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Posted Monday, June 22, 2009 11:12 AM |
In the boardroom that morning it almost seemed as if our company was staging a re-enactment of a Stalinist show trial. Across from me sat my beleaguered colleagues, their sullen and despondent faces trembling in terror as my CEO digested the dismal sales figures for the financial year. As he raised his bloodshot eyes from the sheet of paper in front of him, we saw to our dismay that his face had turned a violent shade of purple. There soon followed the inevitable recriminations and accusations. One by one my co-workers were reduced to quivering wrecks; confessions were extracted and blame was liberally distributed down the company food-chain. I sat there silently, awaiting my turn, hoping that by some miracle he would mistake me for a piece of furniture. Alas my hopes were in vain.
"Dionysus!" he bellowed, casting a disapproving eye over in my direction, "this year you will have the responsibility of putting together the shareholders report!"
I initially felt relief, and something akin to pride. This would mark a considerable step up from my usual activities, which mainly involved removing blockages from the photocopier. However, this buoyant mood was almost instantly replaced by a sense of deep, impeding doom. He must have detected my despondency because he shot me a piercing glance and snarled
"…and you had better do a damn good job, because heads are on the line here!"
His menacing tone of voice made it clear that if I didn’t play my cards right, it would be me playing the role of Marie Antoinette in the company’s next performance.
I sat glumly at my desk the following afternoon, struggling to come to terms with the sheer scale of the task in front of me. Like a latter day Joseph Goebbels I would somehow have to turn a humiliating financial debacle into a something akin to an honourable retreat. Examining the sales chart in front of me for the last financial year the prospects did not look good. To begin with, the line of the graph rose buoyantly, capturing something of the optimism and sales success we had experienced at the beginning of the year. A flurry of meetings had ensued with much slapping of backs and invitations to expensive corporate outings. My colleagues and our partners became intoxicated with an inflated sense of our own importance and quickly worked themselves up into a capitalist feeding frenzy. They spent long hours in the boardroom conjuring up extravagant financial models, depicting impressive but implausible streams of revenue washing into the company’s coffers through an intricate network of coloured boxes.
We had fallen firmly under the spell of our own hubris and, seized by an unquenchable desire for the ultimate profit margin, the decision was taken to develop one of these models into a 'groundbreaking' subscription product for consumers. The basic idea was that customers would pay a monthly fee for the mere privilege of being able to purchase services from our site. The sheer lack of value in the product would be somewhat mitigated by sending the customer a glossy welcome pack peppered with inane marketing text. This 'offering' would then be sold to the ‘low net worth demographic’ by an 'outbound telesales campaign'. In other words, poor people would be bullied into purchasing it by a bombardment from Indian call centres.
The result was an unmitigated disaster. The call centre workers had serious problems articulating their sales script, the 'low net worths' proved far less gullible than our marketing data had suggested and our corrupt and decadent marketing department allowed our budget evaporate into thin air. The result was a crippling lack of sales, which on our annual sales chart resembled a cross between the Wall Street Crash and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I opened the internal memo that accompanied the sales chart. The informal summery at the beginning began by saying that results had been 'frankly catastrophic'. I deleted this phrase and, after a pause, replaced it with "modest but encouraging". I then used the find and replace function to weed out every instance of doom-laden language. Thus "bad" became "respectable"; "disappointing" became "promising", and "collapse" was altered to "softening". I re-read the document and realized that just by this simple act of manipulation, I had taken much of the sting out of the document. In fact, it was beginning to make the incompetence of the last year appear to be a Herculean effort in the face of overwhelming odds.
 Encouraged by this modest success, I returned my attention to the sales graph and the challenge of making such a disastrous set of results appear even remotely positive. Language can be easily manipulated, but numbers are harder to dictate to. In this particular case the problem was the size of our impressive initial sales at the beginning of the year relative to the disastrous decline which followed. Deciding that the line graph looked rather too much like the descent from Mount Kilimanjaro I decided that a column graph might be a better option. This proved no better. The initial sales columns towered over the neighbouring columns in the graph, making them look utterly pathetic in comparison. If I was to have any effect on the presentation of the results I would have to find some way of castrating the initial columns.
It was time to use the 'underlying trend' trick. I dug out the spreadsheet the graph had been produced from and brought the sales levels for the first three months down to be more "in line" with what had followed. I then marked these data points in a subtly different colour and placed a small note in the report to the effect that 'the skewing effect of the sales 'spikes' in Quarter 1' had ‘been removed from the graph in order to reveal the true underlying trend’. Thanks to this bit of surgery the column graph on the screen before me looked a lot healthier, but there was still no disguising the overall atmosphere of decline. The collapse across the year was simply too pronounced for even the most drastic methods of camouflage.
