It was a quiet day in the office at Global Blancmange, the silence broken only by a mass choir of frenzied marketers next door, booming out songs about blancmange for the company’s new radio campaign.
Sally Gulliver and her tentative new ally, Helen Brown, the CFO, are standing at the window in Sally’s office, meditatively looking down into the atrium below. Helen sighed. ‘It’s as if we care about all the wrong things.’
‘It’s pink, it’s neat, you could eat it in your sleep, it’s blancmaaaange…’
‘How d’you mean?’ I have noticed Sally Gulliver’s tendency to elide syllables before. I do not approve.
‘Well, you see how many times you get into rucks with other leaders about things which, if they’re broken down, simply make no difference to how the company actually performs. Who does what; or how we do this. The passion’s there, it’s just misdirected.’
Helen Brown’s perfume was quite strong. I could feel a sneeze coming on. Sally seemed to sense this and gently pinched one of my leaves, which seemed to do the trick.
‘What d’you think we should be talking about, then?’
Blancmange won’t be around forever.
Helen shrugged. ‘Well, blancmange won’t be around forever. Maybe we should think about expanding our ideas a little more? Also, what do we actually stand for? Is it just the pink, wobbly stuff, or could we be so much more than that?’
‘Blancmange: it’s the future of our woooorld…’
Sally’s eyes twinkled. I could see she was genuinely excited by such ideas, which I never would have suspected from a card-carrying sceptic like Helen Brown.
‘Listen, Helen, I didn’t join this company for any other reason than to try and make it better. Better profits, better people, better ways of managing our people. ‘Scuse the HR textbook, but that’s why I’m here. I’m going to draw up a plan setting out how we might do that. I want you to have a look at it first, make sure I’m not talking a load of semolina. OK?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, OK.’
At that point I sneezed. ‘Do excuse me,’ said Sally, immediately. She’s a smart cookie, that one. ‘It’s the only thing that can give meaning to your liiiiife: Blancmange….’
Sally closed the door behind Helen, grinning. ‘So, Bingleby: after all that, what conclusions have we come to?’
I paused for a moment and then pronounced: ‘People in Marketing can’t fluffing sing.’
Next Friday: The Plan to Improve the Company Overnight
@BinglebyinHR
Bingleby was confiding in Richard Goff
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