Spike #2: How Spike Came to Us

Spike the Genius is a throwback to another era, when the Company was run by Giants mean and brilliant, whimsical and brutal. A scary time, because these Giants were larger than life (ask their many ex-wives), made BIG mistakes sometimes, certainly ran things according to their personalities instead of business school management logic. And, somehow, they also inspired loyalty, since dozens have stayed with them from the beginning: maybe from fear, maybe from friendship (can you be "friends" with a Giant?), maybe from masochistic pleasure at being constantly on the edge.

Oh, and the Giants made money for everybody and kept everything going for 40 years, so that may have something to do with it, too.

Oh, and judging from the photos and videos from back then, they had a lot of fun in the middle of all the Sturm und Drang.

And, somewhere about a decade ago, the Giants realized they Don't Know Everything about certain new geographies they wanted to explore, so they sought out a Faithful Guide --

And failed a lot of times.

Till they found Spike.

Not a bad fit, actually: the Giants' giant ambitions were actually less than Spike's talent could deliver - but the Giants' tolerance for personalities where fits and starts and emotion-releasing rants jibe perfectly with Spike's less-than-cubicle-fitting profile.

The Royal Us had found a Genius; Spike had found a Patron.

For 6 or 7 years there was harmony (well, as much harmony as ever could be found with that set of characters) as Spike and the Giants created New Things.

Spike, the Genius: Who He Is

So what we have is a genius: Spike.

Spike has come up with 50% of everything we are going to be doing in the future - and advised us on another 25% of that future. He knows about those things and we don't.

It scare the hell out of us, of course. (Well, maybe not The Cube, since I don't know beans about most technical things, so I long ago gave up being threatened by others' knowledge.) It scares the hell out of the Royal "Us" because:

(a) All of the techno-bosses like to think that they are godlike in their omniscience, and

(b) Spike is a consultant. He don't work for The Man directly. He no be bullied, ordered about, told what to do.

Spike, he just think and invent and lay foundation for patents and products that look to the future.

He also scares the hell out of the Royal Us because there is no PROFIT in the future just yet. We is bottom-lining it today, but paying for tomorrow with no end in sight.

Oh, and Spike is crazy. Think artist in garret drinking absinthe and dreaming surreal dreams that he accurately depicts in his paintings: these are Spike's inventions. This is Spike. (Minus the absinthe: his surrealism is entirely inner-born).

In the techno-world of plodding engineers and verbally-dexterous/talent-challenged management, Spike doesn't fit in to the daily grind. Hence his consultancy.

So Hard After A Holiday

It is sooo hard to do anything after a holiday weekend. So hard. The theory of "refreshed in body and spirit" hits a snag when both the body and the spirit find themselves back in the same old cubicle unchanged. Many around are decorating their cubes, shiny fake fir trees abound. Blue faux chlorophyll is apparently popular this year, as opposed to the traditional colors: green, red, plastic "snow" and tinfoil shiny. It is a desperate fight against reality, though. The cube is still the same little, cramped, unspiritual, un-turkey-filled place. "Complain not," the little voice says, "others are worse off" - and I see the IN Room where twenty some-odd desks sit in open space taking their tele-orders, the hubbub of their voices a gentle drone of persistent commercial existence "Happy Holidays How May I Help You?" The report is due Wednesday: Has the Veep returned from his vacation yet to receive it?

Goof-Off & Deadline Season Approacheth

What's nice about the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is that it's the lead-in to the great end-of-year, Christmas-party, meet-your-deadlines rush.

Mixed priorities abound these next few weeks. Tis the season when party-planning and Most Important Tasks are given equal weight. You can goof off by going from A/R to Telephone Sales to IT to Anywhere and have an every-other-day lunchtime feast, then roll in the aisles lazily for the rest of the afternoon. Since everyone rushes to use up those sick days and personal days that can't be carried over to the new year, 25% of the staff is out on any given day. Just throw out the week between Christmas and New Year: even if you're here, who else is? It's like being on a deserted isle: no company, no conversation - no supervision. The perennial Zen question: if you sleep at your desk and no one hears you snore, do you make a sound?

And, meanwhile, every year-end goal has to be met - at least on paper. But who, what and how? Godalmighty, when? There is no more time to do it. The cash comes in January, so the income goal will not be met by any hurried sales contracts. No one will read your 12/23 deadlined report until the new year. Still, it has to be DONE.

Such a season.

Nope, Nada, Nothing on a holiday weekend

C'mon! It's a holiday weekend (except for everywhere else in the world). Is anybody anywhere gonna do anything work-related this weekend? Not in this Cube.

Policy in absentia

Pierre Dolet writes his Notes from The Cube (this is not a holiday weekend in Canada) . . .

Hate making decisions. Guess most people feel that way. See that it's happening at all levels, too - 'specially on the policy-making level.

