, it becomes clearer why the consultant needs to CYA always. Deeply inappropriate situations arise–the “master’s chambers” in the poem, but in the real life of the consultant, that takes the form of unsavory behavior, transactions that aren’t nearly as ethical as an innocent person might think, but all of that wrapped up in jargon and legalese and confusing situations, so that it becomes difficult to realize what is really happening. And it gets difficult very quickly, as soon as you progress past the non-trivial levels of importance. As Henley said here, “they stab it with their steely knives” but no matter how much they try to, “they just can’t kill the beast.” But the kicker of the darkness you see is that this situation you’re in is “of our own device”: you’re doing it to yourself and choosing to be here; it’s not just about the situation that the universe has put you in, but you are choosing to behave and act in way to make yourself a prisoner.
What does the young consultant do upon realizing all this? When it gets dark, including seeing this darkness within you, most people want to run. Henley addresses that by ending the arc of the song perfectly:
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave”
In other words, the first moment of extreme difficulty in your consulting career, you’ll have the urge to run away, when you truly see the darkest of the dark below everything. And of course you can leave. But “you can check out any time you like–but you can never leave.” Even once you quit the job, turn the project down, and get out of that situation: it’s changed you. You’ll remember it, a tad more jaded, a tad more sophisticated, a tad more experienced. Multiply this by a thousand times, and you get a process that’s commonly called “growing up.”
So this is all great insight for the young consultant. But does it tie in to what we’re doing here at SpotlessMind? Of course it does: we’re building the way you can predict all these other character’s behaviors–the seedy client wanting to do the dark things, the naive young cute consultant encouraging you to just work harder, even the gatekeeper in the finale with the concluding line (and these gatekeepers take many different forms, often you won’t even realize that the gatekeeper is indeed the gatekeeper)–so you can understand them going in, before it even starts. I, for one, would want to know what really lies in store before it happens, so I can decide beforehand whether I even want to check in to the Hotel California, or not.
