I recently discovered this ancient email draft and thought it was a pretty amusing example of why life in the corporate world can be very painful if you work with nutters. This documents a meeting of little consequence at the company where I used to work (certain details and names have been changed to protect people I wish I had never known). There are many run-on sentences here (what was I thinking? Obfuscation by bad grammar?). Anyway, turn off your inner copy editor and take a peek:
Hey Boss
I wanted to give you a heads up that you may be hearing from the Jerk (A VP) regarding some meetings organized by the Marketing group. I was not invited to this week’s meeting yet received a frustrated phone call from the marketers at 2:07 asking me where I was. I obligingly rushed over to the conference room upon receiving their call.
These monthly meetings were apparently set up last year by The Raving Lunatic (a manager), as a way of sharing end of period info with sales and marketing. Oddly, she never seems to include us on the invite.
On Monday mornings at the end of the Period, Marketing gets their financial reports from their financial analyst. On Tuesday at 2 pm, The Raving Lunatic has a meeting with her team and the marketing business partners (so she claims). She asks for explanations of sales trends (declines/increases). She usually seeks very specific info. For example, which accounts declined and why. For Chain Stores, this isn’t too difficult. For our group, it is much more of a challenge, as you know.
Given that we do not have similar meetings with our group, there is no way for me to anticipate her questions and have answers before her meeting on Tuesday.
Today’s meeting was particularly disastrous. I was the only Business Partner who showed up (after the frantic phone call). The other two were in meetings. None of us had answers for them because we did not know which accounts they would be asking about (the questions are very specific to failures with sales). They simply expected us to come to their meeting anticipating what they needed from us. They had never supplied, at any point, a comprehensive list of questions or even an outline of what they wanted to discuss. Additionally, they do not seem to consider the structure of our group, and seem to think of it in terms similar to Chain Stores.
The Raving Lunatic was difficult and confrontational. As the only Business Partner at the meeting, I was put on the spot from the moment I stepped into the room. At one point, after I explained that getting her the information she wanted within 1-1/2 days of her receiving her numbers was close to impossible considering the fragmented nature of our team, she said, “Well, we might as well adjourn this meeting!” When I asked for her to look at her numbers and give me questions to ask the team, she responded that wasn’t possible either. She told me that there wasn’t enough communication between the groups, that’s why they had set up the meetings. She spoke as if she did not have any data. I argued that our data was available in many places that her team can access, from SAP to Oracle. I recommended she take a look at the Big Report (a weekly financial update) so that she could come up with questions before her deadline was only hours away and she turned into a werewolf.
At the end of our very brief meeting, in which out of the ten people in the room, I was the only one who was put on the spot and yelled at, The Raving Lunatic loudly said, to no one in particular, “Well, I’m going to have to leave another voice mail for the Jerk and tell him that this just isn’t working!” She then dismissed the group. All of us looked at one another, shocked at her behavior.
So what happened? I didn't send the email -- I hoped the whole thing would go away and I wouldn't need to CYA. It didn't, unfortunately. The Raving Lunatic called my boss and told him that I needed "coaching" -- and offered to do it herself (guess she was off her meds that week)! I was dumbfounded but knew that a protest on my part would, in the mind of my boss, constitute an admission of guilt. Well, eventually The Raving Lunatic screamed at one too many at the company and was "let go". Unsurprisingly, it took a regime change to make it happen. Her boss, The Jerk, found it easier to let ne'er-do-wells stick around...so when he left, many of his old managers were swept out. My takeaway? Regime changes can be fun -- and are frequently the only way that the bad ones get their due...
