Feedback

This has been a record day.  The bad news just wouldn't stop rolling into the offices today.  The printer has run out of toner again, but I know we just refilled it last week.  Someone is generating too many paper reports or stealing our toner or both.  This is unsustainable.  I am on the verge of banning paper from our offices altogether.  It should be easy since we are down to our last two reams anyway.  We need to do more to keep the trees alive.  I am forming a committee to discuss moving to a tablet based operation, but I can already tell that won't fly because tablets are not suitable for the type of serious work we do here at AcMo.  Plus, I haven't encountered a tablet yet that was fast enough to match the speed of our workflow.

Since bad news is omnipresent at AcMo, ignorance holds a special kind of bliss.  It allows us to keep operating even though we are stuck inside the jaws of defeat as they are rapidly closing on us.  I have been living under the haze of ignorance for most of my life.  It's why I can smile during situations everyone else is panicking.  This is not beneficial since I am now responsible for the fate of the AcMo empire.  If I can't recognize my limitations, I can't be an effective leader.  My faith in my leadership skills was rocked today when I discovered that some of the employees are not being honest with me because they are afraid of my reaction to bad news.  They should not have any concerns because most of the news we receive here is of the bad kind, just like the evening news channels.  If I haven't melted down yet, I'm not going to do that just because one more piece of bad news arrives.  Three more though might send me over the edge.

This discovery has made it difficult for me to trust my objective opinion regarding our excellent work, innovative, and sometimes revolutionary product lines.  All of our internal testing shows that every product we've produced has been well received, but the sales numbers don't correlate to the internal testing results.  We have failed to achieve critical mass in the consumer market despite our best efforts and liberal use of enticements and false advertising claims.  Up until today, I attributed that to a failure of the consumer to recognize quality products, but now I'm uncertain.  AcMo may start including product surveys in the packaging so we can recover honest, actionable feedback from the few who are using our affordable and intelligent products.  This requires additional thought, so I'm forming an exploratory committee to consider best brainstorming practices to achieve our desired outcome.

While the above discovery is bad enough, my conscious mind has latched on to a most disturbing thought.  It appears that we lost the client whose vehicle we road tested to and from the track last weekend.  The realization dawned on me yesterday that she must have fallen out of the car at some point during our return testing trip.  I hope she was not injured when she exited the moving vehicle.  I'm sure we would have heard about it by now if she had been hurt.  I can't figure out when it could have happened, unless she jumped while I was taking a nap when the vehicle was on autopilot.  I'm not sure how this will impact our business relationship, but I hope she continues using our services when/if she reappears.  We still haven't isolated the issue with her vehicle, but I feel like we're close.  We only need to accrue a few thousand more testing miles to isolate the issue.  A cross country road trip to multiple tracks should be sufficient.

I would like to spend the rest of the week planning said road trip, but there isn't a lot of time to rescue operations from this vicious cycle before we are scheduled to attack Omnicron Corp.  Due to security issues, I can't make that date known or even hint at when it might occur out of fear it will provide Omnicron Corp. with an opportunity to prepare.  We can't have that.  This has to be a surprise, which is why I am going to dedicate next week to identifying and silencing our mole.  I have been given some promising leads that will no doubt aid me in stopping the leak.

If the truth resides somewhere between what we think we know and what we actually know, I need to find it.  We are going to dedicate an entire department to determining the optimum manner to elicit honest feedback.  We tried using online forums for that, but it didn't work out well.  I would trust my gut on this, but it is too important to get wrong, and I'm always wrong.  I blame my gut bacteria for conspiring against my best interests.  I have been developing a system to transfer new and more intuitive gut bacteria to give me an analytical advantage.  I got the idea from some friends who work with next level technologies and have provided a gut bacteria intelligence test so I can raise my game beyond the pro realm.  It better work because I don't have time to waste on any more failed ventures.