John Hultberg, "Road Through the Labyrinth" (1979)
John Hultberg, Road Through the Labyrinth (1979)
Can a Game Be Literature?

Mark's Pages

February 11, 2010:

Confusion, mayhem, chaos.

Office phones won't dial out. Participants are dropped from Internet meetings; screens don't share. Decisions aren't communicated; teams are uncoordinated. No two people have the same vision.

The company's proprietary technologies frequently fail. Implementations are incomplete; existing features are brittle. Errors are common and go uncorrected for months.

Senior management lives in a happy bubble where strategy is simple and progress guaranteed. Puzzled, their interventions often begin with the word "just", as though in their world all paths are short and clear and unencumbered.

The company has struggled for a decade through peaks and valleys of effort, promise, and potential. The veterans have seen vision and strategy mutate wildly over the years. Offices and staff have come and gone, sales have crested and declined and rebounded as new products are dreamt and half-built and abandoned. There's general skepticism which anticipates failure and layoffs: keep your head down, don't accept responsibility, you'll remain standing after the inevitable downsizing.

It's not possible to fix these problems without changing senior management.

It's time to leave.