There have been several kerfluffles around my office recently, all revolving around the same issue: What do you tell your boss and when? This would seem to be a simple question, but it’s not. First, it depends on the boss. Some guys (and in that category I, as always, include women guys) want to know nothing until it rears up and bites them in the butt, and then you should have told them. Others want to know what color tie or scarf you’re planning to wear next Thursday. And the target moves. On Monday, Chet may want to know everything. On Tuesday, you can’t rouse him from his slumber.

So what’s a poor employee to do? Take this quiz and see how sensitive you are. How you score may determine whether or not you have a future. 

1. You have a big party coming up and you’re trying to decide what canapes to serve. Do you tell the boss? 

a. No, that’s ridiculous. 

b. Of course! She likes to know every little detail! 

c. Not really, except I make sure to have those little empanadas she likes so much. 

2. You’re going on vacation next month. Do you tell the boss?

a. No. My life is my own! 

b. Of course. He likes to know every detail. 

c. I’m going to check the dates to make sure it coincides with his vacation as much as possible, but in the end I’m going to do what I have to do, making sure that he and his assistant know what my plans are. 

3. You’re going to have a meeting with a bunch of people about something that may or may not happen sometime in the future. Do you tell the boss? 

a. No! I’ll tell him about it when he needs to know. 

b. Of course. I don’t floss without telling him everything. 

c. Yeah, I’ll shoot him an e-mail, just an FYI. Some people are attending who may mention it to him and then he’ll feel like he’s out of the loop. He hates that. 

4. Your division is about to make a big deal with another company. It’s going to be announced next Tuesday. Do you tell the boss? 

a. I’ll tell her Tuesday morning. You know, give her a “heads-up.” 

b. I’ll tell her about the whole thing right now, before we even talk to Law and Public Relations. She’s going to want to go over this thing from top to bottom! 

c. I’ll get all the moving pieces started, and then dial her in, probably on Friday. That will give her the weekend to go over the paper and think about what we might have missed.

5. You’re getting a divorce. Your life is a shambles. Do you tell the boss?

a. Definitely! He’ll feel really sorry for me!

b. I’ll mope around until he asks me what’s wrong. Then I’ll tell him everything. For a LONG time. 

c. I’ll mention it. Since it’s not about him, he’ll have limited interest in it, but he ought to know in case I flake out a little bit in the coming months.

SCORING: Score yourself 1 point for every a. answer, which is a low score because you’re a really stinky communicator and a bad employee. Score yourself 2 points for every b. answer, because while you’re a suckup, you’re erring on the right side by reaching out and trying to make your boss aware of things. You’re likely to be a pretty big pain in the a**, though. Keep that in mind. Score yourself 3 points for every c. answer, because you’re clearly trying to address the issue with subtlety and modulation. You may not get it right every time, but you’re trying to play it a situation at a time and neither tell too much or too little. So good for you. 

As always, the higher you score, the higher your score. Give yourself a point for trying. Trying counts.

Everybody hurts. The Hindenburg is imploding. We’re up, we’re down, we’re up, we’re down. And nobody knows what’s going on. Oh, the humanity!

As the machine creaks to earth spewing hot gas, those who rigged it up to blow continue to do their jobs to help it do so. When things looked good, they honked their horns and smashed their drums and marched down the Street like hopped-up tweakers at a perpetual Mardi Gras. The Dow at 36,000! There’s no downside in YOUR COMPANY HERE.

The street musicians, drunks and satyrs have awakened to the smell of a dark and rainy morning. So now they perform as required. The Dow at 5000! There’s no upside in YOUR COMPANY/SECTOR/ENTIRE ECONOMY HERE. 

The analysts do their part. They come to work every morning and have to do something between breakfast, lunch and drinks. So they write their reports on every company in their sectors. YOUR COMPANY HERE is down! Revenues are flat! Boy, do they stink! Of course, yes, they’re part of the larger market, and the economy is sort of in free fall and the bears are running through the street eating all life forms in their path… but YOUR COMPANY HERE must be singled out. Why? Because it’s their job to single out YOUR COMPANY HERE. If they didn’t, what would they do all day?

The business reporters fall in line as well. They come to work every morning and have to do something between muffins, burgers and beers. So they cover the analysts who write the reports on YOUR COMPANY HERE, and the graphics guys work up their charts, which all look like a snowboarder’s dream, and yes, they put in a paragraph somewhere in there about how YOUR COMPANY HERE is part of the larger market, part of its segment, part of the meltdown of global capitalism, but they wouldn’t be doing their jobs unless they took apart YOUR COMPANY HERE when it was time to do so. And don’t forget the headline writers. In an atmosphere where it’s too depressing to read the stories, this is their time to shine.

Finally there are, of course, the guys who finance the deals. They’re taking the bailout money and working working working to count it, stack it, sock it away for an even rainier day. So no credit from them, nohow. No credit, no deals. No deals? What’s there to talk about? YOUR COMPANY HERE.

So wherever you go, there you are. Nobody can say we’re not all working as hard as little beavers.  At this point, however, maybe we should ask ourselves a question: wouldn’t we all be a lot better off if a whole strata of the infrastructure of investment capital simply knocked it off for a couple of months and let the fumes clear? Chewing away at our jobs as usual doesn’t seem to be doing anybody any good.

Yesterday we laid the groundwork for a major, strategic acquisition of a very attractive, synergistic and complementary property that is geographically contiguous, has plenty of upside and, for the most part, speaks the same language.

