When IT projects Fail

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The mind is a terrible thing.  Last night I stumbled across part of the movie Kill Bill Volume 2. There is a character in Volume 2 named Esteban Vihaio, an eighty-something Hispanic bon vivant.  His is a small role, but performed beautifully.  Uma Thurman, our ninja protagonist, meets Esteban and asks him ‘Where’s Bill?”

With a thick, refined Spanish accent, Esteban repeats the question, drawing out Bill’s name “Where is Beeeeeeel?”

Anyway, today I am on the phone.  And can you guess the name of the person with whom I am speaking?  That’s right, I was talking to Beeeeeeel.  He did not have a Spanish accent; nonetheless, I could not stop the voices in my head from trying to translate every phrase so that it sounded like Mr. Esteban.  Needless to say, the call went downhill rapidly.

When I think about software implementations the phrase “Help, I’ve failed and I can’t get up” comes to mind.

For many people, the goal of a software implementation is to get to the end, to see the vendor leave.  In many minds, that event signals that the work is done, and the departure of the vendor signals that the software was implemented correctly.  Not true Mon Chéri.

In case you did not get the email, IT has become big business in most corporations, and it takes a group of highly paid bureaucrats to administer it.  And you know what happens when you give the bureaucrat a clipboard and ask them to oversee the implementation of a new email system, by the time the dust settles you have spent a few million dollars on a new sales force automation tool—Rube Goldberg on steroids.

Once you start spending it is difficult to stop.  And people do not keep spending in the hope of reaping additional ROI; they do so in order to try to salvage a project that in its current state is a white elephant.  Most of the cost of an IT project is to get it to do what you thought it would do.  This is a classic example of when you are in a hole, stop digging, or at least let me hand you a bigger shovel.

Is your Mission Statement just Parsley?

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What is your organization’s mission, your vision, your goal?  Can you articulate it?  If yes, write it below in the space provided.

Okay.  Why do you have a mission statement?  Is it of any more value than the parsley on your Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast plate, or is it actionable?  What does it tell you to do?  Is it something to which all of your employees can contribute?  Can you measure if your actions helped meet the mission?  Does the business strategy result from the mission statement?

Here’s one you probably haven’t thought of.  Let’s say every one of your employees puts your mission statement into action.  Does that improve your organization, or does it bring it to its knees?  Your mission statement either communicates your mission or it does not.  What does it say to your employees, to your customers?  If it does not create a message that makes you unique, fix it or dump it—or say, “We are just like those other guys down the street.”  Just because it communicates, does not make your mission sustainable.

Here are some real examples of hospital mission/vision statements.  Read them and see if you begin to understand why I think the hospital business model is in trouble.  I have not published the name of the hospital, as that is not what is important to this discussion.

Providing exemplary physical, emotional and spiritual care for each of our patients and their families

Balancing the continued commitment to the care of the poor and those most in need with the provision of highly specialized services to a broader community

Building a work environment where each person is valued, respected and has an opportunity for personal and professional growth

Advancing excellence in health services education

Fostering a culture of discovery in all of our activities and supporting exemplary health sciences research

Strengthening our relationships with universities, colleges, other hospitals, agencies and our community

Provide quality health services and facilities for the community, to promote wellness, to relieve suffering, and to restore health as swiftly, safely, and humanely as it can be done, consistent with the best service we can give at the highest value for all concerned

We are caring people operating an extraordinary community hospital.

Ensure access to superior quality integrated health care for our community and expand access for underserved populations within the community. Create a supportive team environment for patients, employees, and clinical staff.

Let’s look at some of the million dollar words in the mission statements of some highly regarded hospitals.  Ensure, foster, promote, participate, create.  Comprehensive.  Involved, responsive, collaborate, enable, facilitate, passion, best, unparalleled, .  These statements were written by well paid adults.  These statements are awful.  They are awful because they are fluff—unachievable.  They are well intentioned but meaningless euphemisms.

