Today at SML, I attended a management strategy session. This was largely unheralded as the input of middle managers into strategy (or to be honest, even simple business decisions) has previously been deemed as unnecessary – paternalism all the way!

Unusually for these things, we had a really excellent facilitator and I think there was genuine surprise amongst some of Hecate’s acolytes that those of us outside the fortress are not the utterly unreasonable and incompetent monsters that they had rather been lead to believe.

I found it quite cathartic to give some very frank feedback about the massive organisational (top-down) dysfunction – heartening to realise that pretty much everyone had very similar views. Whether there is a way forward is the question, but even doing non-tokenistic, very simple Management 101 stuff is a good start!

In other SML news, the very insolent and utterly incompetent Vern-Percy and Mrs Vern-Percy are expecting another baby. I suspect this means that he will never voluntarily leave now.