And a new door opens

So as of this past Friday I am no longer in the employment of Arch Aluminum. And as a buddy reminded me today it’s been like the line from the Grateful Dead… “what a long strange trip it’s been”. There is no doubt the past 7+ years had goods, bads, uglies and really uglies and I wish some things turned out different/better but it didn’t happen that way. Anyway it really is what it is and I am looking forward to my next stop in life. So now I am free to pursue the one job I really want… CEO of the NFRC. Yep no matter what I’ll still have a sense of humor. And by the way to my friends reading this, my phone number is now different, so best way to reach me is via email (maxbcat@aol.com) or via LinkedIn and as I get reorganized I’ll get my number out.

Last word or words on this (for now), a sincere thank you to the many people in the industry I got to get to know during my time at Arch. The last 7 years allowed me the chance to be heavily involved in the industry and be in tune with some of the best and brightest out there. I fully intend to stay involved but then again you never know where life takes you next. But I can say that I feel like the advancements that our industry made in steeling together was born from some (not all obviously) of the push I began in getting people focused/interested on things like NFRC. So that is a good thing to leave behind.

In the few days since this news broke, I’ve received such an awesome outpouring of support along with some great insight. One of my favorites was this:

Suck on the lemons, or make lemonade: what’s it going to be? Only sucking the lemons is like sucking on poison: it’ll only make you sick. Get on with it, the future’s the only great adventure…

Off to the great adventure I go!

Elsewhere…

I was not the only departure from Arch, as this morning Rick Silverstein also was let go. Ricky is a good guy who in the last few months did a tremendous job up against unbelievable circumstances. Basically times are a changing and I don’t think this is a major surprise that eventually an overhaul was coming. It now will be interesting to see how things progress, what changes and who rises and falls. Funny looking at it from an industry standpoint you now have two groups Arch and AGC that have basically new upper management structures in place, starting at virtually the same time, so this will be one to track for sure.
Obviously I am going to end this week’s post here. We’ll morph back to normal, or whatever “normal” is in my world next time out.