 Changing the graph into 3D seemed to improve matters slightly. Inspired by this I began to fiddle with the various options. First I changed the minimum and maximum values on the axes scales, which immediately helped further disguise what was really happening. Then I tweaked the perspective, titling the graph backwards on the Y axis by 60 degrees so that the difference in size between the columns became less obvious. Now the tilted set of columns looked more promising, but at the cost of appearing as if they were being presented as part of the opening credits in Star Wars. Feeling there was no turning back now I rotated the graph on the X axis by 20 degrees so that the dwarfed sales columns at the years end now found themselves in a more honourable position at the top of a slope. I sat back and admired the result. Most people would be able to see through this illusion of perspective straight away but it was the best I could do and, backed up by my more carefully-worded report, I might just get away with it.
To seal the deal, I completely rewrote the report summary to better reflect the 'true' sales trend that I had managed to 'uncover'. Luckily, the general disaster which had occurred in the wider economy meant our incompetence looked ‘respectable, relative to the overall market'. In the face of a difficult 'negative upturn' in the economy, the 'solid results' of the last year were 'encouraging' and presented an 'ideal opportunity for 'improving efficiency, bringing about cost effectiveness and reinvigorating activity levels'; or in other words, firing everyone responsible for the mess and launching a ruthless purge of our marketing team. I concluded with some Pseudo-Darwinian nonsense about how the disaster of the past year had helped us ‘come out stronger and fitter’, although ‘brought us to the brink of extinction’ would perhaps have been more accurate.
As I printed off several copies of the report, a few doubts about the graph began to enter my head. Had I got a bit too carried away in my efforts? Did it perhaps look a bit silly? My colleagues who read through the report looked somewhat quizzically at the chart as if there were something not quite right about it and then looked at me with a mixture of dismay and admiration. I could only shrug my shoulders in response. My CEO emerged from his office with alarming speed and grabbed a copy from the printer. Having read it through he looked at me and gave a rare smile; "Good work Dionysus". I felt a wave of relief pass through me, until he remarked "So good, in fact, that I'm putting you forward to present this to the shareholders at the next annual meeting".
I think it was Nietzsche who said that "There are no facts, only interpretations" and this is especially important to bear in mind when writing reports on your company's performance. Failure will inevitably occur in the business cycle, but when viewed through the prism of a glossy pdf, some carefully crafted language and a tilted graph, even a year of ruin and misfortune can seem 'modest', 'solid' and 'respectable'; and be an 'opportunity for rebuilding standalone strength with integrity and transparency'. In business truth is the first casualty; but good riddance.
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Posted Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:54 PM |
To the huddled masses of men it was as if the God of war himself had stage-managed the scene. As the thunder of the guns died away, a light breeze suddenly sprang up and began to carry away the clouds of smoke obscuring the battlefield, revealing the massed ranks of Pickett’s legions as they marched in perfect order towards the Union line. ‘Here they come’, ‘here comes the infantry!’, came the nervous cry from the Yankees as the restless tide of men began to...
"Dionysus!?!?! Did you get all that down?"
The thundering voice of my CEO dissolved my day dream in an instant and brought me crashing back into the weekly appraisal meeting with a resounding thud. Sensing that I had not been paying attention, my CEO's mood darkened and he gestured towards my hastily scribbled meeting notes.
"Dionysus, I hope you've minuted the discussion we were just having about our marketing initiatives!" As his gaze alighted on the sheet of paper in front of me, I could see an expression of puzzlement begin to work itself across his face. A brief and unpleasant silence ensued.
"What the hell is that diagram you've been scribbling?" he asked in a menacing tone, gesturing towards the chaotic mass of coloured boxes, arrows and blobs at the bottom of my pad. With horror I looked down and realised he was talking about my 'grand strategy' for the 3rd day of battle at Gettysburg, which I had been idly sketching for the last half hour. This was a situation that called for quick thinking.
