Regrets

[Guest post by Chickenman.]

This is the best depiction of a bad meeting that I’ve seen. If you’re not fluent in business you might miss the subtext so I’ll explain it below the video.

Probably you can tell all of them know they have been doing some bad stuff they never should have done. Probably you can tell that the boss wants to get out in a way that hurts the company least, and that the analyst’s manager says that would be bad because it would hurt a lot of others.

What you might miss is that the big boss isn’t saying “Cause them extra harm so that we get off better.” What he’s actually saying is that “No matter what, almost everyone is going to lose almost everything. There is absolutely nothing we can do at this point to stop that. The whole ship will go down, there is only one lifeboat, we can use it now or else the lifeboat also goes down with the ship and nobody gets to use it in the panic. So let’s use it.”

Which makes it a lot harder to call his decision here, now, in this clip, wrong or evil. The wrong thing was getting started down this road in the first place. Now that you reached the dead end there are no good choices left.

Mr. Chickenman has, half by accident and only half on purpose, been avoiding roads like this. Once you have gone down the road, the end the boss chooses here is the most right thing you have left to do. And that is a damnation all on its own.

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