Policy. That's that crazy thing that politicians do so well, when they lay out Grand Plans that no one could expect anyone to actually follow. "Broad Strokes," doncha know?

By and by, though, it would be helpful down here in the cubicles to have a little policy guidance once in a while.

No, not Rules & Regulations: those are the nitpicking, can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees crap of the mini-meenie-mojo-macho bureaucrats who enjoy Control. (yeah, with the big "C," eh.)

Policy, on the other hand, is a guidance - a philosophy of approach. There is a Team philosophy, the Lone Wolf approach, Vertical Integration, Fiscal Restraint, Laissez-Faire (or, usually, Let Me Faire and You Don't Do - but that's back to politics again).

Any which way, we're setting up for next year and it's tough to make plans without any policy guidance from the top. Everything is seat of the pants, even the 1-year, 3-year and 5-year Plans. (Question: Does anyone remember from high school World Affairs how Stalin and Mao's Five Year Plans were such disasters? Regularly. On both the economic and human scales. Isn't the "Five Year Plan" a concept/term we should abandon, if only for the sake of good taste?)

Oh, yes, they are planning far out ahead - but what's the policy guiding those plans? There's all such a grab bag feeling to the whole endeavor, especially as it filters down to the cubicles, where we create the support structure for the plans, fleshing out the details and without any other guiding principle than "That's what they want us to do."

One part of me is cool with the lack of Policy and says "OK, you don't want to get straightjacketed into these things." After all, would you want a doctor to diagnose your illness only from the "guidelines" of the medical book? I used to take car engines apart and put them back together: nothing ever fit and worked exactly like the Theory of Motors said they should. Why is it different here, then?

Because we're not inanimate objects and, yes, we would understand changes made in mid-stream if the policy had to be adjusted to meet realities on the ground. But you've gotta have a policy to begin with, doncha? Right now the "changes," "adjustments," "corrections" (yes, we use all the right words) are made without apparent policy reasoning. They are reactions - possibly right (given the experience of many making the changes, probably right) - but still reactions.

The tiger's a wily and powerful master of the jungle, but it's still a feral being.

Dan 6: Dan & the NEWER Boss

Okaaay, yesterday was the beginning of an interesting experience - in that "interesting" way that makes you wish for dull and boring. We got the announcement of a new boss coming - a new Vice President who will be above Dan the Hyper-Active Boss Man.

The problem is: Dan, who is a Director just under the current Veep (who wears two hats and has long expressed a desire to split-off his department responsibilities), Dan interviewed the new VP two months ago - under the impression that he was interviewing someone who would be one of his reporting Managers. Awkward, yes?

More than awkward - a lie. Not by the current two-hatted Veep: he thought the interview was for a Manager, too.

Or so he was told by the new President, in office for only a couple of months now, who presented it as acquiescing to a long-standing request to fill the vacant Manager's position. "Yeah, I know this guy from my old firm. Maybe he'll work out here. Have Dan take a look at him."

So Dan did. He wasn't terribly impressed. However, taking the Veep's advice that "Dan, you aren't connecting too well with the new President and the Board, don't pick a fight on this one. Interview a few others and make your recommendations as a group. Maybe he's the best available or maybe you'll find a better candidate, but don't knock him out right away - that'll look like an outright rejection. And, either way, you'll get to expand your department."

That was an argument that Dan could buy into, so he wrote his "Not terribly impressed, but appears competent and qualified" notes and waited to compare notes on the next interviewees.

As it turned out, what with other priorities, Dan didn't get around to interviewing any other Manager candidates. Annual Budget Review came around a couple of weeks ago, though, and - unhappy surprise - the Manager position was cut from the Budget.

Then - happy surprise - a new Vice President slot was put in the budget. Since Dan has had reasonable expectations of becoming a VP based on his record of accomplishment and de facto running of the department for the past 3 years, he was happy happy with the allocation.

Oddly, the current Veep was not so happy. Despite his long-standing wish to split-off responsibilities, he felt uncomfortable that he hadn't been consulted about this decision.

But his unhappiness was nothing compared to Dan's when they both learned, the next day, yesterday, the day before Thanksgiving holiday, that the new Vice President was going to be the man they had both interviewed as Dan's supposed subordinate Manager!

The announcement came from the President and Board of Directors came by timed email that arrived a half-hour before the end of business day. The President had already left for the long Thanksgiving weekend.

Thanksgiving Song

Does anyone know a Turkey Day song?

We're sitting here in the employee lunchroom trying to think this thing out and coming up with zilch.

Thanksgiving is one of the great enjoyable holidays of the year - food, family and not a lot of commercialization - but no song. There is a Thanksgiving symbol, though, two of them: the Turkey and the Pilgrim.

Pilgrims don't make for fun-loving musicality:
...I'm a Puritan
...And all I can say
...Is
...Everyday I work
...And
...Sundays I pray.

