It was culture shock for me when I became a Product Manager for Database at Oracle. In one day, I was suddenly getting 50-100 phone calls every day - and even m

It was culture shock for me when I became a Product Manager for Database at Oracle. In one day, I was suddenly getting 50-100 phone calls every day - and even more emails than that. And these were emails/calls from all over the world. For the first few days, I wasn't even able to make it through listening to all my voicemails - I had to learn to start deleting them after two seconds if I wanted to finish vmails before lunch. Emails were the same - if I didn't recognize the sender after the first couple of sentences I just had to delete the email. And this isn't even beginning to discuss the initiatives that were on my plate already. As a Database PM, everybody wants your time and wants you to help them on their initiatives. And I worked for Steve. He didn't answer most of his emails. He literally had a dozen secretaries screening him. Even internally, he would often simply ignore emails.