A Life in the Day
The CEO wakes with the dawn chorus – his wife and children still sound asleep. As he showers he thinks about the day ahead and wonders how he can keep the promises he made – he will have to finish early this afternoon to catch his daughter’s football game, and then rush into town to see his son’s ballet performance. There is no time now for breakfast, not even the coffee he craves, so he quietly leaves the house - even the dog is oblivious to his departure – and climbs into his car.
Driving through the empty streets he half listens to some American business guru talking about vision/leadership/mentoring and coaching/tipping points/NLP. He feels a rising sense of inadequacy as he realises he will never be able to apply the ideas to his own company. He’s so busy just trying to keep up that he never gets a chance to look around… and what on earth does Tom Peters mean by a “wow project” anyway? He wonders if his competitors are better organised, and more disciplined than he is. He suspects they are and feels even worse.
He checks his mobile phone messages and sighs as the forthcoming day’s challenges build to their usual crescendo. The new sales director he was counting on to enliven the company’s sales performance has decided not to accept the job offer. The sales target in the business plan was apparently “too ambitious”. Subtext - no confidence in the product or market. He’s not alone – the CEO is not sure that he’s got it right either. He clearly remembers the interview - how the prospective sales director kept asking questions about the company’s vision. That was embarrassing - the CEO knows he should be addressing this but, with all the drains on his time, the marketing director will have to sort it out. The CEO thinks, not for the first time, that he should listen to that tape on developing a vision. But how will he convince his staff that the ideas are worth implementing?
Meanwhile the HR director has 10 more candidates for him to interview; this week.
The agent helping to source the new office accommodation wants the CEO to view the latest building he’s found. The CEO wonders why he’s ended up with this particular task and comes to no conclusion. He knows that he is always the only one in the company with spare time – he just wishes he could find a way to stop the clock.
The order processing system has crashed again during the night and the IT director wants him to make a decision about starting the project to replace it. In thinking about the forthcoming conversation he wonders how the pair of them will reconcile their fundamentally different interpretations of the organisation, and its needs.
In search of some light relief, he tunes the car radio to Farming Today. Relieved that he’s not a farmer, he nevertheless empathises with the loneliness of their profession.
He parks his car in his space near the front door of the office building and, before entering, scours the area immediately in front of the entrance for signs of last night’s teenage rampage. Just a plastic bagful this time – must have been a quiet night.
Coffee in hand he reads his emails. Someone wants to sell his business for him, or possibly float it on the stock market. A stockbroker has all sorts of interesting funds in which the CEO could invest and make a killing. He drifts off momentarily, imagining a different life – a beach, a mountain, a desert, a country cottage, even time to play with his children. The phone rings and he snaps back into the real world. One day he may be able to turn his hard work into hard cash, but not today.
The call is from the lead venture capitalist asking about progress with raising the balance of the next round of venture funding. The lead VC has offered to put in 40% of the funding required, but only if the CEO finds other VCs willing to fund the remainder. The VC is disappointed that the new sales director will not be joining, and appears unconvinced by the CEO’s assurance that he will quickly find an equally strong candidate.
As he replaces the receiver, the CEO extracts the latest cash flow forecast from the pile of papers covering his desk. It doesn’t make for happy reading. If that big sale doesn’t close soon, he’ll be having a very different conversation with the VCs.
He stands up, stretches and looks out of the window. He notices someone hard at work in an office in the building opposite. The man looks up, they exchange a shrug- as if to say “are we the only mad ones?” - and the CEO finds himself wondering what it would be like to step into the other man’s shoes. They’ve never spoken but the CEO knows he runs the UK division of a US company. Drives a better car, wears smarter clothes but works much the same hours as he does and is often in at weekends too. The CEO takes a closer look and notices the other man seems pretty ashen-faced; perhaps working for a big corporate is as tough as being an entrepreneur. Maybe the two of them have more in common than he’d previously thought.
In fact the other man’s day started much the same as the CEO’s. But buried in amongst his emails was one from his US manager informing him that the US parent had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Suddenly he sees all of his hard work going up in smoke. He knows that his division is profitable but he also knows that, in times of retrenchment, it’s always tempting to withdraw from overseas markets. He fears for the future of his staff as much as for himself. If only there was someone he could talk to about this.
Well now there is. If they joined their local Footdown Fifteen group, both the entrepreneur and the corporate division head featured in this story would find: information that transforms the way they make difficult decisions; inspiration on the inevitable bad days; relief when, from time to time, they feel isolated.
 It’s about stepping back and looking at what we’re actually doing, rather than just continuing to do the same thing.
Michael Edge, Chairman – London and Country
Intrigued?
|