Not your most inspirational.

Neither is the only Turkey Song we could think of:
...Gobble-gobble gobble-gobble
...Gobble-gobble gobble-goo
...For a National Holiday Symbol
...Why do I end up as food?

Well, they're about to give out the Thanksgiving turkeys now, so we'll end this scintillating intellectual endeavor.

Explanation #2: Why it happens that way

Or maybe it is arrogance.

Verbal vs. Written

Texas Slim writes his Notes From The Cube . . .

Nope, you don't want to write no nothin' down.

This is the lesson I have learned - LEARNED! - my friends, learned from one of the best: Gene the Lead.

Gene has understood the wisdom of the unwritten word. Y'see, some people say erroneously that you should write them memos to cover your ass.

BUT - as Gene the Lead has so wisely muttered under his breath: "You only need to cover your ass in writing if you have exposed it in writing in the first place."

THE SPOKEN WORD is the key. Tell that counterpart what you want. Speak to that underling. Discuss that matter with a colleague.

It's good People Skills, talking is. Good Management Practice, too, the personal touch. You are communicating directly with people -

AND

- you are cutting through the bureaucratic mountains of paperwork that Everyone Knows bog us down. You are efficient.

And you cannot be pinned down.

You cannot be made to answer for something that doesn't exist except in someone else's memory.

You have deniability: "I didn't say that, you must have misremembered."

You have obscurability: "Well, we all heard the same thing, but I guess we interpreted it differently."

And, finally, you have blame-ability, too: "Don't you remember I told you to do that? Now Production is on our tail and you didn't do what I told you to do last month."

So remember, friends, REMEMBER: Say it, don't write it.

Big Plans Old & New

We're changing our Big Plans.
I can't tell you why.
All I can tell you
Is we're going to try.

Our Big Plans are scrapped now.
The Super Plan died.
When you look at the numbers
You see how they fried.

Our execs are experts
Top dogs top dime:
They told us our Big Plans
Would take us Big Time.

But now it is over -
But please don't feel blue:
Yes, the Big Plans are dead plans -
But the next Plans are Brand New!

The Bigotry of Powerlessness

Hank writes his Notes From The Cube . . .

I came across this scribbled on a whiteboard in Conference Room C (the small one that no one hardly uses):

THE BIGOTRY OF POWERLESSNESS

It hit home. We in the cubes don't have power. The workers in the factory certainly don't have power. I am guessing that most of the management doesn't have power, either, not really. (It's probably even more apparent to someone who has a title to realize that he or she has very little influence over how things are run.)

And that results in a bigotry - unconscious? conscious? - against everyone else we perceive as "less" powerful than ourselves, who (if they advance) threaten what little power we (think) we have.

Someone in a bad prize-winning book I just read said the only thing worthwhile in that excruciating literary experience: Suffering doesn't make you more charitable to your fellow sufferers. 'Same thing with power - or powerlessness.

Most of the time it's a numb feeling, though, like a scratch that's scabbed over. When we pick at it, that's when it hurts and the bigotry seeps out.

You see it all the time in elections. Someone else wrote somewhere (I'm just full of misremembered allusions) words to this effect: Americans don't believe in taxing the rich because they all believe that someday they are going to be rich and they don't want to lose it. So, every time an election rolls around, so many of us vote for the promises made against our own interests - because I am not them, the disadvantaged or the poor or . . . the powerless.

Y'know, I don't even blame those with power. They don't make us what we are. They even suffer - because our petty bigotries result in petty jealousies and petty turf wars and petty bureaucracies (the perfect bastion of fake power) that grind things down to a slow crawl sometimes. Dogs fighting for the same bone, even when there are two or three others sitting by the side.

Betty by Detail

Betty knows her stuff - in detail.

In this age of electronics, it is refreshing to see a woman - not old, mind you, but in that prime age of 30-45, teenage daughter and all that wonderful life experience - to see a woman who still fills in her log books by hand, the fact that she is a supervisor of a technical department filled with MBAs notwithstanding.

Yes, Betty is great: none of this "flash by me" stuff. She will painstakingly transfer the information from one printed out electronic file into her precious logs - then give those logs to her assistant to be typed into another electronic file log book: none, None, NONE of this cut-and-paste crap for Betty! No!

And the newer electronic file log book: heaven help us if it should be compatible with any database known to man/woman/child/IS/IT or You Know Who. No, Betty, pure Betty, wants this as a text file - so that some one else (she has many assistants) can re-type her electronic file log books into a database format that everyone else in the company can use.

Oh, Betty, oh, Betty: you are the person who makes our lives worth living on the weekends when you do not touch our lives.

There are no horses only men

There are no horses only men
To pull the load these days.
Wagons lay abandoned by the roadside,
Horses offer weekend recreation ---

And streetlights blanch the midnight sky,
Stealing stars from sight.