If Guantanamo Bay were to provide a suggestion box for the general public I would suggest requiring the inmates to hold weekly appraisal meetings. As any office worker knows, these protracted affairs are the most effective form of torture known to man, with the added advantage that they leave only mental scars. At the latest time possible on a Friday afternoon I and the rest of my team had shuffled in despondently to take our places in the company's meeting room to go over this week's total lack of progress. As the hours ticked by the air quickly became saturated with carbon dioxide, body odour and waffle. The laboured gurgling of the ineffectual air conditioning unit provided the soundtrack to this sorry scene; a noise which was initially irritating but became curiously soothing as time went on and my grip on reality became more tenuous.
My meeting notes had begun sensibly enough, with a couple of scribbled sentences on marketing strategy and a rather cryptic note which read 'requirement to assess strategic priorities'. This obviously meaningless phrase been written in an attempt to deceive myself into believing I was paying attention. Realising it hadn't worked, and with my imagination yearning to escape from it's corporate imprisonment, I cast my mind back to 1863 and my 'strategic vision' began to fall instinctively into place.
As my colleagues continued their monotonous conversation I began to draw the Gettysburg terrain. A few measured strokes of my biro and I had sketched a rough outline of Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Culp's Hill and the Round Tops. This provided the setting for Robert Lee and George Meade's opposing armies, which I depicted as a series of shaded boxes menacing each other from opposite sides of my pad. The combatants in place, it was time for the hostilities to ensue. This I chose to represent though a series of threatening arrows which snaked their way towards the Union positions. A little unsatisfied by this, and deciding the scene was in need of some gruesome decoration, I sketched in an emaciated stick man with his limbs cruelly severed by a passing cannon ball and sent into orbit around him. Feeling rather pleased with this motif, other stickmen, in various states of decapitation, soon joined the melee of boxes and arrows intermingled with badly drawn puffs of gunsmoke. War is hell, even in only two dimensions.
Now, with the fixed stares of my colleagues boring into me like razor blades and my CEO about to explode, it seemed that my desperate act of escapism was as ill fated as Pickett's charge on cemetery ridge.
"I…I was just trying to sketch out a few ideas" I stammered unconvincingly.
"Oh really!", my CEO exclaimed, "well then you should share them with us; we're all ears"
There is a part of the human brain which appears to have evolved to enable organisms to produce bullshit at times of great peril. At this moment, just as I was beginning to give up hope, this long dormant component sparked into life and prompted me to begin speaking.
"I’ve been thinking through the situation with the affiliates and I don’t think the current arrangement is working" I said with a somewhat fragile confidence. This seemed to improve the atmosphere slightly so I endeavored to continue. "We need better co-ordination with them at all levels and we need to ensure our account management staff are chasing up our partners on a weekly basis".
"Here", I pointed to Hill and Longstreet's bloody assault on Meade's left flank. "Here we need to take a decision-focused approach and leverage our partners in the southeast and the midlands. They need to be making direct contacts in the broker market and following those up with the key decision makers in order to deliver on our contracts".
Despite the fact that much of what I had just said was complete gibberish, it seemed to temporarily appease my colleagues. Luckily, they didn't seem too phased by the fact I had chosen to illustrate my account management strategy with trails of headless corpses and gunfire.
"And what exactly is this part here?" my CEO asked, leaning over and pointing towards General Ewall's ill-judged attack on Culp's hill; a seething mass of arrows and scribbled gunsmoke. Beads of sweat broke out on my brow as I struggled desperately to think of something plausible. To my horror, my self-preservation mechanism appeared to have gone on a cigarette break. Mercifully at this point our head of operations poked his head round the door to inform us that the direct debit system had failed again and launched yet another raid on our customers' bank accounts. This was met by much swearing and cursing and afforded me a precious few moments to think. By the time their attention returned, I was ready for them.
"I think there is a good growth opportunity for a similar arrangement in the institutional market" I said, gesturing vaguely towards the bloodbath of stickmen at the foot of Culp's hill. "I think the best thing would be to sweat our existing contacts and get them signed up to a similar referral model".
My CEO scowled briefly and turned back to look at my pad.
"It's a two-pronged approach which should generate significant revenue potential and put clear blue water between us and our competitors." I added, in a final, desperate bid to reach safe ground.
"You know Dionysus" he said, scratching his head in some bewilderment "this sounds like it might be the right direction to go in but I'm not sure if I understand it completely. Do some research and turn this into a proposal and we'll talk about whether this is going to work strategically at the next meeting".
I had reached safety, but it had been a close run thing. For a few moments, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, but this quickly shifted into dark despair. I was now going to have to spend the next week turning the Battle of Gettysburg into a 5-page marketing proposal.
