Let me tell you a quick story. Shortly after I got promoted to deputy account executive, Don and Mary held one of their “state of the company” meetings. These were opportunities to bring the entire staff together and share non-binding information about company objectives. In theory, they were a good idea. Everyone who worked there was siloed in their individual departments, and there was never enough direction from the top to demonstrate that we were all on the same team. Unfortunately, neither Don nor Mary was especially committed to these quarterly affairs and, as a result, they usually happened about twice a year, and only after someone with some influence began asking for one.
This one was especially memorable for me. Because of my recent promotion I had been trying to think a little more strategically about what I did for a living. Where once I had simply done as I was told because I trusted those above me to lead us to success, I realized I had now reached the position where that responsibility would fall squarely to me. Anticipating needs and working proactively within company policies to provide the services necessary for true client satisfaction—that was my job; said so on the new position description I had signed. But I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do it. So, when the meeting agenda was circulated and I saw DEFINING OUR VALUE PROPOSITION in big bold letters across the top of the page, I was hoping to get a few ideas.
I remember the multi-purpose room was already packed when I got there. There were about a hundred and fifty employees in the company back then and there weren’t nearly enough chairs for everyone. The room was used for training and other large projects, and had a lot of modular furniture, which had been arranged in a tremendous U-shape along three walls, a row of chairs set immediately before a row of long, narrow tables. It was the only way to accommodate everyone, and like the good little sheeple we were, we had sorted ourselves according to size, the shorter folks sitting in the chairs, the medium size people sitting behind them on the tables, and the tallest employees standing in the back. It created a kind of amphitheater effect, as if Mary and Don were rehearsing for an upcoming tour on the dinner theater circuit.
And when they appeared it was like performers on a stage, bounding into the room like the hosts of one of those old variety shows, bursting with enthusiasm to tell their waiting audience about all the great acts they had waiting in the wings. I know that this was, in fact, a performance for them, something they needed to rehearse and psych themselves up for. Neither one of them was naturally gifted at this kind of thing. It was probably one of the reasons they always waited for everyone to be assembled before making their appearance. Having to mingle with the masses before delivering their practiced talking points was likely to throw them off their game.
I won’t go into too many specifics about what was said. These meetings tended to drone on with friendly platitudes and soft focus PowerPoint slides—a formula guaranteed to lull even the most restless agitator to sleep—but true to their agenda they did spend a few minutes talking about what they perceived as the company’s value proposition—what made it different in world of similar organizations providing similar services.
Here’s what Don said. I remember it precisely because I wrote it down on the legal pad I was balancing on my knee. He said the company had a sense of institutional presence for its client organizations—a responsibility that transcended the individual desires of the client volunteers. From this perspective, the company was the steward of the very social purpose of each organization it served, with accountability for the fulfillment of its organizational vision.
That probably doesn’t mean anything to you—just more of that corporate gobbledygook. But it actually meant a lot to me, because in those words, I heard Don describe exactly the kind of company I wanted to work for. Our business was turning vision into reality, but that vision wasn’t some boilerplate slogan about maximizing shareholder value. The vision I focused on was that of my client organization—a nonprofit whose mission was focused on making positive changes in the lives of real people. That was why I had come to work for the company in the first place and now, a dozen disappointing years later, in the most unlikely of settings, I found myself shamelessly re-inspired by words Don Bascom had memorized from one of the pages in his bulging policy binders.
And then Mary opened her mouth, and with every word she spoke I felt my spirit plummet back into cynicism and frustration. I think she thought she was agreeing with Don, but the words coming out of her mouth were in direct opposition to the vision he had just described. The company’s value proposition, she said, was best realized when we kept the volunteer leaders of our client organizations happy, when we delivered a service level that surpassed their expectations, and when we showed them how much we loved working for them.
Now hold that thought and let’s fast forward to the day after my phone call with Eleanor Rumford. As promised the overnight package from her office arrived. I don’t know what I was expecting after her dire warning the previous day, but nothing could have prepared me for what I found inside. Not just every page but practically every line of the program had been corrected in the red ink of Eleanor’s small and precise handwriting.
Some things were legitimate typos. Others I could fairly chalk up to her prerogative as planning committee chair. But so much more seemed purely stylistic in nature. She had reordered paragraphs and re-worded sentences—not to correct false information or add essential details—but simply to change the language so that it said exactly the same thing in a slightly more formal tone.
And then there was the punctuation. Nearly every presenter had some kind of designation after their name—PhD or MD or something like that—and Eleanor, for every single one, had inserted periods between the letters. PhD had become Ph dot D dot, and MD had become M dot D dot. She hadn’t just written a note at the top of the first page saying that periods should be inserted in all the professional designations. No, evidently not trusting us to catch them all, she had painstakingly drawn little red dots in a thousand places.
