Not some new form of layered management, merely a tribute to the power of calories and to being nice.
Being nice to people is not the most highly valued job skill. Let's face it, there are plenty of jobs in which you have very little contact with people or where being nice can be negative.
One of the K-landnews contributors, known as a self-effacing person in an environment where self-effacing is equated with meekness and is a career killer like no other, told us the following story out of software la-la-land.
We had just acquired a small foreign company, and our directive was to help align their product, get the revenue flowing if you will.The overall conditions of cooperation were favorable, given that we had been using them as an OEM.
The acquisition had been uneventful for both parties, not one of those shotgun weddings or badger cull takeovers you hear so much about.
Besides the administrative aspects and the technical integration, meeting our counterparts in person was high on the agenda. My work at the time cut across all product components, so I was one of the first to get to go.
Things were going well, it was fun. After a few days, I noticed how cake or small pastries tended to appear in the kitchen area. As expected, they were brought in for such occasions as a birthday or one of the local young developers getting their computer science degree.
I promptly put myself in line and went to the corner bakery the next week to get three or four cakes. Everyone enjoyed the gesture and the cakes, which prompted the chief of our delegation to buy another round of cakes the following week. Before we headed home to the US, the next group of folks from HQ arrived, and we passed the cake baton, if you will, to them.
Notwithstanding our initial claim that this post was simply about calories, it turned out that there was an important management lesson.
Years later, when the branch VP came to the US to meet our newly anointed HQ management, he happily praised me in front of them for having started a cake tradition. Our new HQ chiefs did not take kindly to this. We could see their bewilderment and even disgust on their faces.
It was soon confirmed that the new chiefs at HQ could only think of one thing when it came to cake: let them eat cake.
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