In that regard it is worth noting that up-front costs could be largely offset by an almost immediate divestiture of what is basically an independent, free-standing entity within the acquired corporation: Quebec. While not trading at a very high multiple, its sale or spin-off could generate significant equity and rid the new corporate entity of lingering legacy and cultural issues. There are many potential suitors for what is clearly a very attractive property, the most obvious being France, which is still smarting from its loss in the French and Indian Wars and has a high-profile CEO in search of global profile. Other tactical post-merger actions to rationalize high upfront costs abound, but will be discussed at a later date.

I would like also to offer at this juncture, before proceeding further, my thanks to those of you who weighed in so far with your thoughts and alternative suggestions. Some were patently facetious, while others drifted into issues pertaining to execution that must await subsequent installments of this strategic plan.

As always in the pursuit of any focused acquisition discussion, alternate scenarios do suggest themselves. Most notable has been the notion of setting our sights not on our neighbor to the north, but our amigo to the south. In that regard, I hasten to state that, in my opinion, the acquisition of Canada does not preclude the development of plans pertaining to equally intriguing possibilities involving Mexico, the former proprietor of vast segments of our current asset base, including Texas, California and most of the Southwest. In my view, however, one must put the cart before the caballo. Large global corporations get themselves into trouble when they overextend their holdings, as any study of Rome, Britain and Time-Warner (TWX) will tell you. This is not to say that a hemisphere-wide master strategy might not lie somewhere down the road. Right now, however, let us keep our eye on that which can be achieved in the near and intermediate term.

We have already looked at some of the global issues facing the current incarnation the corporation, which is now more than 230 years old and still functioning rather well for a mature organization. Day-to-day leadership of the entity has floundered recently, but as we all know it is difficult to sustain the quality of management over time, and on the bright side we can state with some assurance that the underlying power structure is still rather robust, and the class that operates it firmly entrenched in power regardless of who is sitting in the corner office.

Still, recalcitrant issues exist that would almost instantaneously be addressed by the proposed transaction. On a somewhat more granular level, then, let’s look at just a few:

• Need to expand customer base/sales territories: The U.S. frontier is a thing of the past. Even the depths of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana are crawling with identical strip malls and high-end boutiques. Look at a map. There’s a lot of Canada up there, most of it in desperate need of consolidation and branding. It is, quite literally, as big as all outdoors; similarly, there are many, many small to midsized urban centers in need of large glass boxes and roads leading to them. The existing corporation has the capital and the know-how to get the job done. All we need is the land and the customer base to justify the expansion, which in our view would be almost instantaneously accretive;
• Limited natural resources: Once again, the acquisition offers an immediately solution to this problem. Oil is, quite literally, seeping out of the ground up there, and there is a wealth of other minerals, lumber and, of course, wind;
• Stagnation of culture: Perhaps most disturbing about current trends within the existing corporation is a “been-there, done-that” mentality and a certain calcification of the spirit of adventure, unlimited opportunity and entrepeneurial drive that made us great not only in our own estimation but in the mind of the world as well. This corporation is viewed now — internally and externally — as increasingly insular, hostile to new recruits to the enterprise, and set in its ways. Canada is, in this sense, far more congenial to some of the core cultural issues that once defined us. They have cowboys, for instance; real ones that actually have something to do more with cows that with guitars and funny hats. There are innumerable other existing synergies that speak to the ease with which integration of the acquired party could be effected, including consistencies in language, cuisine and even pop music, where Canadian artists routinely pass themselves off as American without fear of reprisal.

There are other operating gaps in the corporate fabric that this acquistion would address. Lest the benefits be perceived as purely opportunistic or lopsided, however, it must be recognized that the acquiree would benefit from the deal as well. For its part, the acquisition target needs capital, infrastructure and some sense of what to do with the enormous acreage at its disposal with which, frankly, it’s done very little for the several hundred years of its existence. This lag could quite naturally be laid at the feet of its original stewards — the French and British — but the entity has been essentially on its own as a free-standing corporation for quite some time and there’s really no excuse for all that wasted space.

With so many compelling arguments in favor of the potential acquisition, we must at the same time allow that there are also powerful contradictory trends and considerations that must be addressed as well. Before we arrive at a discussion of conceptual execution strategies, then, it is incumbant upon us to do so. 

Next: Roadblocks and other barriers to entry.

I was talking to my friend Stu the other day, which you’d think would be an everyday thing because we work in the same shop, but it’s not. Stu is mostly virtual and whatever there is of him that is real doesn’t converse much. Which doesn’t mean to say he’s silent, because he’s anything but. He’ll talk your ear off a mile a minute, only dipping into the world of listening for odd moments before taking off into the ether again. Which is not a bad thing. Stu has more ideas in a nanosecond the you or I do in a nanoyear. So I always listen.

Anyhow, he’s in between a few other things on the line and we’re talking about stuff I can’t even remember what it is because it’s all going by so fast, too fast, in fact, for the Boomer Brain, when out of the great mosh pit of his mind I hear him say something like, “Hey, I gotta go, but I had this idea it’s just a crazy phrase that came into my mind but how about this…” Then he pauses for an imaginary drum roll and says: “A social network for dead people.”

That’s what he said. A social network for dead people. Then he hung up.

Now, you know, at first I just thought this was a funny idea, which it is, of course, completely ridiculous, but if you just give it a minute to sink in…

… a social network for dead people…

Let’s look at it for a minute. As a marketing concept.

First of all, is there any real difference between a virtual person and a dead one? A virtual person does not really exist, even though it can do a bunch of things from buying virtual real estate to engaging in virtual conversations and exchanging virtual fluids. It can, in short, do only virtual things. READ MORE