Hospital mission statements are inclusive to the nth degree.  They also seem very similar.  If a perspective patient read your mission statement and read the mission statement of the hospital down the street, could they tell which one is yours?  Probably not.  Who among you has a mission statement which excludes anything?

So, let’s say your board is debating if you should buy the machine in Monty Python’s hospital skit—the machine that goes “Ping.”  Which of the mission’s goals does that support?

How do you make them better?  For starters, make them short. Very.  Twain wrote, “If I had more time, I would have written less.

Southwest Airline’s mission statement—be the low cost carrier.

Dramatic pause.  Something either contributes to the mission or it does not.  Leather seats and free lunches do not.

Do you miss your IT vendor?

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Was Icarus’s problem one born of hubris, or did he simply need non-melting wax?  Wax on, wax off.  So there I was listening to NPR as I made the drive to Subway.  The person doing the speaking had the title, professor of economics.  His point—if you can call it that; the deficit and the debt are a result of the tax cuts.  Essentially, the reason we did not have enough money to pay for our spending was because we had not taxed enough.  I yelled at the radio loud enough for him to hear—the reason we did not have enough money to pay for our spending is that we spent too much.  My children will not be attending that university.

If you see someone screaming in their car, please wave—it could be me.

Summer vacations via car.  Makes me wonder what ever happened to station wagons—anyone who does not remember Richard Nixon may want to use Google to the term ‘station wagon’.  We had a sky blue Ford; others had the one with the faux wood-grain side panels like the one Chevy Chase drove in the movie Vacation.

I noticed last week as we drove from Pennsylvania and crossed into Maryland how the blacktop improved and how the shoulder plantings were more numerous and spiffier.  It was as though Maryland was showing off to make us feel we were entering a better place and leaving a worse one. On the return trip the same scenario was reversed as the road for the first mile back into Pennsylvania was much nicer than was the last mile of road in Maryland.

It makes me wonder why states do not put the same level of effort into the last mile to make you miss the place you were leaving.

Now let us think about your IT vendors.  Remember those guys?  The ones who when they courted you took you to dinners and baseball games and golfing.  You probably have one of their coffee mugs on your desk and a few dozen of their Rollerball pens and a commemorative golf towel clipped to you golf bag.  At the get-go everything was first class.  The vendor hoard was attentive and still picking up the lunch tab.

Then they left; all of them.  You surmised the project must be over.  The vendor’s project manager no longer had you on his speed-dial—your number had been replaced with the number of his new golfing buddy, the CIO at Our Lady of Perpetual Implementations.

It makes me wonder why vendors do not put the same level of effort into the last mile of their implementation as they did the first mile.  If they did maybe your perception of them would be better.  Maybe the implementation would have gone better.

 

Let’s Fire Winston!

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I was reporting to the board—or bored—sometimes it is the same.  The mission: figure out what was wrong, and then fix it.

I spent weeks talking to everyone from the executives to the receptionist.  I interviewed patients and physicians.  The doctors were not happy, the patients less so.  Costs were up, charges were down, and quality was down.

Of all the gin joints in all the towns…

The problem was easy to decipher.  I presented my findings.

“What do you recommend?” asked the chair of the audit committee.

I tried to look lost in thought.  “I fired Winston,” I replied.

“Why Winston?”

“Winston was where it all led; quality, cost, satisfaction.  Winston was responsible for the failures.”

Several members of the board nodded, and spoke among themselves.

After several minutes I jumped back into the fray.  “The more I think about it, the more I think Winston may be salvageable—not in the same role but somewhere else in the organization.  The employees really like him.  Besides, it’s the holidays.  Do you really want to be the reason Winston is not able to buy presents for the kids?”

The board held an in camera discussion.  “Agreed.”

I knew they would.  I started with my actual presentation.  “There is no Winston.”  The Winstons scattered around the table looked perplexed.  They were looking for the easy answer to the problems in their organization, they were looking for themselves.