They look for data to till the soil
Bit by bit, ream by ream of paper
Of sweat that once poured freely in the sun,
Now stinks dully in the fluorescent haze.

Photogrey eyeglasses, still dark, inside
Fluorescent ions have captured the sun.

Do you play golf? No.
Tennis? Yes.
Handball? No.
I like the Jets, too --- You have a season ticket?

The church social could not compete
With twenty thousand --- more! ---

Tomorrow I will meet you at the mall
Between the thousand cars we'll
Greet - embrace - hurry together
To the safety of air conditioning. It

Does not matter where we hitched the horses
They will not wander far . . .

excerpt from Lyrics & Lies

copyright 1988, 1994, 2004 R. C. Fleet

All Rights Reserved

Filler Days

Today is a filler day: nothing particular to do, but do a lot to fill the time.

This would be a great day to be a line worker, where the tasks are the same and repetitious, day in, day out, except for the occasional crisis.

Not so for us in the cubicles: theoretically, we think and problem-solve and . . .

Well, now, maybe that's not so true.

Looking over to the left a few cubes down, ol' Ray there, he's doing the same check-through-the-files and double-check-against-the-papers-on-his-desk that he does every day. And Ellen on the other side of the wall, she's tap-tap-tapping away at her daily, hourly, minutely, input of purchase orders and what-we-got-todays (I'm sure there's a name for that - oh, yeah: Received).

So ... then ... maybe I'm wrong: we in the cubes are the same as the line workers. There are no filler days, only same-old same-old.

Or maybe I'm in the wrong set of cubes.

Working From Home: Harder Than Ever

Working from home today. Foolish idea.

Have to do this time to time: better access to certain research tools that the company won't authorize for purchase; sometimes just need to eliminate the 3 hours round-trip commute in order to make a deadline and the immediate boss-woman understands the time press. Plus the company has set up offsite access to company files for the field personnel - not fully functional for moi but gets the job done. Plus, oh Alexander Graham Bell, we are never out of touch with the office.

Which is why it's a foolish idea to work from home today: never out of touch. Thanks to the miracle of modern communications, the "concentrated time" needed to finish The Project has been dissipated so far by 2 telephone calls and 3 "must answer now" emails (and it's only 8 a.m.). 'Been working for the past hour and a half and haven't even started on the planned task.

And . . . That's the way it will go all day. 'Know this from experience. 'Will work 12 hours to get 6 hours of work done, won't get the regular breaks, will eat at the home desk - and will have everyone jealous tomorrow for "the day off."

When you work really hard, you want the "Oohs" and "Aahs" of credit and impressing people. There is no audience at home, except for a dog that thinks I'm God anyway and a cat that's absolutely certain I would be her dinner if only she were the tiger in fact that she is in her heart. Spouses and lovers don't count: they want you at home, not your work brought home.

'Think I may goof off for a few hours this afternoon and work until midnight. 'Might as well: at home there is no one to hear you yawn.

Budget Fiddle

Hey diddle diddle,
What a fine fiddle
Fingers stuck in the pie
The little prez sez
"I ate too much,
Now the company's about to die."

Hey diddle doodle
It's the bonus kaboodle
Don't stop to wonder why
When the Board takes its cut
It's a little too much
Now the company's about to die.

Hey diddle dangle
Find another angle
Cut the budget in half, just try
Our hidden stash
Leaves the Co. without cash
Now the company's about to die.

Hey diddle dongle
It's a cruel biz jungle
Where the ink it runs blood red
And they've gotten all they can
And away they've ran
Now the company's done gone dead.

Budget Priorities

[Pierre Dolet notes from the cube he lives in . . .]

Our annual Budget review this year is very uncomplicated: we have to cut our operational expenditures drastically in order to pay for a few new friends at the Top.

Compare:

The Company must "plow with the horses we have."

Operations needs to be "lean and mean."

The executive branch "needs" a newly-created Vice President of Business Development.

We currently have a Vice President of Sales, a Vice President of Marketing, a Vice President of Advanced Marketing - and the President is, by his own declaration, "a market-oriented guy."

1 Vice President salary = 1 1/2 Director or 2 Managers or 3-5 Engineers or 5-8 Technical Specialists or 10 Line workers or 2 product development projects or 5 safety-required facility/equipment upgrades or 1 new manufacturing equipment that will cut a production line's costs in half.

But there is a Future:

We are also hiring 2 new outside consultants to supplement our existing staff of 6 consultants brought in last year - they hold "the company's promise in their heads."

To "save valuable resources," we are cutting loose the long-time consultant who is responsible for 30% of our patents and 50% of our patent applications.

We have priorities: new is better.

