Aacckk! And, let me add, aarrgghh!

No, it's not Talk Like A Pirate Day. My peaceful world just erupted into drama and trauma. Seems that yesterday's complacency jinxed my little world.

Gidget was scheduled for a 7:30a.m. meeting today. She came out of it about 10 minutes ago. In tears.

I've known Gidget for 10 years. I've known her aggravated and even angry, but I also know that 90% of the time she's upbeat, optimistic, and bubbly. We've worked with and for some seriously difficult people but I've never known any of them to get her down.

Seems that Jason, lead Pot Stirrer of our ChaosManagement team, has given her two weeks to present him with a plan that shows she's able to take our internet marketing "to the next level."

I'm not really sure what that means. Because this group sold off about 50% of their locations last year, they have, obviously, 50% fewer locations available now to bring in business.* In spite of that (and the recession) internet leads are up 7% - 9% from this time last year. In any sane company, this kind of increased lead generation (in such an unstable market) would be cause for praise.

I didn't try to probe for a ton of details, of course, but she said that Jason isn't unhappy with the business leads being generated (well, how could he be?) but he's not sure she's the person to take things "to the next level."**

Anyhow. Long story short sort of thing, naturally I told her I wasn't going to stay if they canned her. She thinks I should, because I need the job (and she doesn't?). At least until her current free-lance company decides if they're going to move ahead with their big expansion plans.

A huge chunk of my brain just keeps saying, "the problem isn't in the internet marketing department--it's in the management team, and no changes they make to my corner of the building are going to fix their problems."


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* To illustrate in simple, round numbers:

Say the Argonuts had 120 locations last year. They sold 50, but Jason promised the Board of Directors that his "business development" team was going to bring on 35 new ones to replace the lost income.

They brought on 3.

The BoD is now, as you might anticipate, less than pleased with Jason.

Now consider that Gidget has been telling them since May of 2007 that she could not handle all the marketing needs of the company. She wanted them to hire her some help, someone to do the daily work, leaving her free for the strategic work. Instead, Jason and the ChaosManagement team decided to outsource work. They hired the Doodledorks, whose sales presentation must have been very impressive, and handed over the 50 biggest producing locations to them, to be managed by their automated software marketing management or whateverthehelltheycalledit program.

This was an abject failure--it cost a lot of money, never produced what it was promised it would produce, and annoyed the various location franchisees--which led to my hiring in February of this year. At this time, only 7 of the original locations are still with Doodledorks, with three threatening to jump ship at the end of this month. They and even the locations who left Doodledorks three or four months ago cannot stop bitching and complaining about what a bad decision it was.

So, not only is Jason under fire from the top for not producing what he promised, but a collective decision of the management team was a complete failure. He keeps hearing about it from various locations --while he's conveniently forgotten his own contribution to the decision. He frequently mentions that the "marketing department's decision" to hire Doodledorks was a major misstep.

Now that I've boiled it down for you, I can see it more clearly myself. She's been chosen to take the fall for all of the management team's mistakes last year.

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** My mind keeps fixating on that. What does it mean?