I've also found myself near the center of a number of poorly-conceived Vision of the Future meetings. Normally I dig Vision of the Future meetings, since it's a chance for Management to give us underlings direction and motivation. The focus of the meetings is We Need a Better Website, which I don't disagree with. Our online readership is, frankly, abysmal. From where I sit, the largest obstacle we're facing is that the website we have is just about as much [if not slightly more] than our current staff and organization can handle. If we want more, we need more staff and better organization.
I think we have two options. The first is that we can continue doing what we're doing. The website exists mostly as a byproduct of our daily operations, and as such, it really only needs a one-person web department and a small amount of cooperation from other departments. It is cheap and functional, and we're not going to go out of business if we keep it the way it is. If this is what we decide, I would only wish that we'd stop pretending small usability improvements and devastatingly grandiose gimmicks would magically net us a million hits a month.
The only other option I see is to 'go daily' online. We have 19 articles this week, and no new content until next Thursday. A certain competitor has 16 new articles today and more on the way tomorrow. And before you say I'm crazy to insist on nothing short of total organizational overhaul - Editorial is behind me on this one 100%.
So we seem to be having a meeting every week now. For fifteen minutes every Thursday afternoon, we have a premeeting meeting wherein we get our stories straight about what we're doing to follow up on miscellaneous ineffictive ideas. Then we sit at a table for an hour while the Boss shows us some keen websites he found, with the implication that we should be more like them [here
is a true, honest-to-God example; I wish I were making this up]. Then there's a tense fifteen minutes where we try to regroup in a secure location [which is difficult to do in a blind rage] and spend fifteen minutes calming down by deciding what we're actually going to do before the next meeting.It's fucking ridiculous, really, that we have to secretly plot how to be productive and organizationally successful.
- Z
I like the idea of bringing in an independent consultant. Especially if it's an efficiency consultant, who will best serve by distracting the management so the rest of us can get some work done.
Excellent job Z, I thoroughly enjoyed this entry!
On another note, sounds like you guys need to hire an independent consultant to go evaluate the situation.
Seems like every mac laptop I ever owned had some sort of horrible fatal flaw such as this, accept for maybe the powerbook duo which had a whopping 33mhz processor. It is the only mac laptop I still own. I am happy to say my sony vaio is still going strong after two years of daily use and abuse.