Budget: The Structural Flaw

[Now, these Notes From The Cube do not indicate Power, Prescience or Profound ability to change the course of events. The Cube is simply one of the few who can string a couple of sentences together, handle a spreadsheet beyond basic data entry, work a Gantt chart and convert them all into meaningful (meaningful?) reports -- hence, The Cube has supported annual Budget reviews for a few years now and has observed. Observed and observed. No one listens from below, so observation is the limit to The Cube's participation.]

The structural flaw in the Budget review: no one's in the same room at the same time.

Start: President gives a PowerPoint "Vision Plan" the last week of the 3rd quarter. Each Department is instructed to prepare its next year Budget by the 2nd week of the 4th quarter.

Observed: No instruction, direction, or scheduled time for the Departments to coordinate with one another or the President. The Budgets are prepared independently.

Step 2: President meets with each Department, alone, and asks them to explain their Budgets. He brings along one or two Financial people, not necessarily the same people the Departments were dealing with in prepping their Budgets. President and Financerios are seeing the Budget figures for the first time. No reference is made to the President's "Vision Plan" - now or evermore - but the President asks that the Department meet with another Department on line items 7, 14, 15 & 24; and perhaps with yet another Department on line items 3-6, 8-11 and 20-23; and so on. Financerios are instructed to go over the figures and report back to the President; no instruction, plan or inclination for them to talk to the Department on the Why of an item, only to make sure that the #s add up. Everybody due back in a week.

Observed: President gets a very seat-of-the-pants understanding of the line items. He may know a lot about some departments but, since no one can be an expert on everything (especially current President, brought in from outside the industry for his "management" skills and rolodex of contacts), this leaves the President vulnerable on the issues involved. A well-spoken Department head can breeze over questionable items, while a conscientious technogeek may be at a loss to explain a complicated-but-essential line item.

Step 3: Meet the President and the Chief Financial Officer. Cuts are made. Department heads are put in the position of justifying (or not) decisions made in coordination with another Department - but other Department is not represented at this meeting. CFO has not spoken with any of the Department heads about justifications; CFO sees only numbers and fiscal targets, as directed. (By whom? 'Never identified.)

Observed: We're down to the wire, and the Budget items that make it through are treated much like the salmon swimming upriver - survival of the luckiest.

CONCLUSION: Easy sarcasm aside, The Cube is still surprised over so many years at why no one has put all the key people together in one room and hashed out these short-range line item issues in coordination with the company's mid-range tactical plans and long-range strategic goals.

Oh sure, these same people get together regularly - but never with the same focus and facts/figures at-hand. Now they alternate supporting and competing against one another in isolated configurations of ad hoc assembly.

'Used to think this was a symptom of the old company ways: problems that a family-owned business faces when it grows larger than its roots. However, we've had professional management and organization for a few years now. This is their new structure, and it repeats the disconnects of earlier, albeit with a rhetoric that gives lip service to "communication," "interactivity" and "accountability."

The Getaround

Here is how it will happened - because it's happened this way before . . .

The owner, getting older, semi-retired, will ask about something: something that is pertinent, that he cares about, that is "troublesome."

"Troublesome"? Yes - to the new management that the owner hired-on. They have agreed to "maintain your vision," but can't wait till he gets so blind that the "vision" is too narrowed to mean anything. They have been slowly helping along that process, isolating him from information, shaping the issues in ways that keep out "unnecessary" alternatives - one could almost say that they lie to him, but that would be as false as some of their accusations against those that they have persuaded to "voluntarily terminate" themselves. No, they don't lie - they Getaround.

Getaround.

"What's the status on this, Bill?"

"We're getting around to that, Bob. It's important, like you said: 'don't want to jump into it unprepared."

"It has to be handled!"

"It will be - it is - we're meeting on this tomorrow and-"

"I'm not here tomorrow."

"Well, you want us to get on this right away."

". . . Yes."

But the meeting, with the owner not there, will never happen. And, for the next two or three times the owner and the new management meet, there will be other things to talk about. And this won't be talked about - or dealt with - ever. Until it wilts away, or the deadline passes and it's too late, or the owner brings it up again ---

And "we're getting right on it" again.

The Getaround.

How Do You Cut What You Don't Know?

[The current batch of Notes From The Cube may seem redundant, because The Cube is still sitting in annual Budget review meetings this week. If The Cube has to suffer through them, so does everyone else. Misery does not make us more charitable.]

So, we're being asked by the CEO and his CFO for an FYI on the YTD v PAB - and where we can make some cuts in order to up the PAR.

Sound Greek to you? 'Didn't sound much clearer to those of us in the room. Sadly, truly sadly, they speak in acronyms:
CEO - Chief Executive Officer
CFO - Chief Financial Officer
FYI - For Your Information
YTD - Year To Date
v - versus
PAB - Projected Annual Budget
PAR - Projected Annual Revenues

But, keeping with the Greek theme, the question that came up amongst all us Myrmidons of Manufacturing is fairly simple: How do we make budget cuts when we don't know what they want to do next year? (Read your Shakespeare to get the pun*)

Y'see, it works like this here and in all the world: The Emperor may want new clothes, but somewhere down the line there's a seamstress who has to cut the pattern --- and What pattern did His Excellency select?

