not yet. We’re here to have a very different discussion. One I hope is going to put that other discussion on permanent hold.” If I had been expecting a rousing cheer after my emotionally uplifting little speech, I would have been disappointed. All it earned was more blank stares.
“So you’ve got some ideas?” asked Stu. “Some new insight?”
“Not exactly,” I told them. “In fact, exactly not. I feel as if I know less than when I got here.”
“Nice, chief. Real inspirational.” Luigi could be a sarcastic bastard at times.
“Not to be negative, Will, but you’re looking at a group of people who have been busting their butts for three years now, trying to make this company work. Clearly we are out of ideas. Having us give it one more good old college try doesn’t sound like the path to success.” I preferred sarcasm to Alice’s more rational truths.
“I’m not questioning anyone’s commitment —” I started.
“— So you’re saying we’re incompetent,” Amanda finished.
“— and I’m also not saying you’re incompetent —” I continued, rolling with the detour.
Alice jumped in again. “Then you’re not making me feel better. If we’re not stupid, and we’re trying hard, the only other conclusion is that this problem isn’t solvable and we’re all on the next boat to India.”
“I think it would be Indonesia, Alice,” said Stu. “India is getting too expensive.”
“I hear Russia is the new spot for cheap outsourcing these days,” Leslie piped up. “Then, in another five years, the U.S. may be so economically depressed that this will be the place to be and we can all come back home.”
“Great,” said Stu. “If we can just hold on long enough, we’ll be the new developing world, and we won’t have to move the operation anywhere. Maybe that gives us some kind of competitive advantage . . . we can stay where we are until the crashing economy makes us competitive again.”
“People!” I interrupted, a little more shrilly than I’d intended. “At the moment, these are not things we care about. As I said, we’re going to stay right here and solve our problems.”
“Right, I forgot,” said Amanda. “With the new ideas that none of us have. Yes, let’s get back to that.”
I stood up and began to pace back and forth in front of the conference room whiteboard. “Not that I want to dwell too much on the good old days, but some of you were around when we dealt with the Windsailor crisis. Remember that? We didn’t know what we were doing then, and we managed to get through it.”
“Well,” said Amanda, “back to my point about ideas. Someone did have ideas then. You had that mystery consultant feeding us stuff.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ve been in touch with the same consultant,” I said.
Suddenly, the mood in the room brightened. “Really?” said Amanda. “Why didn’t you say that?”
I stopped pacing. “Oh, so now you’re all enthusiastic? Like I wasn’t bringing anything to the table? You need a consultant to get you motivated?”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “You already said you don’t have any ideas, princess. And we’ve been coming up empty for a while now. So yes, some outside perspective is attractive. I’ll try harder not to offend your delicate feelings in the future. But cutting to the chase, what has your guy got for us?”
I decided to put my ego aside, at least momentarily, for the good of the team. “She . . . uh, he,” I started, and then had a furious conversation in my head about gender, honesty, and the value in correcting a little white lie.
When Martha helped us with the Windsailor situation, I was worried my team might not find an eighty-something-year-old lady a credible source of sound management advice. I portrayed her as a man, let the team paint their own mental picture of “him,” and made sure the team never met her. I had never corrected their perception of Martha, and now I struggled momentarily with whether I should tell them the truth. Expediency won out: I had enough on my plate without facilitating a discussion about how my mystery consultant was my grandmother-in-law. So I carried on with the deception.
“He is suggesting that we need to go back to clearly defining our problem. He thinks we’re spreading ourselves out in too many places, trying to address what are fundamentally symptoms of the same issue, not the cause.”
Stu looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “He’s saying we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole.”
Mark Goldman, who had been silent to this point, upped his contribution significantly. “Huh?” he said.
Stu explained. “That goofy carnival game. My grandkids play it at the arcade. You plug in twenty-five cents —”
“Join the twenty-first century, Stu,” said Alice. “It’s, like, two bucks.”
“— you plug in your money,” Stu continued, “then you take this mallet, and mechanical moles start popping their heads up on the board in front of you. You try to whack as many on the head as you can before the time runs out.”
“The difference is you get some satisfaction from that game. Here, there are always more moles to whack,” Luigi lamented.
Mark must have had a late night, because it was taking him a while to get the concept. “So, in this case the moles are the problem?”
Amanda made a face. “Yes, Mark, the moles are the problem. You have a mole infestation in your house, or your barn, or wherever the stupid game is supposed to take place. You stand there like an idiot waiting for a mole to poke its head out so you can whack it. But you’re not addressing the real problem. You’re not going to get rid of the infestation by waiting for individual moles to appear and then whacking them. You’ve got to fumigate the whole house. Or nuke it, or whatever you do to get rid of moles.”
“Nuke it?” said Mark. “Wouldn’t that be a little extreme?”
“People!” I said. “As much as I love to wander off topic and relive my days working as a carny —”
“You worked as a carny?” said Amanda. “That explains some things.”
“— which I just made up for effect! Can we get back to talking about the actual issue?”
“I think we are talking about it,” said Stu. “We have a serious mole problem at Hyler.”
“And instead of using nukes, we’re dealing with the individual moles,” added Amanda. “We’re killing ourselves with the whacking, and we’re not getting any further ahead.”
“OK,” I said grudgingly. “Maybe we are talking about the problem. But it’s still an analogy, right? You’re not going to tell me that our issues come down to an actual mole problem, are you?”
“Of course not. Don’t be stupid,” snapped Amanda.
Her comment was followed by an uncomfortable period of silence. Finally I said, “Analogies are great, but sometimes it’s hard to understand what
