When VPs Get Together
DAY ONE There’s this lifeboat with four VPs and one intern. Sounds like the start of a joke, but no, this is no joke. I’m starting this journal to help pass the time as we are afloat 100 miles or more from the Mexican fishing village of Vista de Muerte, where we left this morning.
I’m not the sort to place blame, but as the VP of planning, I tried to tell the others that we shouldn’t go out without a guide or at least a GPS system. But no, old Sam, Mr. Peppy, the VP of sales, talked us into “an adventure.” He said we should “sail by our wits.”
Well, within a couple of hours, we were sailing by our Jose Cuervos, and then a couple of hours after that, the boat hit something in the water and started taking on water, and we were lucky to find an old life raft and get it inflated.
DAY TWO We discovered that we have no food, water or other supplies, except for some rope and one aluminum paddle. Carol, the VP of human resources, has been coming up with versions of the old “teach a person to fish” bit, but the biggest problem we face, other than the sharks bumping the boat and eyeing us, is trying to agree on which way to pilot the boat.
We have four VPs and each one insisted on a different direction — north, south, east and west. The intern asked if he could break the tie, but we four agreed that such a maneuver would show weakness, so we declined his offer.
DAY THREE Our VP of IT, Curt, a large man whose skin has rarely known sunshine, is already beginning to blister over. He keeps trying to Google our position by “keyboarding” on a piece of driftwood. We’re all lost, but he’s more lost than any of us, if you follow me.
DAY FOUR Having failed in our attempts to catch fish, hunger was becoming an issue and decisive action was called for. We called a meeting, took a vote and unanimously agreed to eat the intern (having previously voted four to one on whether or not the intern got a vote). The others insisted that the young man tasted like chicken, but I said, no, pork. Either way, surprisingly tender.
DAY FIVE The arguments over which direction to head have grown more heated, but no one wants to be the one to give in. At least we’ve narrowed the decision to three directions, as the proponent of north, our sun-crazed VP of IT, has fallen into a kind of loud coma, muttering about “beta-fish testing.”
DAY SIX Carol, the VP of human resources, a woman who was quite cheery before moving into human resources, but who after just two years has started to mope about the office like a female Hamlet, attempted to divert us with some team-building exercises. We didn’t have much to work with, but she cleverly turned our little raft into a version of the “ropes” course she dragged us to last year.
For one exercise, two of us were to hold a rope tied about the waist of the third person, who was to stand on the rubber side and lean over. This was intended to build trust, and Carol volunteered to go first. Concerned about the knots I’d tied for her, I said to her as she climbed up, “I’m no knots man,” and she turned to me and said sharply, “Knots-PERSON.”
That act of glancing back was enough to cause her to slip into the water, where the sharks awaited. My knots-PERSONing skills turned out to be OK after all, for she stayed attached, but one big-boned VP of human resources with four or five sharks attached is startlingly heavy, and it turned into “The Old VP and the Sea.”
There was, however, good news to come of this. (You don’t get to be a VP without an eye for the silver lining.) The team-building exercise worked! The two of us — me, the VP of planning; and Bob, the VP of sales — created a new team bond and immediately broke the deadlock over which direction to head. He was south and I was east and we agreed, bingo, just like that: Southeast! We also agreed that when we get back to headquarters, we’ll build a permanent ropes course and name it after good old Carol.
Executive Summary We now have consensus and teamwork, and we have Curt as a kind of food locker, just in case. So we have a plan and a strategy. We have DIRECTION — literal and figurative. Now we’re getting somewhere!
(This ended the journal entries, which were found in an empty life raft two weeks after the group of five departed. All are presumed dead, but who knows? Perhaps somewhere in the Pacific there is now a new version of Gilligan’s Island — VP’s Island.)
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”
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