At what point did any of those four other people act like winning was the only viable option?

This ritualistic British “bollocking exercise” that followed is precisely what’s wrong.

The mainstream British media turns this kind of thing into a gratuitous orgy of platitudes and sentiments.

It’s extreme low effort masquerading as culture, in which nobody wants to own what they can control and nobody wants to aim at goals in order to win because that demands responsibility, preferring to blame the people they believe are controlling everything.

You know, like the idiot sandwiches who try to blame Gordon Ramsey for their messed up restaurants that he’s trying to get them to fix by acting like good food is a win people can appreciate?

Instead, the participants undermine Management by pretending everything requires a consensus decision rather than a situation that keeps momentum going, and more mistakenly, that Management has to put up with this default to consensus because it makes those people feel good about participating.

That you actually goaded these cretins to do something and that you ignored their sham democracy in action deeply offends these people because they’re losers who believe they’re not.

“We didn’t reach our goals. While things may have been better from the Management perspective, the truth is that none of you identified a single focus area in which you could push forward and get results quickly on Management’s behalf. Instead, everything bogged down because you thought every matter deserved group decisions. This means you have no initiative, no ideas, no beliefs worth talking about, nothing but squishy feelings and sentiments that masquerade as opinions, and that has failed the project.”

“Because you cannot take direction and you cannot take control of focus areas in order to get things done, Management congratulates you on your immediate termination and doesn’t wish you the best in your new endeavours.”

Whether you’d be among them should be debatable, BTW, but I’d say no because this is an incredibly teachable experience for Management.

Everyone who isn’t paying close attention to this emergent sham democracy technique for trying to control Management eventually gets to play the fool like this, but it’s a lot harder for people to get one over on you if you genuinely don’t give a toss whether they like you or not.

So look on the bright side: you now have four people after this whose calls you may safely ignore because they have no initiative, no ideas, no beliefs worth talking about …

I would not give any of these successfully covert losers the time of day.

Management by Objectives often produces absurd results, but Management by Outcomes often works.

“You see this graphics and fonts boy? YOU ARE A COMIC SANS PIE CHART FULL OF SHIT.” 🙂

No problem, I’m glad I could help you.

The major point that I don’t think I touched on much, is the one that you brought up about making plans and not executing. This is often due to “paralysis by analysis”. I have found that the people most heavily afflicted by this are always the ones who actually tend to succeed whenever they just get off their butts and DO SOMETHING. The reason we are afraid to take action is because we overestimate the probability of failure and underestimate the probability of success. We also tend to have very, very strong inertial tendencies – that is to say, it takes a LOT for us to get off our butts and do something – but once we start moving, we are hard to stop.

Thanks for taking the time to put all of this together.