I couldn’t believe it. The woman was insane. For a time as I sat flipping through the more than three hundred red-marked pages, so scored with corrections that a blind person could have read them as Braille, I thought maybe someone was playing a trick on me. But then I remembered how gravely serious Eleanor had sounded on the phone, and how persnickety she could be about appearances, and I knew she would never be part of such a prank. She was the planning committee chair for this conference, and its success was ultimately a reflection on her professional standing.
So my first stop was Lily Rasmussen, the twenty-something in Desktop Publishing that Susan had been working with. She was one of those creative types—hired more for her skill with a Macintosh than her business sense, and everything about Lily was gothic black. The heavy eyeliner, the fingerless gloves, the draping sheer fabric—everything, of course, except her pasty white skin.
“Alan,” she told me. “This is too much. These edits should have been made at the drafting stage, before the text was given to me. It would take me a week to fix all of this.”
“Can’t you do some kind of search and replace?” I asked, thinking about all the periods in all the PhDs.
Lily shook her head, her Aquanetted shock of black hair not wiggling a bit. “In Word maybe, but the program’s not in Word anymore. Once we import it into our desktop publishing software, all future changes have to be made by hand.”
That didn’t sound right to me, but I knew it would be hopeless to question Lily about it. It was well known that she would sometimes spend half a day chewing on her tongue piercing while looking for the right font to use, and she usually chose the one with the most curly cues on it. Instead, I took my problem to Jurgis and threw myself on his mercy. He was in charge of IT. He could get things done. But I couldn’t just order Jurgis around—not if I wanted my network passwords to keep on working.
“I don’t know what Susan was doing or how there could be so many changes this late in the game, but we simply have to make these edits before the program goes to print.”
Jurgis had the program laid out on his immaculate desk, and was slowly turning the pages over one by one, his rheumy eyes scanning the red marks.
“I talked to Lily, but she said these changes couldn’t be made in Desktop Publishing.”
A bushy black beard covered half of Jurgis’ face, obscuring any clues his expression might have offered as to what he was thinking. Looking into his face was like staring into a bird’s nest that had fallen out of a tree.
“Are you listening to me?” I asked impatiently.
Jurgis placed a finger on one of the pages he was studying. “There,” he said.
“What?” I asked, craning my neck to get a look at what he had found.
“She’s wrong,” he said in his thick accent. “She wants to change ‘comprised’ to ‘composed’, but ‘comprised’ is correct, no?”
I didn’t know and I didn’t care. “Jurgis, look at me.”
He looked up, his eyes like two nuthatch eggs in the nest.
“I need Desktop Publishing to make these changes for me. Lily says it’s not possible, that she can’t even do search and replace on some of the universal edits. Is that true?”
Jurgis shook his head. “No, but DP can not make these changes. The designers are not capable of this kind of keystroke. That’s why our policy requires material in final form before submission to DP. One or two changes, okay—but this? No. Lily would spend week on it and only fix half of problems, and make twice as many more.”
“But these changes have to be made,” I said desperately. “If Lily can’t do it, can I get one of the Education staff people to work on it?”
Jurgis looked at me as if I had spat in his vodka. “What you mean?”
“Caroline’s got some free time. How long does it take to learn the publishing software? If we put it on her computer would she be able to make the changes herself?”
“There are no spare licenses. It is illegal to load software on new computer.”
“Then she’ll stay after hours and work on one of the computers in Desktop Publishing.”
“No,” Jurgis said quickly. “I think you should talk to Don.”
I was trying to avoid that step if I could. I knew company policy said DP was to be run as a profit center. But they billed clients by the project instead of by the hour, so the more time a designer spent on a project the less money the company made. If that was what Jurgis was hung up on, I didn’t see how I was going to make any headway with his boss. Don, after all, was the one who wrote the policies.
“I don’t want to talk to Don,” I said pointedly. “I’m talking to you, Jurgis. Can’t you help me out with this thing, just this one time?”
Jurgis folded his arms across his chest and his face went back to its unreadable mask. It was done. Now he would simply sit there and stare at me until I got up and left.
I scooped the pages angrily off Jurgis’s desk and began walking towards Don’s office. I saw him about halfway there, his bloated form barreling down the hallway like a runaway train, and I knew it would be a mistake to talk to him. He had designed the company’s counter-intuitive desktop publishing function. If you wanted it to produce work of good quality, you had to give it all the details up front and not surprise it with any changes. But if you wanted your client to be happy with its output, you had to show them what DP had produced and give them the ability to make changes. The brutal inefficiency and impotence of the exercise was awe-inspiring. If I was Captain Yossarian then Don was Colonel Cathcart and there wasn’t going to be any way past his Catch-22. I needed a new strategy and I thought I knew what it was. Giving Don an acknowledging nod as we passed each other by, I made my way down to Mary’s office.
Ruthie was sitting at her desk just outside Mary’s open door, typing something into her computer at no more than ten words a minute. I tried to catch her attention but she told me to shush as her fingers continued to hunt for the right keys. I stood and waited patiently, the sheaf of misaligned papers tucked under my arm, knowing it wouldn’t serve my purposes to rush her. While I was waiting, Mary poked her head out of her office.