I think it was Plato who said that 'only the dead have seen the end of war'. Alas, the same is true of Friday meetings. It is all too easy to give in to the urge to daydream and procrastinate but, if you must, keep your wits about you, and make sure you are able to retreat in good order, if needs be.
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Posted Monday, April 27, 2009 6:52 PM |
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'I asked for a ****ing big button! Where the **** is my big button?!?' thundered my CEO, his face shifting seamlessly from its usual pale and unhealthy complexion to an alarming red.
The atmosphere in the office changed abruptly; we scrambled back to our desks and, as one, focussed our attention rigidly on our screens. Our lead web designer winced and turned to our CEO with an expression of pain and annoyance.
A few minutes earlier, our web designer had sat back in his seat and proudly invited us to come over and admire the fruits of his labour. We quickly jostled over and examined his final draft of the company's latest retail website. Like a latter day Michelangelo he had been earnestly chipping away at it for the last few months, balancing the colour scheme, making the buttons subtle and unobtrusive and endeavouring to make it as appealing as possible. He was of an artistic temperament and had spent much time and effort thinking about his design and how best to realise it. We could all see that he had succeeded wonderfully. The finished product had avoided all the pitfalls of web design; it was un-cluttered, modern looking and pleasing to the eye. As we were admiring his handiwork, we suddenly felt a menacing presence and turned to see our CEO peering over our shoulders.
Our CEO was a pensive looking chap in his late forties, with a jittery manner and what is commonly referred to in business as a 'no nonsense attitude', and everywhere else as 'rudeness'. He had roughly the same approach to people management as General Patton, and the sensitivity to match. Memos drafted to him had to be a maximum of two sentences or they would be tossed derisorily into the recycle bin. The battle for creative control was about to begin.
'I thought I should scale the buttons down from how they appeared on your specification' explained the web developer. He stopped to ponder how best to continue without causing offence, then elaborated, 'I thought they seemed a bit…obtrusive'.
Our CEO gave an affronted snarl, 'Obtrusive, of course we want them to be ****ing obtrusive, we want the customers to press the ****ing Buy button; that's why I asked you to make them as big as possible!!'
They both turned to look at the design on the screen, the mood gradually darkening.
'You can't do that; you can't treat the customers like idiots', the web designer exclaimed boldly.
This was met with a snort of annoyance by my CEO who turned abruptly and marched back to his office. 'Not good enough' he shouted as he departed, rubbing salt into an already festering wound.
Minutes later the inevitable email arrived in the designer's inbox. In amongst its numerous expletives were a series of bullet points; each one punctuated by a ferocious chain of exclamation marks. As our developer scanned the list he let out sighs of exasperation and displeasure. He left the office that evening a broken man.
Over the next few days he began the task of defacing his masterpiece bit by bit. The buttons were relentlessly expanded and daubed with flashing slogans .The subtle colours were abandoned and the page quickly became cluttered with streams of incoherent marketing text, violating the rules of both grammar and logic. As a final indignity, a stock art photo, carefully selected by our CEO, was inserted in the top right hand corner. This airbrushed image depicted an improbably wholesome looking family and resembled an illustration from a Jehovah's Witness magazine. The awkward smiles etched across their faces looked like they had been extracted at gunpoint by Phil Spector. When it was finished, the new site had all the subtlety of a red light district.
Upon launch of the website, the tracking statistics made for depressing reading. Judging from the bounce rate, visitors were arriving at a decent rate but departing in disgust almost instantly. As the marketing budget began to drain faster than the Zimbabwe treasury, the recriminations and soul searching began. In a fit of hubris, our CEO decided that the only way to reverse the decline was to produce an elaborate flash movie, with him as the star. He felt sure that his presence on the site would be enough to tip the balance and compel visitors to press his beloved Buy button.
To forestall this, we decided to do a quick audit of the internet to see which sites were attracting the most traffic. The truth quickly dawned. The websites that were most successful and had the most loyal fan base were also the plainest, the ugliest and the most visually inept. In contrast, the ones with flashy marketing and expensive looking animations were left forlorn, hopeless and abandoned. We duly reported this back to him. 'Right, that's it!' he exclaimed before storming off to his office and frenziedly typing another uncouth email.
A month later, our lead web designer sat back to contemplate the depressing compromise that was the latest draft of the site. This time he felt no pride in his creation. The buttons were still large, but rendered plain and uninteresting. The slogans were still there but they no longer flashed alarmingly back at the user. The site was functional and minimalist but oddly joyless. We shuffled over, murmured a few belated congratulations and then went back to work.
