Why I Went to Fiji in 1990
Having been through the 1985-1990 “Managed Care War” where the old traditional service ideal of the leading national carriers was replaced by a much more base profit motive by those from the HMO world who all of a sudden found themselves in charge, I was bloodied by lack of culture, inept management, infighting and and a mania for mergers and acquisitions. While working to integrate two disparate sales forces following one of those big M&A’s in 1990, I got a phone call from The Cousteau Society asking me to be an underwater photographer during a two week project on one of the out islands of the Fiji archipelago. Our work was to be put into a videotape which would eventually be used by Fijian students and visiting tourists to educate them about the marine resources that lay below the surface. When I got the call, I was actually sitting in an on-campus cottage in Connecticut owned by the acquiring carrier. I had been stewing for weeks about being treated like a second class citizen as the acquiree and having to show deference to a new management that clearly had little concern about retaining the management talent of my company. I knew going to Fiji would be the end of my being considered for anything respectable in the new management structure. In life there are only a few times where you can make such a decision. I opted out of the carrier world at that moment. A few weeks later, about midnight, after avoiding the thousands of land crabs that scurried across the road in front of me, I sat on a deserted Fijian beach and contemplated what I had done. Even with the bumps I have caused myself since, I have never regretted that decision.