Who are your Winstons?

Leadership: No Experience Required

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Not long after graduating with an MBA from Vanderbilt, I returned to Vandy to interview job candidates.  With me, was my adult supervisor, the VP of human resources—a stunning older woman; about thirty-five.  At dinner, she invited me to select the wine.  Not wanting to appear the fool, and trying to control my fawning, I pretended to study carefully the wine list.  Not having a clue, I based my selection entirely on price.  I had little or no knowledge of the subject; nonetheless, I placed the order with all the cock-sureness of a third-grader reciting the alphabet.

A few moments later Wine-man returned with a bottle, angled it towards me, and stood as rigid as a lawn statue.  After a few seconds my adult paused and motioned my attention towards Wine-man.  I remained nonplussed.  “You are supposed to tell him that the bottle he is holding is the one you ordered.”

“He knows it is what I ordered, that is why he brought it.”  I thought they were toying with me.

A few seconds later there was a slight popping sound and then Wine-man placed the cork before me on my napkin in a manner similar to how Faberge must have delivered his fabled egg to Tsar Alexander III for his wife Empress Fedorovna.  They were both staring at me, not the Tsar and the Empress—Wine-man and my adult.  “You are supposed to smell the cork.”  And so I did.

“Now what?”

“If it smells bad, it means the wine may be bad.”

To which I replied, “This is the Opryland Hotel—have you seen the wine prices?  They don’t sell bad wine.”  She nudged me with her elbow.  I could tell I was wowing her.  I smelled the cork.  “It smells like a cork,” I whispered to Wine-man.  He smiled and poured a half inch of wine in my glass.  I thought he was still pulling my lariat.

I looked bemusedly at the mostly empty glass, held it out to him, and asked him if I could have some more—I was thirsty.  Rather than embarrass me further, with a slight nod of her head my adult instructed the Wine-man that my sommelier class was over—any further proof of my inadequacies would be of limited marginal value.  Any chance that we would have gone dancing later that evening was about as flat as the wine.  I should have ordered a beer.  I was good at beer.

For those who are still reading, if you are wondering if I am actually going to make a point, here it comes.  I’m not fond of segues, so don’t blink.

Sometimes, a little guidance is helpful—even if it has to come in the form of being led around like camel with a ring through its nose.

Often, what is important in a leader is having the knowledge and temerity to ask the right question.  In business it is often the case that the number of executives with answers may exceed the number of executives asking questions.  Value is often measured by scarcity.   Good, challenging questions are often in short supply.  So are leaders who do not require adult supervision.

Pretty simple things.  The right things usually are—like knowing what to do with the wine cork.

 

Crowdsourcing–Social CRM at its best

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Social octogenarians

I was settling in to my first bite of overstuffed pastrami and corned beef sandwich—apologies to the vegetablists.  One of the four octogenarians seated in the booth next to me was speaking loudly to the other three about the catheterization he underwent the prior day.

Thankfully, his friend, who was eating the egg salad special interrupted him and asked, “How long have you known Bernie Westoff?”

“I don’t know Bernie Westoff,” replied the cath patient.

“He is one of your LinkedIn contacts.”

“How do you know that?”

Egg Salad stated, “I looked at your contacts.”

“Who told you you could look at my contacts?”

“You set it up that way.  Everyone can look at them?”

This conversation continued for the next several minutes.  I was tempted to pull out my iPad, open the LinkedIn app, and join the fray, but instead I kept my eyes straight ahead and worried about the Russian dressing dripping down my arm.  Crowdsourcing 101.

I think the one application of crowdsourcing most overlooked is one which hardly fits the definition. This type is not premeditated. It is the type where the “machine” is a means to an end, and it does not originate within a company. More often than not, the company is the target of this type of crowdsourcing—Social-CRM.

Most definitions of crowdsourcing involve a call going out to a group of individuals who are then gathered via the call to solve a complex problem—problem solving—much like the Law of Large Numbers.  The crowd is likely to have an upper limit in terms of the number of members. By default, traditional crowdsourcing is fashioned to work from the top down; it is outbound, a push model.