We dunno and He's not telling.

Here's the thing: We make gadgets, not whizmos. So this budget is for gadgets. But some gadgets are part of whizmos, so we've made a few whizmo-oriented gadgets. And, to make those whizmo-system gadgets, we've hired a few whizmo engineers, and a few whizmo consultants, and made a few whizmo inventions --- because, really, whizmos are where the industry is going a few years down the road so that's where our future is.

Or so His Excellency has been telling us this past year as he laid off a whole shift of our gadget operations.

Howsoever, it seems, gadgets are relatively cheap to develop and make while whizmos are expensive. More than that: whizmos are the Future, not the Now, of income generation. To keep the cash flow a-flowin' we need gadgets a-goin'.

His Excellency decrees Budget Cuts.

"Your Highness," we ask, "What, in your Strategic Plan, do you want to cut: cheap gadgets or expensive whizmos?"

"We need to make Cuts," is the answer.

The seamstress crunches her scissors down between the lines: the Emperor's new clothes will be something between a shirt and a pair of pants.

[* Try Troilus and Cressida. Apropos, a question from left field: Cressida was the Trojan woman who was unfaithful to her warrior-lover Troilus. Why did they name a car "Cressida"? Speaking as a driver who has the typical love-hate relationship with mine automobile, this reference does not bode well for the affair.]

Sitting in a Budget meeting

Notes From The Cube while sitting in a Budget meeting . . .

Prez sez: "It's all about cutting" - positive way to look forward to next year, 'thought we were "doing better than ever before" according to the monthly President's Message

Prez sez: "We'll find our cuts in the low hanging fruit" - didn't we hear that 2 years ago when talking about "first profits"?

Wow, the smell of $$$ panic

[Note to Polly, under the table: mmmmm, now we rearrange the figures again - keeps us employed another week on useless exercises: the total is the same.]

Clark doesn't know what the f--- he's talking about

[A little explanation here: Clark is the CFO - Chief F--- Off or Financial Officer, whichever you prefer. But Clark has latched on to a key word today, "organic," and seems to think that anything that isn't "organic" is unnecessary. What the hell is he talking about?!]

Dan 5: New Bosses-Weird Responses

Dan the Hyper-Active Boss Man has hit a roadblock of sorts. The new executive management that came in - a Board and new President where once there were only a pair of brother-partners - these new bosses give weird responses to everything that Dan does or says or proposes.

"Weird responses" - What would that be?

That's... That is... why... it's weird. It's hard to make out.

It's easy to dislike Dan. He's very in-your-face with his enthusiasms and aggressions, his good humour and his funks, with his ideas and his opinions. Dan is, if nothing else, transparent and unsubtle. "Honest" as a bottom-line word that might not be heard a lot around the business world, but there you have it: that's what Dan is - honest about what he says, does, is.

One would think, if one were above Dan on the corporate food chain, that Dan would be easy to manage. He's certainly eager to please. You can tell him straight off Yes or No and, though he might disagree (and offer a better alternative), he will obey. He will strive to do his best - and make his department do its best. He may strive too hard sometimes and Dan could benefit from some "parental" guidance in these matters more than he gets. "Be a little softer, Dan" or "Try approaching this less head-on" or "Remember, Dan, your staff have lives outside of this place." But those things are never said, probably because Dan's doing what they want done - and taking the heat for their directives. Or they're tired and don't care that much any more: they are "Legacy" Veeps, after all. Or maybe they care even less about those under them than Dan does: he's a hard-driving boss, but a softie inside who's never fired anyone and protects his people like a mother hen. Dunno.

But that was before, anyway. Now the Legacy Veeps are mainly silent, wondering where they'll fit in the new regime, and pronunciamentos come from a level higher.

The new President has already brought in a number of consultants to help him "get up to speed and speed up the process" - folks who sometimes look as if their temporary offices are being outfitted for permanency. The Official Statements come from this new cabal, a far more coherent group than the turf-fighting Legacy Veeps. (A very beneficial side effect of the current situation is the apparent truce amongst the warring factions. They may be backstabbing one another in private conversations with the new regime, but the open warfare that caught so many of us minions in the crossfire has been replaced by a tentative peace.)

Back to Dan, the Hyper-Active Boss Man: because Dan is so straightforward and honest, it is easy to react to him, positively or negatively.

But the new regime doesn't respond to Dan either way.

Dan says "Hello" - they nod with that distant, "I don't know you but I'm polite" expression typical of the Queen of England on public display.

Dan provides a year-end progress report that doubles the previous year's output - there is a curious review of the numbers, but no questions.

