Pedro Flavicon is our newish Senior Director of Technological Enablement and reports directly to Vice President of Product Susan Scranton, who’s both super smart and super empathetic, and thus one of the few people around here who’s never been indicted.
But poor Pedro; he’s at Day 11 Since Hire, or what we affectionately call The Dawn of a Growing Sense of Resignation.
Like when you visit family cross-country and they insist you crash in their guest room but it’s clear nobody vacuums in there because when you close the door there in the corner you find a pile of hair and you can’t tell if it’s dog hair or people hair and it’s definitely undulating.
So you wonder if you should sleep on the couch in the living room instead, but now you’re in a pickle because what do you say in the morning when Aunt Jeanette finds you on her prized floral settee, so now you really wish you had stayed in the Microtel Inn & Suites next to the IHOP and three 22 pump gas stations off Interstate 35, Exit 90 in Ankeny.
Indeed, The Dawn of a Growing Sense of Resignation is common for anyone at Day 11 Since Hire, as well as for anyone at Day 11 Since One of Life’s Other Major Critical Events, including…
- Beginning of third marriage
- Accepting undergraduate student loan
- Purchasing awesome van
- Dying
- Agreeing to tropical vacation with in-laws
- Commencing kitchen remodel
- Building roof deck
- Joining megachurch
- Joining country club
- Joining Pilates studio
- Renewing Barre 3 membership
- Signing local non-profit advocacy group’s petition
- Visiting strip club
- Buying bird
- Meeting neighbors’ parents
- Getting new boss
- Registering for webinar
- Creating social media profile
- Commissioning portrait from local artist at farmer’s market
- Flipping through old high school yearbook
- Hanging air freshener from rearview mirror
- Upgrading to low-flow toilet
- Signing up for meal-kit delivery service
…and of course, many more.
And just look at Pedro, the poor bastard, exhibiting all the classic signs and symptoms of The Dawn of a Growing Sense of Resignation:
- Pallid complexion
- Lucid, waking dream-state when seated
- Obsessive back of neck rubbing
- Profuse buttock sweat
- Super wet eyeballs
- Mumbling
- Furtive, darting eyes
- Manic bursts of laughter
- Constant nose-bridge pinching
- Vaping
- Empty airplane bottle of Scotch in breast pocket
- Always-on email autoreply set to giant smiley face emoji
- Eyebrow-pencil-drawn mystical symbols and organic shapes on face
All because Pedro can’t get anything done because everyone here is disconnected from everyone else. Or as the troops of Harvard-y consultants we had march through this place concluded: “Ya’ll have a nasty Hidden Truth: There’s a total lack of alignment across your cross-functional teams.”
Thanks Harvard. Why are you calling them cross-functional then? Shouldn’t it just be “teams?” Who should be wearing the polo now?
What a total waste of money that consultancy was, especially considering after Chancy, Stennerson, and Preston left in wafts of Bleu de Chanel cologne, our Office Manager, Mike Lambott, found like 20 articles on this lack-of-alignment phenomenon and gave them to us in a binder.
Stuff with titles like:
- Why Strategy Execution Unravels (Harvard Business Review, 2015)
- The Abilene Paradox (Organizational Dynamics, 1974)
- Strategic Execution: Driving Breakthrough Performance in Business (Stanford University Press, 2019)
But whatever, we can’t top payment on the checks now (we tried).
What we certainly can and will do about this (as it turns out) prolific problem across many organizations is Something About It, which in this case is to launch our roughly 7050th Internal Training Mandatory Indoctrination Program, which, coincidentally, starts next week. Civilians such as yourself can sign up here:
That’s a lie! You can’t come, you don’t own any fun hats! We love fun hats.
But if you share this newsletter with any Executive Leadership-types, we’ll let them in…for a little while at least. Do so at the link at the bottom come on now chop chop…
Note: We didn’t want to catch people off guard, so we sent the following agenda of our roughly 7050th Internal Training Mandatory Indoctrination Program out this morning, which explains why everyone left before noon.
Get Out Of Your Head.
Today!
An extremely mandatory training program for everyone but the valets because we think they’re in the mafia.
[DAY 1]
It’s The Economy, Stupid!
No wait…
It’s The Org Chart, Stupid!
We use 1100 yellow sticky notes to explain the org chart is a reporting structure, not a coordination structure, so stop looking at it as such, unless you need to be reminded where the non-C-Suite parking spaces are located (in the open-air lot across the street next to the methadone clinic and the gun store).
[DAY 2]
You Can’t Double Dutch Alone
All employees must record a voice memo explaining why only 20% of our managers (on a good day) think our 100% expensive collaboration efforts—cross-functional committees, service-level agreements, centralized project management offices—work well all or most of the time.
You can even use Voicechanger.io and apply reverb, robot, or even monster filters! Thus making your contribution completely guaranteed anonymous! Even though we had Lisa Zendaya in engineering build a 1:1 matching voice biometrics tool we affectionally call The Big Right Ear to figure out who said what so we can punish accordingly!
(Your responses are very important to us to confirm or deny our plan to fix this collaboration issue, which is to give the 80% of managers who claim our collaboration infrastructure doesn’t work walkie talkies.)
[DAY 3]
Dealer Incentives
Our inaugural, company-wide, weekly gift-giving exchange where those with a verifiable track record of collaboration get a Furlan Marri watch.
Then if that sticks we’ll incentivize adaptability, candor, and goal-stretching in a likewise manner. What a wonderful world it could be! (But please lower all expectations.)
[DAY 4]
Standing to Reason
The Executive Leadership group helps to reconcile each of our 26 departments’ different rank orders of the same stated quarterly priorities by providing each department the reason behind the goals.
As we do so, every department member must draw an accurate visual representation of our extremely well thought-out priority/goal/reason matrix. The most talented artist gets their drawing framed and placed in the foyer.
As you can see from a trial submission, things aren’t looking good:
Note: no one leaves until all 1700 employees get it right.
[DAY 5]
Soul Asylum
We’re opening up 17 breakout rooms of 100 employees each to reflect on the learnings of days 1-4 as they relate to intimate and personal details of each employee’s life which they must explain in detail to everyone in said room over the loudspeaker. (The consultant we found on Socialscientists.com said this was the only way to collectively snuff/cleanse/purge any remnants of our nasty Hidden Truth/lack of alignment from our psyches, which is clearly the only way to ensure we never go through this again. Forever.)
Bonus! Special guest visit by our unusually limber CEO! They’ll personally attend all 170 breakout sessions (in 22-second increments via iPad on rolling cart) pushed by nonother than our intrepid VP of Strategic Initiatives Brad Douche, who was just released by the New Zealand government! And 12 of the 22 seconds will feature our CEO formally empowering our middle managers with Key Alignment Powers as represented by last year’s key-card lanyards…that admittedly no longer open any doors but we didn’t want to waste the money on duplicate lanyards/key cards.
So don’t you fret Pedro my dear, the time of your The Dawn of a Growing Sense of Resignation is nigh. Soon you will gleefully saunter into a new era, and one that will make you the envy of all your peers across the Aerospace, Defense, and Chemical Manufacturing industries—specifically, the adhesives and sealants segment: Day 18 Since Hire, or what we will soon call, The Day We Gave Up and Started Low-Level Flight Planning for the Sinaloa Cartel.