Social-CRM (S-CRM) tends to work from the bottom up. There are no boundaries to the number of members; in fact, there can be thousands of members. Also atypical is the fact with S-CRM no single event or call to action drives the formation of the crowd. The crowd can have as many events as it has members.

The unifying force around S-CRM is each member’s perspective of a given firm or organization. Members are often knitted together by having felt wronged or put-off by an action, product, or service provided or not provided by an organization. Most organizations do not listen to, nor do they have a means by which they can communicate with the S-CRM crowdsource. This in turn causes the membership to grow, and to become even more steadfast in the individual missions of their members.

In traditional crowdsourcing, once the problem solving ends, the crowd no longer has a reason to exist, and it disbands. With S-CRM crowdsourcing, since the problem never seems to go away, neither does the crowd.

Every firm has one or more S-CRM groups biting at its ankles, hurting its image, hurting the brand, causing customers to flee, and disrupting the business model. Even so, most organizations ignore the S-CRM crowd just like someone ignores their crazy Uncle Pete who disrupts every family gathering.

 

Shoeicides and Walmart: Stop the World I want to get off

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As we enter the Arab Winter, I am suffering threat fatigue.

Much of the news coverage this week, as it is every week, had to do with one or more awful set of occurrences taking place in a part of the world that is never going to wind up on anyone’s list of places to visit before they die.  That these arid expanses of rocks and sand are labeled ‘countries’ is only relevant if you happen to be a geography student.  The only reason the average American knows the names of these places is because oil is buried under their rocks and sand.  Oh, and the fact that they are on the news every night burning flags, and terrorizing people from the non-rock and sand countries.

Then there is the snit about the movie.  Washington had to undergo a factadectomy.  There is proof that the release of the movie had nothing to do with the recent riots and killings.  The attack on our embassy was planned.  Even so, the government of the United States kicked off their 2012 apology and appeasement tour with their own video featuring the two most powerful people in the world apologizing for the movie, and imploring the dirt agrarians to forgive us.  As a sign of US sincerity, the president and his secretary of state beseech those we offended to agree to accept our billions of largess.

Take for example, Pakistan’s behavior this week.  Their president, a jihobbyist, declared a national holiday to allow the Pakistani’s to protest the movie.  Can you picture the scene had Richard Nixon declared a national holiday so every American could protest the release of Blazing Saddles?  Try to stay with me here.

Millions of people are upset because of the movie.  Just in case some of those millions did not finish unleashing their angst burning cars and firing rockets into buildings—destroying the few capital assets they had, the Pakistani president, the purveyor of their fiscalamity, decided to legitimize the anger of the thugocracy, set aside an entire day for them to vent, and provide them with a venting venue.

Net-net on the holiday, 15 less potential combatants.  Not much of a holiday if you ask me—it makes Arbor Day look better and better.

And guess what?  The news media captured the whole thing for our education and entertainment; lucky us.  How about we agree not to watch any more shockumentaries disguised as ‘news’, especially if the whole reason the newsmakers are making news is to export their acts of terrorism to US television.  When something you expect to happen happens, is it news, or is it simply the new normal?  Reporting a suicide bomber blew himself up somewhere in the Middle East is the new normal.  The Talibanisation of millions via franchise terrorism has become their daily equilibrium.  Free-range terrorist events in the name of whoever, are no more newsworthy than reporting that it did not snow in Miami in July.

Is it more difficult to make this argument in America than would be to make it to the jihadists?  Would not the jihadists agree with most of this?  They have no need for political correctness.  America’s leadership however, feels their pain, and has a burning desire to assuage their angst.  At least that is the message we are sending.  Are we no longer capable of acting like the world’s most powerful democracy?  Our aircraft carriers against their rocks and goats.  Yet the goat people are the ones dictating our policy.