Before the new President was installed, Dan prepared a 5-Year business plan outlining a bold new approach for the company to take. Part show-off, part honest proposal, the plan was detailed; offered some very perceptive analyses of the company, the marketplace, and the company's place in the marketplace; was, no matter what else, an impressive piece of work.

There has been silence about it ever since the first, one-phrase reviews from the Board a month ago.

There was a big meeting of the executives, directors and managers last week. Several directors and managers came back midway to pick up their messages and commented that Dan was singled out for particularly hard questioning - but the kind of questioning that seemed to come from left field and did not address any of the issues that were supposedly being discussed that day.

By the same token, before the big meeting day was ended, Dan was assured that his accomplishments of the previous year insured his position this year. Everyone, in fact, was offered reassurances - but Dan was singled out.

Still, they are having a meeting next week on planning and Dan's department is not part of it.

Still, they have approved an expansion of his department, to begin in the next quarter.

Still... There's such a left-hand, right-hand dichotomy that Dan is starting to feel confused and unsure - of himself. This is a man incredibly eager to please and do what the company wants, and they send very weird messages.

ISO Liz

[Notes From The Cube: Liz is a friend, a friend caught between the International Standards Organization (ISO), unwanted responsibilities, her own hard-working ambitions - and her own limitations. Why can't we learn to Just Say "No"?]

Liz is nice, nicer than so many. If you have a car breakdown or a family crisis or just need to talk things out, come to Liz.

Liz is tough, tougher than so many. If you are a slacker in your standards or like to skip steps or screw up on dotting an "i," look out for Liz.

Liz is suspicious, more suspicious than so many. If you work for her and do anything involving judgment, don't expect any decision you make to go through without her scrutiny.

Liz runs a department. She did not always run a department. She did not always run this department: it came her way because no one else wanted it, 15-18 years ago, when Liz had been around 7 or 8 years herself and was capable and trustworthy and certainly honest. She didn't know what this department was supposed to do - but neither did anybody else - and the anybody else's were smart enough or deft enough or tricky enough to pass on the responsibility for rising or falling to newbie manager Liz.

Sometimes you don't rise or fall. Sometimes there's a third way: existence without understanding. Much like life in a universe where, whatever our belief in God, Creator or Samsara-Enlightenment, it's always a one-way conversation for public consumption, leaving the human beans to make their own interpretations about the metaphysical facts on the ground.

"Metaphysical?" Well - yes. Liz's department answers to Higher Powers sometimes - aka state and government regulatory agencies - and some self-made Rules - aka ISO rules - and with no one to guide her, Liz created her own Oz-like maze of logic and "I-think-that's-what-they-want" rule-making that no one at the time took the time to figure out if it was true or wishful thinking or bonehead desperation.

But Liz had done it - and she hadn't fallen on her face - and now it was Hers.

And it works like crap: an unwieldy structure of rules and reinforcements that everyone agreed to for expediency and now they are stuck with - and stuck with Liz as their appointed Knowledge Source on the subject.

And it works like crap: everyone knows it - including Liz. But no one knows a Better Way, nor wants to propose a Better Way for fear of getting stuck with it themselves, or for fear of taking on Liz (who, after all, did this loyally and with full approval of all).

But self-knowledge of one's own failings is a terrible burden - and one that must be covered up. Liz cannot admit her failings. She cannot say: "I am lost, help me." She cannot lead the revolution - against herself. No. She is stuck as Defender of the Faith, a shaky temple where even the slightest doubt could set the foundation a-trembling. So, like a good Inquisitor General, Liz persecutes any and all Doubt: heretics - for don't we know (and we know) that the Purpose of the Faith is good?

Or do we know that anymore?

More and more rumours and back-grumbled discontent shred at the edges of the Faith that Liz has constructed for the company, on behalf of the company, with the mandate of the company. That the Faith is false obscures the Truth underneath, the Truth missed by Liz, who can never find it, underqualified, unenlightened, unchosen by Knowledge as she is.

And so she turns obstructionist to logic and reform, to nit-picking on the typographical rituals instead of addressing the structural substance, the face of all that is wrong with her misconceived Faith.

But Liz is more - because, as is noted, no one will step in to help her. Or maybe they cannot, like a nonswimmer helplessly watching a drowning man sink. Either way, intentions good or ill, Liz has assumed her iconic, traditional place in the way things are. The woman who will take the Fall.

Hey!

Hey diddle-e-dee, a Sunday working spree!
Hey diddle-e-oh, it's off to work we go!
Sometimes on weekends it is fun
To be here all alone
There's no one here to slow you down
The business is your own! (Or so it feels like)
Hey diddle-e-dee, productivity!
Hey diddle-e-oh, sometimes it's fun, y'know!

Jekyll-Hyde Why?

