Corporate Bullshit

This past two weeks has been tiring, exhausting even. It has been the pinnacle of corporate bullshit, politics and time-wasting. The new financial year has started, and with that comes a huge amount of planning for the financial year ahead and setting of targets for our sales colleagues. Every year we go through the mammoth task of analysing past performance, predicting future performance, and balancing the two to come up with a target. Every year management completely ignore our suggestions and say “I want 6% growth on actual”. And yet, every year we live in hope that they might listen to our rationalisation and give us a reasonable target. Alas, that is not how sales works.

A few weeks ago, that mammoth process kicked off again. Spreadsheets with thousands of line items were created, computers put to their limits and nested IF functions were used that are so complicated they’d make a CPA qualified excel-guru cry. The hardest part though, is pitching it to management. The lowly analysts (that’s me and my trusty Finance colleague, let’s call her, Amber) understand the pitch inside out because we’ve spent weeks working on the data, understanding the inputs and building a case for the adjustments. We get an hour to pitch it to my boss to prepare him for his half hour pitch to his boss. Some people (Amber) get very stressed about this process, however I know that they will ignore our suggestions and ask for that trusty 6%, so I don’t get too caught up in it emotionally, professionally is another thing entirely.

This year, the pitch to my boss for the data was scheduled for a day I had annual leave. I cancelled the annual leave day to make the meeting because I’m the world’s most dedicated employee of all time. My boss didn’t show up for the meeting and Amber spent the whole meeting being confused about what we’ve just spent four weeks working on. To say I was pissed, was an understatement.

The meeting with my boss was rescheduled for yesterday. Amber asked for a pre-meeting the week before to prepare her for the meeting. We had the pre-meeting, but Amber wasn’t ready for it, so instead she spent the whole meeting being confused about what we’ve just spent four weeks working on. So, Amber asked for another pre-meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Guess who wasn’t ready for that meeting either? We scheduled a final pre-meeting meeting on Wednesday. We sort of got there. She was comfortable, I was resigned to a lifetime of eye-twitching caused by all the eye rolling I’d done. Finally, yesterday, we had the meeting with my boss to prepare him for his meeting with his boss. At this point I have attended five pre-meeting meetings for the meeting. My boss asked for a final pre-meeting meeting between him and I, to prepare him for his meeting. I closed my twitching eyes and tried to think about how much worse my life would be if I worked somewhere else.  

Eventually, my boss was prepped and tottered off to THE meeting that all this effort went into. Guess what happened at the meeting? Management asked for 6% growth on actual and all our work (and meetings) was essentially worthless. But don’t worry, my boss now wants to meet with another section of management to discuss what that target would look like. So I now have a pre-meeting meeting with Amber so we can prepare her for the pre-meeting preparation meeting with her boss before he meets my boss.

Just fucking kill me now.