The United States of America versus the Sharia States of the Middle East.  At the moment we seem to be trailing badly at halftime in the Afghani game of Bazkashi, and the reason we are trailing is that we are being used as the headless goat.

The torch-and-pitchfork crowd flaunts the fact that they do not value life, theirs or others.  Is it not incongruous for them to feign worship of a god who created life only so they could give up their own lives and take the lives of others so cavalierly?  They deploy Son of Sam logic to show their rectitude by attributing their actions to some facsimile of a higher power.  They have behaved this way ever since the media first showed a willingness to broadcast their message.

So what options does that leave us with our flat screen televisions during the dinner hour?  How about more coverage of Canada, heh? Or a tulip festival in Holland?  Perhaps a cooking segment on how to prepare Feijoada, Brazil’s national dish.

Could much of the problem be solved if the news media were not so quick to validate the verisimilitude of other religions? Certainly there is more to it than that.  However, as the media demonstrates daily, it is difficult to be both politically correct and to run non-stop coverage of deplorable people doing deplorable things in the name of their god.  If one thing is incongruous with another, is the incongruence because of the falsehood of one?  If A implies B, and A is false, what does that say about B?

“Yeah though I walk through the valley of the shadow death” has a new reality.  A battlefield for some, a necropolis for others.  Shoeicide.  And while the bombings continue our leaders are friending the terrorists on Facebook.

Personally, I like believing in a god whose godness is not dependent on my ability to defend Him.  A life over death, heaven and earth making god.  A god omnipotent enough to overcome a caricature or a movie.  Our constitution supports the right of people to worship whatever mythology happens to tickle their fancy, no matter how obtuse the belief.  The Constitution does not decree that those who believe in the one true god have to subordinate their beliefs because their very existence offends those who place higher value in a turnip.

Washington wants us to make nice with the vicars of the Polemic Turnip, suggesting we hold hands and accept everyone for who they are.  Our leaders would have us renounce our values and beliefs and on bended knee hope the fifth column agrees to meet us halfway.  Clinton even suggested we build a Walmart in Libya.  That way the people who hate us could buy camouflage clothing at a discount before they blow themselves up.

Give a little and hope they like us.  I think not.

The Joy of Sox–how to deliver a great presentation

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NPR is the white noise that usually accompanies me to and from the office lest I let the traffic turn me into one of those drivers CNN broadcasts with footage of police helicopters hovering above my road rage.  For the most part I have learned to tune out NPR’s political bent and focus on their Macarena-mind human interest stories.  Stories like the whistling sound made by the yellow-spotted salamander living in equatorial Iowa.

These days NPR is all-a-thither about the forthcoming forty-eight month renewal at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  The noise the NPRers make high-fiving each other in the hallways is almost loud enough to drown out their rewriting of Mitt Romney’s position describing him as being in favor of shipping our homeless people to South Sudan because our homeless would have so much in common with Sudanese homeless.  It would not surprise me to learn that an NPR staff intern had drawn a caricature of the prophet and signed Mitt’s name to it as an enticement to have someone fire an RPG into Mitt’s campaign headquarters.

Was that a contrail shooting past my window?

It is an interesting exercise taking apart a one hour speech and repackaging it as a five minute talk—Twitterizing.  It goes to the quote, “I would have written less if I had more time.”  The corollary for presentations may be, if it does not fit one slide, it’s not properly thought out.

I think what a lot of presenters miss is having an understanding of what makes for a good presentation.  Here are a few of mine.

Presentation Rule 1—never bore the audience.  They are pulling for you to do well for your sake and theirs.

Presentation Rule 2—most of the audience can read.  If your slides are filled with text and bullet points, their natural inclination is to read what you’ve written.  They are doing this while you are reading aloud the very same text.  If they are reading, you become superfluous.