In the realm of business, artistic taste and creativity will inevitably lose out. So it was that Botticelli was forced to paint his pompous Medici patrons into his nativity, and Michelangelo's daring nudes were defused by his employers with strategically placed robes. By all means let the artistic muses guide you, but be under no illusions: it's the philistine who always gets the final say.
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Posted Wednesday, April 15, 2009 10:33 AM |
A couple of years ago, the small dot com company I work for embarked on a cost-cutting drive. In light of the company's commitment to the highest coding standards in their products, it was decided that a proper customer services department was a superfluous luxury, and they abandoned all efforts to establish one.
Instead, our "customer service" was carried out by a solitary, chain-smoking Australian. If he was engaged or unavailable, the support call would be routed from phone-to-phone, through an aptly named 'hunt group', in search of an unsuspecting staff member upon whom the caller could vent their fury. Unfortunately, his frequent cigarette breaks meant that this was a common occurrence. Each time our Antipodean departed the building, slamming the door behind him, a tsunami of terror swept through the office. The web developers scrambled to enable the 'do not disturb' function on their phones; those in marketing sprang to their feet with previously unsuspected alacrity, and disappeared into the office kitchenette to make an emergency cup of tea, or hold an impromptu meeting.
On one fateful day, the office was bombarded with an unprecedented level of customer complaints. It turned out that our online direct debit payments system, built in-house, had become a ravenous monster overnight, launching repeated raids on our customer's bank accounts like a band of restless Visigoths. Some customers had been debited three times for the same transaction, and had incurred bank charges. As I struggled to regain my composure and stem the tide of retribution, a nervous snort suddenly erupted from the cubicle behind me.
Through some accident of fate, a rogue call had somehow penetrated the lair of our most socially awkward web developer. Every morning this chap entered the office in the same manner, marching determinedly ahead with precisely placed steps, catching the eye of no-one. Having reached a precisely defined point close to his desk, he would turn his head sharply towards the other inhabitants of the office, stammer a quick 'Morning!' and then dive quickly below the parapet of his cubicle, thus avoiding the discomfort of having to engage in trivial conversation.
Now we were about to see how he fared when exposed to the consequences of his coding. After a long pause and a great deal of heavy breathing, the receiver was suddenly snatched from its cradle and a high-pitched 'Yes!?' was offered, sounding more like a cry for help than a salutation. Even from where I was sitting, I could hear the raised voice of the customer; the accusations, the recriminations and the demand for recompense. All that our developer could summon in response were a series of distressed yelps and a few stifled mumblings. 'Look, I just can't help you!' he finally whimpered, before slamming the receiver down violently, cutting off the customer in mid flow. There then came the sound of more heavy breathing, before the unmistakable low beep which accompanied the enabling of the 'do not disturb' function on the developer's phone. It would remain enabled for the next couple three months.
While the developers scrambled to fix the online payment software, our Australian friend was quickly overwhelmed with calls, and became progressively more stressed. His cigarette breaks grew longer and more frequent, his lungs blackened and his breathing became laboured. The onslaught of overspill calls quickly reduced all but the senior management team to a state of institutionalised terror. The sales and marketing swung into a spiral of depression. The developers rebelled and simply refused to answer their phones at all. Something had to give. Eventually, after much hand waving and shouting, the management relented and announced that it was expanding the customer services team.
Our company had stumbled across the first law of business: incompetence is inevitable.
No matter how solid the commitment to the quality of one's products, the vagaries of both human and machine error will contrive to capsize one's good intentions, and feed the survivors to the sharks for good measure. An anvil is needed, upon which customers can vent the frustration and anger that is the inevitable result of this incompetence.
In the 4th century BC, Aristotle observed that some of his countrymen were born into a state of 'natural slavery', destined by nature to be servile and worthy of subjugation. This observation went on to become the founding principle of the customer services department, the liver-like organ of the business that acts to shield the company from the consequences of its mistakes and errant decisions. Many a bright eyed young thing, selected by unscrupulous recruiters for their youthful naivety, has entered into a role in 'customer care and retention,' in a spirit of benevolence and compassion. They leave as a broken carcass of a human being, having been tortured relentlessly by furious disembodied voices.
As thankless a task as it is, you should never undervalue your customer services team. If you do then like the Wehrmacht generals who, when planning Operation Barbarossa, decided that thermal underwear was an un-heroic and unnecessary extravagance, you will soon suffer the consequences of your frugality.
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