Melbourne

@StudChud Even though I'm not directly in his department (thankfully!), I am affected by his decisions.

I mentioned to a colleague today: "Have you noticed <manager> has a habit of springing decisions on people, and not taking things into consideration even if they have been explained to him?"

She said yes, and gave me some of her own examples.

So it has been noticed by people — although unfortunately the people who he answers up to are new in the role as well.

Earlier today, I was in a meeting with <Manager> and some people from the business sales team.

Marketing had wanted to run an end of financial year promotion for business customers.

<Manager> overruled them and decided that they should instead run a discount campaign aimed at consumers. (It's a small team that doesn't have the resources to do both.)

(This despite the fact that he said himself a couple of months ago that he wanted to focus more on business sales.)

(<Manager's> idea is the stupid campaign they don't want to do.)

I explained to the sales team that because the consumer discount campaign was happening — the one marketing doesn't want to do — there wouldn't be a promotional campaign for business.

This apparently hadn't occurred to <Manager>, even though it was clearly explained to him. (I was in the meeting when it happened.)

"Well, ummmm, maybe we can do both?"

And then this afternoon I had a meeting with a colleague. One of <Manager's> brilliant ideas is for her to cross-promote a product from <Manager's> division with a product from another division.

"Okay, well before you go too deep into this, you might just want to be aware that the IT systems in <Manager's division> aren't integrated with the systems from the other division."

She gives me a mildly horrified look. What do you mean not integrated, she asks?

"Many years ago, <Manager's division> used to be a completely separate organisation. So it has its own separate IT systems. That means its own customer database, its own accounting package, its own content management system. Many of the platforms are different to the ones the rest of the organisation uses.

"*Nothing* is integrated.

"IT is planning to eventually move everything across to the same systems, but in the meantime any data that you want to move from one system to the other has to be done manually.

Her face dropped as she realised her workload was now at least triple what she had expected. Why didn't <Manager> tell me any of this?

And that's a very good question...