To the huddled masses of men it was as if the God of war himself had stage-managed the scene. As the thunder of the guns died away, a light breeze suddenly sprang up and began to carry away the clouds of smoke obscuring the battlefield, revealing the massed ranks of Pickett’s legions as they marched in perfect order towards the Union line. ‘Here they come’, ‘here comes the infantry!’, came the nervous cry from the Yankees as the restless tide of men began to…
 
“Dionysus!?!?! Did you get all that down?”

The thundering voice of my CEO dissolved my day dream in an instant and brought me crashing back into the weekly appraisal meeting with a resounding thud. Sensing that I had not been paying attention, my CEO’s mood darkened and he gestured towards my hastily scribbled meeting notes.

“Dionysus, I hope you’ve minuted the discussion we were just having about our marketing initiatives!” As his gaze alighted on the sheet of paper in front of me, I could see an expression of puzzlement begin to work itself across his face. A brief and unpleasant silence ensued.

“What the hell is that diagram you’ve been scribbling?” he asked in a menacing tone, gesturing towards the chaotic mass of coloured boxes, arrows and blobs at the bottom of my pad. With horror I looked down and realised he was talking about my ‘grand strategy’ for the 3rd day of battle at Gettysburg, which I had been idly sketching for the last half hour. This was a situation that called for quick thinking. 

If Guantanamo Bay were to provide a suggestion box for the general public I would suggest requiring the inmates to hold weekly appraisal meetings. As any office worker knows, these protracted affairs are the most effective form of torture known to man, with the added advantage that they leave only mental scars. At the latest time possible on a Friday afternoon I and the rest of my team had shuffled in despondently to take our places in the company’s meeting room to go over this week’s total lack of progress. As the hours ticked by the air quickly became saturated with carbon dioxide, body odour and waffle. The laboured gurgling of the ineffectual air conditioning unit provided the soundtrack to this sorry scene; a noise which was initially irritating but became curiously soothing as time went on and my grip on reality became more tenuous.

My meeting notes had begun sensibly enough, with a couple of scribbled sentences on marketing strategy and a rather cryptic note which read ‘requirement to assess strategic priorities’. This obviously meaningless phrase been written in an attempt to deceive myself into believing I was paying attention. Realising it hadn’t worked, and with my imagination yearning to escape from it’s corporate imprisonment, I cast my mind back to 1863 and my ‘strategic vision’ began to fall instinctively into place.

As my colleagues continued their monotonous conversation I began to draw the Gettysburg terrain. A few measured strokes of my biro and I had sketched a rough outline of Cemetery Hill, Cemetery Ridge, Culp’s Hill and the Round Tops. This provided the setting for Robert Lee and George Meade’s opposing armies, which I depicted as a series of shaded boxes menacing each other from opposite sides of my pad. The combatants in place, it was time for the hostilities to ensue. This I chose to represent though a series of threatening arrows which snaked their way towards the Union positions. A little unsatisfied by this, and deciding the scene was in need of some gruesome decoration, I sketched in an emaciated stick man with his limbs cruelly severed by a passing cannon ball and sent into orbit around him. Feeling rather pleased with this motif, other stickmen, in various states of decapitation, soon joined the melee of boxes and arrows intermingled with badly drawn puffs of gunsmoke. War is hell, even in only two dimensions.

Now, with the fixed stares of my colleagues boring into me like razor blades and my CEO about to explode, it seemed that my desperate act of escapism was as ill fated as Pickett’s charge on cemetery ridge.

“I…I was just trying to sketch out a few ideas” I stammered unconvincingly.

“Oh really!”, my CEO exclaimed, “well then you should share them with us; we’re all ears”

There is a part of the human brain which appears to have evolved to enable organisms to produce bullshit at times of great peril. At this moment, just as I was beginning to give up hope, this long dormant component sparked into life and prompted me to begin speaking.

“I’ve been thinking through the situation with the affiliates and I don’t think the current arrangement is working” I said with a somewhat fragile confidence. This seemed to improve the atmosphere slightly so I endeavored to continue. “We need better co-ordination with them at all levels and we need to ensure our account management staff are chasing up our partners on a weekly basis”.

“Here”, I pointed to Hill and Longstreet’s bloody assault on Meade’s left flank. “Here we need to take a decision-focused approach and leverage our partners in the southeast and the midlands. They need to be making direct contacts in the broker market and following those up with the key decision makers in order to deliver on our contracts”.

Despite the fact that much of what I had just said was complete gibberish, it seemed to temporarily appease my colleagues. Luckily, they didn’t seem too phased by the fact I had chosen to illustrate my account management strategy with trails of headless corpses and gunfire.

“And what exactly is this part here?” my CEO asked, leaning over and pointing towards General Ewall’s ill-judged attack on Culp’s hill; a seething mass of arrows and scribbled gunsmoke. Beads of sweat broke out on my brow as I struggled desperately to think of something plausible. To my horror, my self-preservation mechanism appeared to have gone on a cigarette break. Mercifully at this point our head of operations poked his head round the door to inform us that the direct debit system had failed again and launched yet another raid on our customers’ bank accounts. This was met by much swearing and cursing and afforded me a precious few moments to think. By the time their attention returned, I was ready for them.

“I think there is a good growth opportunity for a similar arrangement in the institutional market” I said, gesturing vaguely towards the bloodbath of stickmen at the foot of Culp’s hill. “I think the best thing would be to sweat our existing contacts and get them signed up to a similar referral model”.

My CEO scowled briefly and turned back to look at my pad.

“It’s a two-pronged approach which should generate significant revenue potential and put clear blue water between us and our competitors.” I added, in a final, desperate bid to reach safe ground.

“You know Dionysus” he said, scratching his head in some bewilderment “this sounds like it might be the right direction to go in but I’m not sure if I understand it completely. Do some research and turn this into a proposal and we’ll talk about whether this is going to work strategically at the next meeting”.

I had reached safety, but it had been a close run thing. For a few moments, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, but this quickly shifted into dark despair. I was now going to have to spend the next week turning the Battle of Gettysburg into a 5-page marketing proposal.

I think it was Plato who said that ‘only the dead have seen the end of war’. Alas, the same is true of Friday meetings. It is all too easy to give in to the urge to daydream and procrastinate but, if you must, keep your wits about you, and make sure you are able to retreat in good order, if needs be.