'Sat in on a company dinner last night, at a round table with several of the top honchos and honchettes and their spouses. A formal affair, $250-a-pop charity fundraiser - leftover ticket from a last-minute sickout, hence The Cube's invitation. Enjoyable. The food was good. (Good!) and the charity made sense. The company was pleasant.

Ah, there's the curiosity: the company was pleasant.

Which leads to the question: why so unpleasant so often in the daylight hours?

What is it about the four walls and offices and atmosphere of the enterprise of business that, on the job, these same people have to shed good nature and behave in conflict-guaranteeing manner?

Let's eliminate Drink as the false front of the camaraderie last night: pale wine in teaspoon servings does not a convivial drunk make. And they weren't jolly jolly, either, just decent people behaving in a friendly, enjoyable manner. The exact opposite, sometimes, of their daily demeanors, when pissant power plays and simple sourpuss grimaces mark their mugs and maneuvers

'Used to watching workers sour-shift their ways through the days - odd to see the same thing at the upper levels. It's as if home life has rules of decency and goodness while the business world is designated wilderness with all its savage implications. 'Wonder why?

Another Friday

It's Friday night, everyone's gone home. Jack writes his own Notes From The Cube . . .

How do they do it, everyday, the same? How do they come in knowing exactly what will happen, and do it, the same, again and again?

This is the moment of strength, of perseverance. The moment, a repeat repeat repeat moment, when responsibility to a family triumphs over one's own sored soul. That takes strength, courage. Nations are built on it.

The Reasonable Budget Cut Back to Absurdity

It's budget time and we are back in bizarro Never Never Land, where Captain Hook's cruelty teams up with Peter Pan's skewed logic, to make Wendy and us Boys prisoners on our little Island of Hungry Crocodiles.

Whew!, what a tortured metaphor! Fairly accurate, though.

In a nutshell:

'Developed for the department a budget for next year consisting of Analysis of this year's workload-per-person, Resources demanded by the company's needs for next year as defined by the Strategic Plan, and the resulting Cost estimate.

Speaking of "strategy" and "planning": we not only have a Strategic Plan - we have a Super Plan!

Well, planning and strategy are good things in a general sense - road maps, fiscal guidelines, etc. - and so a proposal was developed. Due to a certain contradiction between the Super Plan's goals and planned budget constraints for the next fiscal year, our proposal offered logical options: If This is wanted, then That must happen - If resource X is reduced, then goal Y will have to be postponed - and so forth. And so on. Tedious but honest choices. We can't eat all the candy we want without either brushing our teeth a lot or getting a lot of cavities. 'Can't have it both ways, Peter Pan.

Oh, but we can, Wendy, we can!

So it is that, while the planning requires us to "plow with the horses we have" - with a 50% reduction in overtime - it also requires that we fulfill every need, wish and logistic demand called for by the plan: a Super Man Strategic Plan, if you will.

Thus, per calculations and experience, next year every person will be working 168% of their legal time - without 33% of the material resources required - to produce 28% more next year than this year.

And, hot damn, this budget balances!

Let's go back to the tortured metaphor and sing:

"A Wish Is A Dream Your Heart Makes - Per the Super Plan."

Dan 4.1.1: Greater Expectations

Dan the Hyper-Active Boss Man's expectations for the new regime are reaching the point of pre-coital anticipation: the Board of Directors, five months into office now, have chosen a new President!

These past few months have been frustrating for Dan. To string together as many cliches and mixed metaphors as possible in a paragraph: The winds of change were in the air, but the air was smog-filled with delay. A Company-wide Review was announced with great pomp and circumstance, but the many-headed mob of Management responded with fear and loathing. Only Dan, upright Dan, cooperated with full-throated cry of "Excelsior!" (The state motto of New York, apropos.) "Excelsior!" he cried, "Ever onward!" And onward Christian soldiers he marched - albeit to the unintended beat of a different drummer - to beat down the doors of Tradition (aka the Legacy Veeps) and help the Board establish a New World Order of Progress and Reform. It was the End of History.

But, first, the Board set itself up as a Search Committee to find the company a new jefe, don, shogun, fuhrer, chief, head of state - President & CEO.

The search is now completed. The lists scoured and the candidates vetted. The Best Man for the job has been found.

It is - one of them.

We have a new President and Dan the Hyper-Active Boss Man is ready to serve!

Upper-Level Decision-Making Understood

[There has been some commentary that these Notes From The Cube are fictions. The Cube insists on a stack of IRS affidavits that the following is a true and accurate account of a real-lif event. The only caveat is that it took a week to obtain the Review results that can be read below in 30 seconds.]

'Had to coordinate an executive report: a 3-man Board of Directors review of an underling-proposed business plan. It is now understood how decisions are made:

Part 1: The Review

Board Director #1: I like it, it's our future.

Board Director #2: This is a dead-end proposition.

Board Director #3: I concur with my colleagues.