Nicholas Bate

Totally, Totally Global Inc., The Novel: mini chapter 3

Previously on Totally, Totally, Global Inc. Sales are down. Morale is low. Strategy has been neglected.

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But there was so little I could do now apart from try and get the desperate senior team to think about 12 months from now. Hard to do when the quarterly figures were so depressing, shareholders were shouting NOW and aspiring bloggers wanted another story of death and destruction in the technology arena.

I did as I always did in such situations: I left my desktop-both physical and virtual-looking busy, I left my sweater for the chilly morning fixie bike ride over the back of the chair, grabbed my current Moleskine and propelling pencil and headed out. The nearest good coffee shop was always busy being an overflow meeting room for those from Totally so I walked an extra 5 minutes to Caffeine Molecule, in my view the perfect coffee shop. This had great coffee and was quieter. I ordered a doppio that they promised to bring over and I slipped back outside and sat at one of the small tables. The still early morning spring sunshine was just perfect and reviving. I flattened a double page spread and rapidly did two things: a SWOT and a 5 Force analysis: good traditional MBA stuff. I had a gut feeling of what was wrong but I would eventually need to argue this well. The matrices flowed.

The doppio arrived. I took two short strong sips and following the schematic analysis started to summarise in narrative format our problem: I needed ultimately to be able to express our headaches in a story that would grab attention; a story that was a simple transmittable meme. We had dominated the personal productivity software market for a long time. We’d been slow to get to the mobile space. And we were slow to get to the place Amazon was aiming to own: the home. We were doing me-too. We were copying. We needed to get ahead of the market. I took two more sips, stretched out my legs and looked out at the horizon: with all the buildings in the way it was too short. Just like ours; that was a useful metaphor: we were forever caught in that trap. Why was that? I jotted notes in sentences which could perhaps be later wrapped into some kind of extended story to the board: a saga, that was what I needed. A saga which captured the current perils but envisioned hope and heroism. Homer: bring it on.

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TBC...

DID you miss mini chapters 1?, 2?

Totally, Totally Global Inc., The Novel: mini chapter 2

Previously on Totally, Totally, Global Inc. Sales are down. Morale is down. 

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And me? Head of Strategy. The trouble is of course nobody likes strategy: it’s too hard. It requires thinking. They like ‘comms’. And they can ‘force’ sales. Although they don’t like the results much. That’s because they don’t do strategy.

Strategy requires you to slow down and think. It requires you to put down your phone for a while. It requires you to have some hard data rather than a portfolio of generalisations and one-off anecdotes. The buzz is long-term compared to the short-term of an ad campaign or ‘deal’ with a major client. And that short-term buzz so often results in painful discussions in the War Room on a bleak Monday morning. Bleak even if the sun is shining outside.

Tim Wrangling, CEO: So Hemel, things still don’t look good. Revenue down, profits certainly down and share slipping away from us. What’s the plan?

Hemel Hempstead, Sales Supremo: If I may go through a few slides I think I can cover off all of your points, Tim.

TW: Hemel, for once, just give it to me in a couple of sentences. Do we know what we are doing?

I left at that point. It was going to be painful. It was not that I was squeaky clean by any stretch of the imagination. Over a year ago at the critical off site I should have fought harder and longer to force the team to really, really decide what we were doing rather than generate just another inflated spread-sheet of sales figures. In the annals of PC history the story of what VisiCalc did for the Apple computer and business planning is oft told. But the ease of the modern spread-sheet dangerously allows any set of figures to be made to appear to work if pummelled enough.

TBC...

DID you miss mini chapter 1 ?

Totally, Totally Global Inc: mini chapter 1

Mini Chapter 1

No day was the same at Totally, Totally, Global Incorporated: the date on the schedule changed. And yet all days were identical: meetings, conference calls, e-mail fire-fighting and staring at screens which changed in size during the day; pretty small when you rolled out of bed; a little bigger on the train. Bigger still in the cubicle. And even bigger in ‘The War Room’.

Times staring at a screen were interspersed with standing in the queue for ‘barista’ coffee. In the queue we longed for the simplicity of their job: perfecting a piccino and learning the names and drinks of those directors who jumped the queue. And we knew the baristas longed for the spoils of our job: salaries, bonuses, job titles and gym membership; but perhaps not our actual job. In the queue was also where you processed texts from your partner about trivial issues (compared to Q2 Vital Indicators or Q2VI) such as your child’s school trip to the Air Museum, discovered what friends were pretending to do on a variety of social media and scanned the feeds and world of false news.

We spent a lot of time in the War Room these days as sales figures were never where they ought to be. Hemel Hempstead was the high-flyer brought in from the Munich office to ‘change the sales space’ as CEO Tim Wrangling had proclaimed at last year’s kick-off. Hemel’s main tactic was Trance by PPT; it was impossible to survive beyond slide 2. But today’s meeting was a crunch one.

TBC...