Friday, December 3, 2010

Well, all things considered...

Since some time back, our head office has been engaged in a bit of a struggle with a distributor in some regions. The distributors wants to keep selling our products according to the somewhat overly beneficial conditions in terms of transfer prices and term of agreement, that was granted them by a previous Vice President who since has made to leave the company, due to, among other things, deals such as this.

The new team took over with vigor and engaged the dealer in what they hoped to be constructive discussions but quickly found themselves in a confrontational situation with very little progress followed by a complete refusal to meet with the new team and the guy who was put in charge to sort things out with no conclusion anywhere in sight.

A senior management member of the company, ultimately in charge of this situation decided to jump in and go hands-on with the situation since he deemed that "personal chemistry" was a big problem between the distributor guys and the internal manager who had been in charge of negotiations with them. So he set up a new meeting with a new team from our company to try and sort things out.

After the meeting he sent out an e-mail reporting to the management team on how things had gone (which I eventually got forwarded) proudly exclaiming that "it was the best that we could have hoped for" (sounds promising, huh?), followed by "the listened politely to us and said that they would get back to us eventually".

As this partly affects our business, I had to fight the urge to not reply back in capital letters "NO THIS IS NOT THE BEST WE COULD HAVE HOPED FOR! THIS IS NO CHANGE TO THE PREVIOUS SITUATION, THE BEST WE COULD HAVE HOPED FOR WOULD HAVE BEEN A CANCELLATION OF THE OLD CONTRACT AND A NEW MORE REASONABLE AGREEMENT! YOU NEED TO TAKE A LONG HARD LOOK AT HOW YOU PLACE YOUR EXPECTATIONS!", but calm and reasonable as I am, I just kept my head down. A few weeks later I asked if there had been any progress but was told "No, I'm still waiting for them to get back to us".

If the best we could have hoped for was nothing, I'm curious how a bad scenario looks like in this guy's eyes...

3 comments:

ThePenguin said...

Can you provide any statistics on the volume of air which would have been sucked in through clenched teeth when all these negotiations etc. were taking place?

Chris said...

Did the ex V.P. mail that photo to your company as a "a ha ha ha ha ...fuck you!!" attempt? That would be pure genius.

Mr. Salaryman said...

Penguin - I would guess something around 76.5 cubic meters or so? Some of it was later exhaled orally and some was released rectally.

Chris - Well, he should've!

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