Trippy

Ramblings Post #69
Sometimes bad things happen to bad people. But more often than not, good stuff happens to bad people, and then keeps happening and then continues on as long as you can stand to watch it. This is how some people get rich, despite certain personality attributes that would normally render them "beat down". Every now and then though, they slip. And it makes the world right again.

Last week, apparently upon his own initiative, Naive Mogul decided to hold a meeting. As long as I have been with my current "chicken plucking" firm, we've been trying to implement a system that eliminates, well, er...error in chicken plucking. The idea's been tossed around and put on the back burner more than a few times, but apparently it was time to drag the old beast out again.


It is Naive Mogul's plan to show he really should be management by implementing something.

The meeting was a rehash of old ideas, wasting a good hour and half of my day. We don't go through his printed agenda as it's unfocused, he leaves out whole sections of the process that we have to go back and fill in, he doesn't know what the new process will do the existing processes, he's not sure of the value of adding the new process and we spend the bulk of the meeting deciding which "chickens" to which we even want to apply the new process. Typical first meeting stuff, you know how it goes if you've ever worked in an office: You've hashed out some basics, everyone gets a few assignments to report back and we schedule the next meeting to work over them, repeat until you get something workable.

Naive Mogul then announces, as I start to get up to leave, "at the next meeting we'll talk implementation."

One meeting and implementation? Um...no.

There is a momentary silence.

There is that quiet, almost furtive look around that everybody does, because somebody is going to have to burst his bubble, and they don't want to be the one.

Then the tech guy, whom he invited because it's a "tech" process, starts into him. He's the one guy not in the usual chain. The tech guy basically explains how you have a complete and through implementation process. Tech guy goes over what all is required to fully document a process as it exists now, and how future changes will affect that process, the pros and cons of the changes proposed, value gained etc, and why certain people invited to this meeting probably didn't need to be invited (that would mean me!). Basically in front of four or five senior people, including Naive's boss (via conference call), he told him that he doesn't know what he's doing.

And then I got up and left.

Barkeep. A shot of the Russian vodka.