Dear Mister Whiz:
I'm a Junior Vice President for the formerly ethical investing firm of Pupkin Fufkin Gherkin Fife. (When our returns during the 2008 Fukushima level correction were only 17 per cent of the other New York investment houses, the board fired everybody in senior management and changed the direction of the company. Now, we buy and sell derivatives so complex Deep Blue couldn't figure out what they were, and it assured us that it wasn't calculating methods of replacing Alex Trebek while it tried! Just another Wall Street success story, I guess.)
The new managers decided to hold a team building exercise by commissioning the creation of a mystery room. The first mystery to be solved was where, exactly, the room was; it took them three months to find it on a corner in St. John(')s, PEI. Once that was accomplished, seven senior executives (including the CEO, CFO and head of Janitorial Services) entered the room for what was supposed to be a two hour event.
That was three and a half weeks ago.
Those of us who remain do not have the authority to enter the room ourselves, and wouldn't even if we did since we were chosen for our lack of initiative (the walls of our competitors' offices have been splattered with the blood of more than one executive who challenged a senior manager to a headbutting contest). Unfortunately, senior management left no instructions for what to do in this situation.
What should we do in this situation?
The Biz Whiz:
Everything should be fine as long as you don't press the red button on the side of the room.I didn't even know there was a red button on the side of the room. Oh, you're right - there it is. What is the red button for?
The Biz Whiz:
Ah. That's the button that may or may not release a poison gas into the room depending on the calculation of a random number. If the poison gas is released, it will kill everybody in the room; otherwise, they will be fine. This is corporate America's version of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. As long as you don't open the door, the executives are both dead and alive, a unique state sometimes referred to as "quantum management."
The fact that this has gone on for three weeks complicates matters. It is possible that some of the executives have...gastronomically liberated the potential energy of the others. In this case, the number of potential survivors in the room is seven to the power of...a lot. You could feel free to refer to this as "fuzzy quantum management," or, at least, you could before I trademarked the phrase. Now, it'll cost you. We could, of course, create a quantum array in order to map all of the possible combinations of living and dead, or we could pointlessly speculate on the power relationships between the people in the room.
Do some of the executives strike you as more culinarily likely than others?Well, Agronium Pifflethwaite seemed like a very unlikeable person in the brief time that I worked with him. If I understand you correctly (and, frankly, I kind of hope I don't), he would be a likely candidate for...you know. He's a small guy with not a lot of meat on his bones, though, so I'm not sure he would be the best candidate for...I'd rather not think about it.
In any case, that doesn't really address my problem: should I do anything about the situation?
The Biz Whiz:
If you're the sort of person who isn't good with uncertainty, you can open the door and find out what's going on in the room. If the team is still building, you may or may not be fired - quantum uncertainty seems to permeate businesses at every level of organization. Perhaps the most important question is: how is the company doing in the absence of your senior executives?Quite well, actually. Short term earnings are up and our clients seem quite pleased with us.
The Biz Whiz:
In that case, you might want to give your executives another few weeks to sort things out themselves.
The economy is too important to be left to economists! If you have a work, financial or otherwise money-centric question, quiz the Biz Whiz at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. For those of you who have come late to the party (sorry that the crab cakes have all been eaten and the champagne is somewhat flat), a mystery room is an area that is constructed with built-in puzzles that lead to the solving of a mystery (often how the hell to get out of the room). If you didn't know that, this whole article would probably have been all Greek derivative formulae to you. Sorry about that.