Presentation Rule 3—the audience cannot walk and chew gum at the same time (they can’t read your words and listen to you.)  For those presenters who favor text on their slides there are two choices; read from the slides, or try to offer commentary about the slides.  For those who do not read directly from their slides and want to offer commentary it gets even more awkward.  You look at the audience and see them reading the slide.  Your natural tendency is not to interrupt their reading because you are trying to be polite and you do not want them to miss your words of wisdom.  Then your mind starts to wonder if what you are about to say is so important if you should have written it on a slide.

Presentation Rule 4—if you wear wild looking socks–see mine above–you had better be delivering one heck of a good talk.

My philosophy about presentations is not wanting people taking notes based on what is on my slides, hence I use pictures to convey an idea.  I hand-draw concepts from which I can then speak.  Since there is nothing of import on the slides, people start staring at you, something which will make a lot of presenters even more nervous.

The downside of this approach is that since everyone will now be listening to you instead of reading or writing, you better have something worth hearing.  The issue then becomes how to craft your words in a way to get your audience to remember your message.

I favor humor and telling a story.

Will these steps work for you?  I hope they do.

I felt they were working pretty well for me the other night right until the end when an attractive woman approached me and said, “You look like Jack Nicholson, only not as unattractive”—so at least I’ve got that going for me.

Where Fish First Walked–if you think fish did walk you will not enjoy this post

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This one is on my nickel—feel free to come back tomorrow.

Sometimes something gets stuck in my head and the only way to get it unstuck is to get the idea stuck in someone else’s head.  A few weeks ago I came across something on the news having to do with a Canadian paleontologist sitting on a pebbled beach in Quebec.  His life’s work revolved around finding the place where fish first walked from the sea—the very fact that he was interested in finding out where they first walked seems to imply that they (fish) have walked on more than one occasion.

I know some of you are thinking, ‘And your point in writing to us about this is…”.

The television spot went on with the fellow concluding that the interesting thing is not that fish walked—which I would have found sufficiently interesting—epochs later; yada yada yada—but that without them having walked none of us would be here.  It was alchemy in paleontology and the reporter was his Rapunzel.

What troubles me about this is he and his amanuensis, the reporter, with her eyes wide shut, somehow managed to create a dialogue around this notion as though it (the meaning of life) actually happened the way this fellow said it did.  Her interview was like watching two left-handed men learning to dance backward without either one knowing the woman’s part.

The voices in my head started screaming epitaphs at me.  The paleontologist’s mind tacked intuitively and lurched from idea to idea untouched by the clammy hand of logic.  His premise made as much sense to me as having an oboe player in a punk rock band, yet the erstwhile reporter, with her sang-froid composure, uttered nothing more than ‘uh-huh’ and looked as though she was watching time bend as he explained the wonders of the universe to her with his do-re-mi recitation of the facts.

Some people in front of a camera have the innate ability to insult our intelligence with boredom and futility.  His perfervid idea was stranded on the edge of reality and worked about as well as a poorly used preposition at the end of a sentence.  She listened and nodded and stared into the looking glass.  She never questioned whether the compass of his intellectual qualifications may have been missing its needle.

Therein lays the rub.  Simply saying something aphoristically on television does not make it true.  What was intended as an ephemeral interview now exists for the folly of all of us.  The man is guilty of sharing his ideas without having a hall pass to do so, but then again, are not we all.

Maybe that is how mermaids came to be.

If you’ll  permit me a quick aside.  Last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show featured a skit using  Jimmy’s outsourced comedy writers in India.  Their conversation had to do with whether the Indian’s could write some jokes about Jesus being married.

Am I the only person on the planet who is  tired of the media’s double standard on how it reports religion and freedom of speech?  If Jimmy’s skit had been about another certain religion that has been on the news a lot recently, Jimmy and his Indian buddies would either require round-the-clock protection, or they would already be dead.  And, if that were the case, the US news media would be blaming Jimmy and apologizing for his behavior.

