The Corporatorium: Excelleration (Episode 10)
Watching Brett and Savannah interact was endlessly amusing
for while they publicly professed to adore each other—Brett going so far as to
announce boldly, “We’re twins separated at birth!”—they seemed to actually despise
each other. Publicly, they always had their heads together leaving the
impression that they were conceiving The Next
Great Thing. More likely though,
they were plotting against the rest of us.
Presumably when they were alone, they plotted against each other.
The Corporation was big on discovering The Next Great Thing. A year before the financial collapse it had
been helping clients win the war for talent.
Now it was Centers of Excellence.
So the search was on for the next
Next Great Thing. They had even formed
Innovation teams to answer the Innovation Challenge whose winning entry would
be, by definition, The Next Great Thing.
Meetings began each day at 8 a.m. with a “working” breakfast
which meant that you were forced to listen to Savannah while you ate. I attended each meeting fortified with the
contents of Nigel’s survival kit, Savannah’s near-senseless words a
near-constant assault against the skein of my Xanax-fueled indifference. This
indifference had the invaluable effect of sparing me confusion.
Savannah’s monologues were frequently accompanied by
stupefying PowerPoint presentations full of Excel spreadsheets, whose tiny
print was impossible to read, pie charts and words like “noble purpose,” and
“synergy.”
Each day of exhaustive listening ended in a mandatory
“mixer.” The stated purpose of said mixers was so we’d each get to know each
other better as the Center of Excellence model called for us to function as a
cohesive team.
“To create unmatched teams,” Savannah said grandly, “We will
harness all of our diversity.” She
opened her arms to encompass the room—a room in which, it should be pointed
out, all the faces, save mine, were pale and anxious. And while we were about
evenly divided between male and female, the women all looked like boyish
imitations of the men, a favored daughter pretending to be “dad,” playing up
the slight resemblance between them by dressing like him and adopting his
mannerisms.
“Doesn’t she mean ‘mismatched teams’?” someone whispered.
“These teams,” Savannah explained raising her voice to
silence to offending whisperer, “will create for clients a ‘high touch’
experience stressing sharing and understanding a common set of core values that
align with each client’s vision. Each team will work to identify and present a
mutually agreeable solution that can be achieved by outsourcing HR
Administration and set benchmarks and goals that can be monitored. You’ll promote mutual accountability with
focus on having the administrative services align with the pre-identified goals
and objectives thus ensuring that the participant experience and performance
metrics match expectations. Any
questions?”
There was just one asked by a young woman who was either new
to The Corporation or intent on committing career suicide. “Yes, I have
one. What exactly is it we’ll be doing
as part of the COE?”
“That’s the beauty of the COE model for us as
communicators,” Savannah answered. “We
don’t have to do anything. Under the model we’re provided a global
network of resources through a single local point of access. Each of you will be the local point of access
for your particular team. The Implementation team does all the work
through deployment. We are simply the
‘Excellerators.’ That means your only job is to listen for future opportunities to expand our scope of services and
to build a relationship with the client
so that you can become a trusted adviser.”
We all fell silent.
Well, except for Brett who was barking into his cell phone, his face
aflame, like a beacon of terror. He must
have felt the daggers of enmity Savannah threw his way because, without lowering
his voice, he shot her a withering look, and stormed from the room.
“Any other questions?” Savannah asked of the vacuum his exit
left behind.
As no laptops, tablets, or cell phones were allowed during
the interminable meetings (Brett seemed to hold the lone exemption), you had to
do all of your work after the nightly mandatory “mixer.” Thus it was after midnight when I got the
message from Diana. Characteristically
short she said simply: “Call me.”
“Hey,” I said when she answered on the first ring. “What’s
up?”
Sleepily she mentioned the name of our biggest client, the
eagle daily eating my liver.
The client was the world’s leading purveyor of inexpensive
assemble-it-yourself furniture and home accessories of every stripe. In their stores you could not only design
your own kitchen, you could assemble the cabinets, which came in a kit,
yourself. You could buy paint, tile, and
appliances. You could even furnish your
new kitchen right down to the pots and pans and dishes, and then buy the
groceries to make the meals you’d cook in those pots and serve on those dishes—all
without leaving the store!
You got your own merchandise off the shelves, wheeled it
through the store to the check out where you checked it out yourself and then
bagged it yourself—assuming, of course, you brought your own supply of
bags. They employed thousands yet I was
never sure what these employees did except “direct consumer traffic.”
