Visitor. 3/14/2006
The following is a old post, which I have edited for anonymity, somewhat. The previous version of the post had real names, and it was turning up in the search engines.
Just got word that WN., the chairman, will be visiting us on site today. Probably to hand out pink slips. He’s a cool guy, always ready with smile and a “How are you?” I don’t know what it’s going to be like today though.
The infighting and politics at his level in the organisation that I work for are incredible. 12,000 employees, spread across 4 continents, in 20 different countries. And he is responsible for them all, including, as I was informed today, being on the board of the parent company that owns this one, making it a total of some 20,000 people, all of whom look to him for leadership.
I’ve seen some examples of their bitchfights at boardroom level. Not pretty. The amount of power these guys wield is incredible, affecting the lives of thousands of people. One wrong statement, mistakenly implemented by a director or manager down the line, can have unimagineable consequences.
One example of this, which I experienced directly, was when a decision was made in the home office in Europe, to close down the company that I work for. WN. wanted the company to continue, S., another of the directors on the board, didn’t. And S. and WN. don’t particularly like each other. One of them is responsible for engineering, the other for medical services management. And S. saw the capability in this company, and possibly wanted it for himself, to expand his empire.
Things came to a head when the main contract ended, and I was sitting in the meeting, watching these two men argue it out. F., the Financial Controller, was taking a neutral view, although professionally he had to fall on the side of S., for financial reasons. The company was now becoming a drain on the mother company, and push had come to shove. So these two guys, right at the top of the company, were bitching about it, in German. Which no one in the room knew I understood.
And then F. stands up, and tells the room, in English, that he had received a projection of revenue from one of my senior colleagues, also in the room, and he said that the numbers were surprising, and if it came to pass, the company would be viable for another 10 years. S.’s jaw dropped at hearing this, because he had no idea of what we had been planning at the bottom level to keep the company going.
WN. smiled triumphantly at hearing this, and S. stormed out of the room, swearing blind that he was going to get on the next plane back to Vienna. F. looked at me, and gave me a grin, and whispered to me, in German, “Sometimes these guys are like kindergarten children.”
Which left me dumb struck for a moment, because I had never spoken to any of these guys in their mother tongue, and I wondered how the hell F. knew that I would understand him.