It is more than a little ironic that countries–and I use the word ‘countries’ very liberally–with no freedom of religion and no freedom of speech are the ones getting the sympathetic backing from a media that has all the freedoms it needs to report on global events through the lens of a blindfold.

Why Showing Initiative Will Kill You

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Were one to judge America by what they read from scanning the headlines of the magazines in the supermarket’s checkout lane, the only items of note are that Jennifer Aniston may or may not be pregnant, and that another one of the Kardashian’s was getting married—no word as to whether or not she is pregnant.  The headlines provided no indication that we are at war or that the economy has been outpaced by my daughter’s lemonade stand.

Anyway.  I have been reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which should be on every reading list for Genocide 101.  In the book Solzhenitsyn describes numerous offenses which could get a Russian sentenced to Stalin’s gulags.  Some estimates suggest more than sixteen million people were purged under Stalin’s regime—enough people whereby those in power had to continuously invent new offenses.

In one such description Solzhenitsyn recounts a conference for Stalin’s supporters.  Every public gathering was attended by several members of the NKVD, the bad guys.  At the conclusion of the conference its chairman called for a verbal salute to Stalin which resulted in all of those attending applauding.  The vigorous applause continued for eleven minutes because everyone was afraid to be the first to stop applauding.

To stop applauding was to show initiative, was to be an individual.  Exhausted, the chairman finally stopped clapping; immediately, so did everyone else.  The chairman, a loyal communist, was arrested.  During his interrogation the interrogator told him “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”  Darwin’s natural selection; and how to grind people down with stupidity.

Nonetheless, we return to Beaver Cleaverville.

Do you ever sit in a meeting thinking it would be easier to design a revolving sliding door than to agree with or understand whatever is going on in the meeting around you?  You scan the room eying the flock of sheep each of who think of themselves as lions.  Once again, the Pickle Factory’s leader had confused motion with movement.  You scribble yourself a note using your favorite crayon—the cerulean blue, ‘I have seen our future and it needs work.’

“Well, here we are,” says the meeting’s Tartuffe-like moderator outfitted in her J C Penney imitation Vera Wang pantsuit.  For years her mind had run just fast enough to enable her thoughts to always be in the same place.

“Yeah, here is where we are,” you mumble into your cupped hand. “We have been here before and we will be here again and again.”  The person across from you seems to be humming “It’s a long way to Tipperary.”

These meetings make about as much sense to you as the game played by the Afghan Pashtun tribesmen—buzkashi—sort of like polo except instead of using a ball they use a headless goat.  (Here’s hoping no Californian makes a movie of the game and uploads it to the internet.  You had to see that coming.)  Corporate executives rampage through offices each day dragging the headless carcass of their business strategy to meeting after meeting hoping to score, and the more meetings you attend the more you feel like the goat. “Maaaa”.

“What are we supposed to accomplish today?” You ask.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” replies the moderator, her mind making its way back from its visit to the land of ultima Thule.

“No, your guess is better than mine,” you say.  “It is your meeting.”  ‘Lock the gate,’ you are thinking, ‘before the village loses its idiot.’  Everything is running behind and the team wants to make up for lost time.  Your job is to try to convince them that you cannot make up for lost time; the best you can hope for is not to lose any more.

You have always known that companies which do not tolerate dissent have a tendency to ignore dissenting information but they remember the dissenters—the first person to stop clapping. In a company lacking second sight and new ideas, the old ideas are often divided evenly among the goats.  The death spiral of silence continues—employees avoid the threat of being voted off the island refrain from making any statement that may show them having an original thought.  Showing initiative can result in your being sent to the company’s gulag.

Have you noticed that the more a firm’s competitive edge erodes, the busier the firm appears to be?  Once you have fallen through the looking glass the only way out may be for you to walk back the cat, that is travel backwards to see how it is you and the others became trapped in this house of mirrors.  The problem with that strategy is that to undertake it requires you to show initiative.

The firm’s gulag is filled with people like you.  At least when you get to the gulag there will be enough players for a rigorous game of buzkashi.