The Boss
Today was the endof the month and the end of the quarter. I worked late because of this.
It’s been a long time since I worked late because of the end of the month. At least, if I was sick and would rather have gone home at any point during the day. It’s been a while since my boss specifically asked me to get involved with the end of month games. Actually I was working closely with the manager mentioned in my last post, both sharing the same pupose.
I’m not sure if I was supposed to be all along or what. My boss asked me what I usually did, so I told him: “Nothing.” If the orders get properly booked then they will ship and it will all be happy.
This month, though, it became important that we interfere. For months we’ve been working to get the majority of our product shipped from the distribution warehouse several states away, and we’ve had plenty of opportunity to see that we can’t easily decide to ship the product direct; it takes a considerable amount of intervention to pull this off. But this is what I was asked to do with everything I could get my hands on. I was also told to follow some exceptional rules in deciding which orders to ship.
I believe it is substantially and seriously true that we do not operate our business around the customer; we operate around the shareholder. Shareholders are the real customers of public companies and especially of the managment of public companies. In crunch time, it is not customer priorities that matter, but shareholder priorities.
I have a lot of trouble working for my current boss. I try sometimes to start off with an open mind and a positive attitude but if there is anything much going on he usually handles it in a way that disgusts me. He did it again today. I got this boss the same way I got my last boss whom I liked and respected: doing nothing. In both cases I was reorganized without my prior consultation and wound up with a new boss.
This happens all the time everywhere–getting new bosses, I mean. Promotion, firing, job hunting, retirment, politics in general; it’s vain to plan your career around a personality.