Corporate Ponderings…

There was a story in the newspaper last week about prison vans being ordered at vast expense, only for the powers that be to discover that they are too large for most courthouse entrances. Really. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was an extravagant (VERY extravagant, like £900 million, I mean how can a few tall buses with blacked out windows cost that much?) April Fool. Of all the people in the world in whose shoes you would not want to be, the project manager of that particular project probably tops the list.

Of course, we all know what happened here. Lots of people, probably dressed in suits, have got together, done a whole lot of talking and very little listening, and have probably come up with a list of proposals, which have then been circulated around a whole lot of other people who either weren’t invited to the original meeting, or were vital to the meeting but couldn’t be arsed to attend, and who thus have done even less listening, and they have prioritised the proposals, and then someone completely different who actually controls the money has had a look at the list and rejected the first 5 items because they are too expensive. So number 6 has been duly selected, but because it was number 6 no one in either of the original parties did any form of due diligence about the viability of the proposal because they only checked proposals 1 through 5. And absolutely no one thought to get their measuring tape out and check the dimensions of a courtroom’s approach roads against the proportions of the vans being ordered. This is because number 6 ticked pretty much none of the boxes, and thus was never really intended to be a serious proposal in the first place.

People have not been singing off the same song sheet. Their ducks have not been placed in a row. Have you ever seen ducks in a row? I have only ever seen ducks in a line, and it’s usually quite a dishevelled and quite frankly a bit stinky line too. If this is a standard analogy in the human world for being well-organised, is it really any wonder that the flipping trucks don’t fit through the gates?

Corporate speak is a shifting landscape though. We are seeing a whole new generation of words and phrases entering common usage, so out goes brain-storming, thinking outside the box and blue sky thinking, and in comes collaboration, transformation and optimisation. At the risk of this becoming a rant (I mean, we wouldn’t want that now would we), here are a few other favourites of mine

• You can’t polish a turd: this means that a group of people, in full recognition of the fact that some situation is poor and unfixable, are meeting nonetheless, probably at vast corporate expense, to discuss how poor and unfixable it is. Rarely will anything be resolved.
• Strategic: Neat, slick, expensive. Never going to happen.
• Tactical: Messy, manual, also expensive but in people hours rather than computer development. Almost always the favoured option. No one ever seems to worry about people hours.
• Collaboration pod: a slightly posher than normal, well-furnished meeting room containing a phone, a set of microphones and a computer with a web camera and a network connection, which usually doesn’t work. In special cases, there may even be an interactive whiteboard which no one knows how to use, and a video link, ditto. Usually there’s a flip chart in the corner. In almost all cases, the door has the words “Collaboration Pod” written in unsteady capitals on the door, not always spelt correctly.
• End-to-end thinking: intended to ensure that the rambling, disjointed route a customer transaction takes through all the different internal parts of a business is invisible to the customer, who just experiences slick, efficient, customer-oriented pleasantness. In reality, each part of the business only considers its own boundaries and doesn’t give a crap if those boundaries don’t interface properly (or indeed at all) with the boundaries of the next part of the business. So the customer experiences a total shambles, and rarely does it end well. (Obviously this is a sweeping generalisation. There are many examples out there of businesses which do end-to-end thinking very well. But I cannot rant about them…)
  

There’s a lot to be said for dictatorship then, you would think. One person makes the decision, there’s no discussion or argument, and anyone who makes a mess gets flogged, so there’s a much greater incentive to succeed. Simple!