a word from the head office

toward a new corporate restructuring plan

as it happens, this plan itself has been restructured in tree-death (printable) format

it has also been restructured into a tree-death (printable) format just for SCHOOLS, if you're interested, though you'll need to print the pages back-to-back and fold them into a cute little booklet; it's an arts-and-crafts feature to make it feel more "schooly"

The Head Office Restructuring Committee (HORC) was formed last year in response to the need for a new committee to be formed. Following the consumption of literally dozens of half-caff lattes and the general acknowledgement that a cohesive restructuring plan will never be created until managerial pig-headedness and office in-fighting is quashed (i.e. never), the Committee has prepared this booklet as a summary of progress. Presented largely in rhetorical-question-and-facetious-answer format, the Committee hopes you won’t notice the misplaced participle at the beginning of this sentence which implies that the Committee itself, rather than the booklet, has a format. If we’re an office anywhere near worth our salt, these grammatical mistakes will engender extensive and vitriolic staff feedback.
--The Committee to Openly Mock the Head Office Restructuring Committee (COMHORC), February 2008

The Committee will be guided by the following priorities when making decisions regarding restructuring, except in cases where we don’t feel like it:

1. Dedicate so much time to planning the restructuring that it is impossible to facilitate the creation of an office culture that values collaboration, reflection, and communication, because we’re all too freaking busy going to restructuring-plan meetings
2. Promote a greater sense of those things that make each office division pissed off at the others
3. Take advantage of corporate discretionary fund to go on frivolous fact-finding trips and “retreats” to nice local restaurants
4. Over-extend the use of all existing office facilities such that members of the office staff can butt heads as much as possible

1. Is the office going to move to a structure that streamlines and improves transparency?
Please. Streamlining and transparency are so 2005. If we’re going to steal a restructuring model from another company, you can be damn sure it will have a funky, hip descriptor (who has a “name” anymore, anyway?) with loads of corporate street-cred. Something like an Organic, Multi-Phase, Triangulating (OMPT) Restructuring Model, only softer to reflect the fact that we’re warm and fuzzy while at the same time getting across the idea that we are all about kicking the ass of other businesses. Maybe, “Fuzzy, Warm, Whole-Customer TimeFrame with Special Ass(everation)-Kicking Adjunct.”

In the meantime, you could call what we’ve been doing “investigating” types of restructuring plans, if by “investigating” you mean “having all our friends at other companies email, fax, and otherwise pelt us with whatever rubbish ideas their companies have been using to deal with their own structural inadequacies.” This has been very helpful in that it has proven to us that yes, in fact there are dozens of other companies around the world just as screwed up as we are.

As a side note, it turns out that the classic type of restructuring model, which involves focusing resources in areas of greatest market opportunity, is very unlikely to work for us. So expect to see this as the proposed model from the Head Office some time soon.

2. Is the Restructuring Committee looking at personnel, budget expenditures, and internal conflicts, or is it looking only at the office management structure itself?
As we’re sure you can imagine, it is very hard to look only at restructuring and also fulfil our mandate to get our sweaty little fingers into as many office pies as possible.

3. The process seems too fast—what can we do about this?
Lace up them running shoes, baby.

4. How will low-level office staffers be included in the process?
In much the same way that smoking is included in the life of a professional athlete.[1]

5. Will there be an approval process after the new restructuring plan is completed?
Our intention is to make you believe that your input is valued throughout the process. By the time the new plan is actually created, we hope to have had a number of occasions for you to say what you think while we sit and stare at you with empty smiles on our faces. After you have been thanked and your suggestions summarily ignored, we will leave to ridicule you behind closed doors. So no, genius, there won’t be a separate approval process.

6. If the new structure is profoundly different from what we currently have, how will staff be able to prepare for the change?
Even if the restructuring plan is finished in time for an adequate period of adjustment to take place, we plan to pack that time full of amusing time-wasters, which we like to call “professional development.” These will include visits from the top professionals in the field of corporate restructuring, people with “best-selling” books entitled things like All Work and No Play Means Johnny Needs a New Corporate Structural Model, and REST(rict)RUC(tions)TUR(n out)ING(enuity): Bringing Peace of Mind to Your Head Office. They will come with their pre-fab presentations, foisting their agendas and opinions on us by the roomful and trying desperately to jam our square realities into their round ideas.