In a stunning example of truth in advertising, the retail
giant’s tagline was: I Did It. Myself.
The few times I’d attempted to shop there the expedition had
ended badly. I’d fight the scores of shoppers who wandered about slowly yet
determinedly, as if sleep walking—looking for the one thing I’d come to buy.
I’d find ten other things that had nothing to do with what I’d come to buy, and
which I wasn’t sure I actually needed. After hours of walking I would no longer
remember what I’d come for, or what I actually needed, and once I saw how long
the check-out lines were, I’d abandon my cart and leave swearing never to
return.
Yet despite what was hardly a unique experience, the store
remained wildly popular and was hugely successful. Management was also, unfortunately,
insane. To make matters worse, their
billionaire owner was a notorious penny-pincher and “sensitivity to cost” had
become part of their culture and brand. The
sly old devil had managed to turn penny-pinching into a virtue by embedding it
in their Core Values and “Value
Proposition.”
We were in the process of helping them rollout their
Employee Value Proposition—a proposition so outlandish, and so complex that
words had not yet been invented to describe it. That task had fallen to me and
my team of mushrooms; we’d replaced words with “graphic representations”
illustrating the value proposition. This
worked well for the company as they were known for “universal” instructions
which were simply a series of illustrations as clear as hieroglyphics that
purportedly “walks you step-by-step through the assembly process.”
I stifled a groan. “What’s wrong?”
“They want to reprint the Employee Value Proposition booklets.”
“What? Why?” I gasped, “Is something wrong in them?” I was pretty sure that wasn’t the case—as I’d
made up everything in the booklet. Still I was worried. Once we’d printed 10,000 refrigerator magnets
with phone numbers for various employee resources for a client. Unfortunately, the client had transposed a
pair of numbers and no one had verified the numbers by calling them as was
standard practice within the peer-review process. As a result of the oversight,
distraught employees suffering the loss of a beloved pet, or on the brink of
divorce, who called the Employee Assistance Program, were connected to a phone
sex line.
“Nothing’s wrong
with them—except they think they look too expensive. Remember we used that glossy stock so the
cover illustrations would pop? It didn’t cost any more than the matte stock,
but now they think it looks too expensive so they want to reprint on dull stock
and while we’re at it can we use thinner paper for the inside pages…”
“But we can’t absorb the cost for that since nothing is
wrong and they signed off on the stock!”
I sputtered.
“Oh,” Diana said in her typically droll manner, “They’re
perfectly willing to pay for both print jobs.”
“We printed what? Thirteen thousand brochures? That’s going to cost them a fortune—times
two!”
“They know that. They
don’t mind paying a fortune; they just don’t want to look as if they did.”
I know nothing if not when to concede defeat. “Fine.
Let’s call and get the printer to reprint.”
“Already done,” she said crisply. “It’s a rush job so they’ll run a crew
through the weekend and we’ll ship to locations on Monday. Via Fed Ex overnight so we still make the
deadline.” Her efficiency fairly
crackled over the phone line.
“Fed Ex overnight?!
What’s that gonna cost?”
“You don’t want to know!
And again they will pay for it.”
“Thanks, Diana. You’re a Prince among artists.”
She tutted me. “I’m
married now, remember? So I’m officially the artist formerly known as Prince.
Damn! Her name change
screwed up some perfect cleverness.
“Speaking of which, why are you still in the office? Don’t you have a husband to go home to?”
“Oh, him. It’s been
so long since I’ve seen him, I’m not sure I remember him. I’m told he’s very nice though. Do you find it at all telling that you called
me in the office even though it’s well after midnight?”
“Good point. I’m
going to bed. Oh, do I need to call the
client?”
“Nah. It’s taken care
of. Besides if you call them, you’ll
have to bill them—and you know how sensitive they are about money.” Laughing, she hung up.
***
On the final day, we were each issued enormous 3-ring binders
containing hundreds of pages and multiple flash drives which themselves
contained innumerable PDFs, which I would have shipped to me at great expense
via Fed Ex as I couldn’t possibly carry it with me on the plane because I was
already “over weight” according to the TSA.
No doubt because of all that lotion.
Missed Episode 9, Caipirinha? Read it here.
Read the entire series from the beginning here.
Next Episode Friday, August 5.
Read the entire series from the beginning here.
Next Episode Friday, August 5.
Copyright © 2016 Larry Benjamin
D I S C L A I M E R
The characters and events described in this blog post exist only in its pages and the author's imagination.
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