“Ruthie, you’ve got that done, yet?”
“Has it been ten minutes?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not done. Come back in ten minutes.”
Whatever Ruthie was working on, it must have been something Mary had sprung on her at the last minute. Ruthie could occasionally get testy with Mary, her indispensability offering her some immunity in these situations, but she rarely did it in front of other people. When Mary looked self-consciously around and saw me standing there I decided to take my chance.
“Can I get a few of those minutes?”
“Why?” Mary asked. “What is it?”
I held up the dog-eared and post-it note-ridden ream of paper. “It’s Eleanor.”
There was the barest of pauses as I watched Mary’s eyes bounce back and forth between me and Ruthie, as if torn between two equally compelling tasks.
“Take him inside your office,” Ruthie commanded. “This isn’t going to get done any faster with you two chit-chatting out here.”
Inside Mary’s office, sitting at her conference table, I told her the whole story. The phone call from Eleanor, the arrival of the program, Lily and Jurgis’ reactions to it. She listened intently, and then motioned for me to show her Eleanor’s copy of the program. I slid it across the table and watched as she began to flip through it. Her head started shaking almost immediately.
“Why did Susan even send this to Desktop Publishing? Look at all these changes. It clearly wasn’t ready.”
And here was the opening for my new strategy. “I’m not sure all those changes need to be made. Look at this,” I said, pointing to a reworked paragraph. “She’s not correcting anything here. She’s just moving some of the words around. And what about this?” I said, flipping to the section where the presenter names were listed. “What about all these periods in the professional designations? Do we really need to add all of those? We haven’t put periods in our designations for as long as I’ve been working here.”
Mary looked up at me with a puzzled expression, and at the same time Ruthie appeared at the door and moved swiftly into the room. She had a FedEx envelope in one hand and a printed document on company letterhead in the other. Mary quickly moved Eleanor’s program aside and Ruthie slipped the document under Mary’s nose. She began reading it as Ruthie went to retrieve one of Mary’s favorite fountain pens from her desk.
I knew better than to try and read the document Mary was proofing, or even to give that appearance, so I averted my gaze and found myself staring for a few moments at the hideous lapis lazuli globe Don had given Mary as a congratulatory gift upon her ascent to the presidency. It was a monstrosity of executive indulgence, sitting in a place of honor by her windows, a fixture in the track lighting above adjusted to illuminate its reflective surface. The thing sat in its own mahogany frame—great blue oceans surrounding continents comprising nations carved from thirty-seven different types of precious stones—and a small, leather-bound log book hanging from a golden chain, in which the proud owner could index the demographic statistics of each country and place a little checkmark next to the ones they had visited. As far as I knew, like every other book in her office, Mary had never even opened hers.
The scratching sound of Mary’s pen drew my attention away from the globe. Mary was handing the document back to Ruthie, telling her it was good, and reminding her to get it in the drop box in the lobby of the office complex across the street before the four o’clock pick-up. Ruthie nodded in obedience and left us alone in the room.
“Mary,” I said cautiously. “Can’t you call Eleanor and talk to her about some of these changes? Even just the periods? If we could skip those, we might be able to have Desktop Publishing fix all the others.”
“Desktop Publishing can’t fix any of these errors. You have to do it.”
“What?”
“I’ve already discussed it with Don. It’s against company policy, but it’s what we have to do to keep Eleanor happy. He’s talking to Jurgis now, and Jurgis will set you up on one of the computers in DP. It’s an embarrassment how badly Susan has bungled this, but Eleanor seemed quite relieved to hear that you would be taking responsibility for it.”
“What? Wait a minute. You talked to Eleanor?”
Mary nodded. “About an hour ago. She wanted to keep me in the loop, and commend you for taking this on. She’s got a lot of confidence in you. Good work, Alan.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was so stupefied by what she was telling me I wasn’t sure I was even thinking straight. Here I had been confident that I could somehow convince Mary to negotiate Eleanor down from her ridiculous position—to get her to agree that what Eleanor was asking us to do was little more than a distraction and not mission-critical—and instead I discover that Mary had actually been conspiring with Eleanor to make me do all the useless work. I feebly tried to argue that Lily, or maybe even Jurgis, should make the changes, since they already knew the software. But Mary tossed that idea easily aside—taking me ever so briefly into her hushed confidence to confess that neither Lily nor Jurgis could be relied on to do such detailed work—and in a few minutes I found myself dismissed from Mary’s presence, my one chance to object wasted on something that hadn’t even made her think twice.
Based on what Don had said at the state of the company meeting, I thought my strategy should have worked. The reality was that fixing things that weren’t broken—just because your planning committee chair said so—didn’t serve the social purpose of the organization. It stroked an ego, and it kept people busy, but that wasn’t what we were supposed to be in business for. My mistake was not realizing that Mary didn’t care about that reality. All Mary cared about was keeping Eleanor happy.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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