Next week I’m going down south, to a small town close to Linköping, the same city where my sister live for four years before moving to Australia. I’m going on Monday and will stay down there until friday and help one of my customers as much as I can.
There has been quite a lot of pressure from this customer the past month, and they want to get things sorted. We went down there two months ago for a workshop, which didn’t prove to be of much use.
Their CFO (chief financial officer) basically wants me to go down there and tell their people how to run a global manufacturing company correctly. How this is going to happen I don’t know.
He has so far presented three strategies. 1. Firing everyone and hire new people. 2. Stand behind them and hit them with a bat until they do things correctly and 3. Sending an outside consultant, with no experience of manufacturing companies or authority to tell anyone to do anything down there to sort things out.
Since number 1, making empty threats about firing them all proved unsuccesful and number 2. Is illegal, the choice came to number 3.
That idiot is me.
I suggested a fourth strategy. Listen, Learn, Communicate and Support.
This one was effectively stopped by threats of number 1 and number 2 presented by that same CFO when we were doing that workshop to increase co-operation and communication. The end results was thus not very good.
When someone with the aim of making something works starts a presentation by telling everyone that they are incompetent I really start wondering how they got their job. I do think that the C and the O in CFO should be dropped, because this guy obviously do not know what he’s doing.
The good thing about all this is that I’m going to stay at a nice hotel and get some time off from the big city. Staying on my own in a place I have only been a few times, just minding my own business.
We’ll see how it all turns out…