People who agree with us will get to go on trips to offices in exotic locations to see how much easier it is to be happy with your office’s structural model when you work in an exotic location. In short, we will do exactly what we feel is necessary to alleviate our guilt about those people whom we’ve made unhappy with the changes. Then we will stop thinking about it.

7. What if the new plan appears to require a change in contracts or staffing levels?
This is a very sensitive issue, mostly because nobody likes it when we in the Administration say we are going to start “making changes in staffing levels,” a polite euphemism for what we in Admin more often call “cutting loose the debris.” You’d be really surprised the way people’s danders get up when the idea of losing their jobs rears its head. Go figure.

Because of this, we will never EVER talk about people losing their jobs, even when we have every intention of getting rid of them. Instead, we will continue our policy of passive-aggressive staff review and control. This is that thing we do where we don’t tell you, “You should have done this in that situation”; what we say is, “It’s interesting that you chose to do that in that situation. I might not have chosen to do that. But you did, which is interesting.” It’s also that thing we do where we don’t tell you what we think personally, but we tell you, “You should know that this is what people are saying about you.” Often we do this during formal job evaluations, which is great fun. You should see the looks on your faces when you suddenly think that you’re completely alone and everyone around you is talking about you and you don’t know who you can trust. It’s a hoot.

Anyway, we the Administration hope that breeding this fear and mistrust and self-doubt will cause those people we don’t like to quit of their own accord, thus saving us the emotionally draining experience of firing them. Oh, sorry—this was another planning question, wasn’t it?

8. What precisely, then, is the goal of the Committee?
The goal of the committee is to develop another bizarre-as-hell restructuring plan that reflects the narrow views of those random people involved in the committee and to provide ample time which will be largely wasted on excursions to theoretical restructuring conferences and to other companies who serve as exemplars of bizarre-as-hell restructuring. Bearing this in mind, the committee is striving for a January 2009 implementation date, with a proposed restructuring plan in place by September 2008. We know this is not enough time, but we don’t care. We will labor and delay for months, the restructuring plan will not be done until August—probably just before most office staff goes on vacation so that it will be presented to public outrage which will be frustrated and/or forgotten during the next two weeks, after which everyone will become overwhelmed by the end-of-the-calendar-year routine and won’t have the time or inclination to look at, critique, discuss and modify a restructuring plan. Then the Christmas holidays will roll around and a cabal more clandestine than freemasons will put the plan in place as a fait accompli for January.

Your Role
The committee is genuine in its quest to appear to want feedback from all members of the office community, particularly mid-level management. If we have time, we will make an effort to appear to want feedback from low-level staff as well. And lastly, from tech support. We ask EACH OF YOU to do three things:

1. Review the questions and answers contained in this document. Be distracted by the colored font. Ask yourself, “Why lilac?”

2. You will have time now during which you could prepare your own reports or read emails and other communications relevant to your actual job. Instead, spend this time examining the attached documents and any other stuff we throw at you. Consider how it would overturn your professional life if we decided to make our restructuring plan conform to one of those provided. Additionally, and most importantly, forget the practical issues associated with this plan. Rather, think “big picture”; practice talking about these restructuring models in broad, general terms. Use phrases like “workplace efficiency” in ways that never actually address either the workplace or efficiency.

3. Spend time going to long, drawn-out meetings where people are asked to talk about sensitive issues that get everyone riled up. Get riled up. Be assured that what you say will go nowhere. Become part of the negative undercurrent here at the office. Start sending hostile emails to like-minded thinkers swimming alongside you in the undercurrent. While you send these, notice that, on the office email system, new folders with attractive icons have been set up and dedicated to the controversial topics discussed in the aforementioned meetings. PAY NO ATTENTION to these folders—they are absolutely pointless, and frankly pretty stupid. The only people who contribute to these folders are sad losers who obviously don’t understand how this process works. These people are also compulsive committee-joiners and energetic do-gooders who will have the enthusiasm and joy beaten out of them in due course.

Your efforts in these matters will help make it easier for our confused ideological oligarchy to run the office unimpeded. We appreciate your understanding.

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[1] A dangerous thing that we’ll try to avoid, though we know we can’t entirely.