Head office visits game earns a chuckle but brings home bonus

Apparently visiting clients is important. At least that is what some management consultant back at head office has told everyone.

This concept, that we should have meetings with our clients, was seen as so clever and such a good idea by the board that the CCC programme was put in place a few months ago. CCC stands for Compulsory Client Communication. The plan is basically that all managing directors are required to pay a visit to the head offices of their top five clients before the end of the year.

This sounds sensible enough, and probably not something that needed to be mandated. But as a reflection of how out of touch our management are, they have not only made it mandatory but also put in place an automated system to check that we are doing it.

Each day I get an e-mail informing me, and every other managing director, that I have not completed my client visits and that if I don't do so, I will not be paid a bonus. Oh, yes, in addition to a draconian method of imposing the CCC programme on us, there is an unbelievably disproportionate penalty for failure to comply.

My biggest problem with the CCC programme is that the clients that I have failed to visit are not at their head offices. They are right here in Hong Kong working on a deal with me. I have attempted to explain this to my own bosses back in head office to no avail.

Some people might say that if head office doesn't think I know how to manage my own clients then they should just fire me. Some others might say that rather than wasting time and money flying all over the place to comply with the CCC programme, that the managing directors should be focusing on doing deals. Some might even say the problem with outside consultants is that they are bound to come up with tedious ideas like this because their whole existence depends on the assumption that they know better how to run our business than we do.