Modern business adventures
Short stories of techno-optimistic folly
The following stories (except the first one) are (barely) exaggerated & fictionalised versions of real situations I’ve witnessed.
Scene: a boardroom in Kansas City, late 1990s
CEO: Our sales have been declining for the past 3 quarters. Clearly, we need to change our strategy. I’ve arranged this workshop to brainstorm on ideas.
CMO: My team has been interviewing our customers over the past month. Their feedback is unequivocal: parents are worried that our cereal contains too much sugar. My suggestion is to revert back to our old recipe and packaging, and launch a brand campaign emphasising our heritage as honest purveyors of a healthy breakfast.
CEO: But when we reformulated our recipe, sales spiked.
CMO: Yes, kids loved the new flavour. But consumer sentiment has changed: people care much more about nutrition now.
CTO: If I may offer an alternative?
CEO: Yes?
CTO: We could start selling our cereal on the internet.
CEO: How does that work?
CTO: We build a website. People go online and order cereal, like mail order — but from the future.
CEO: Interesting…
CMO: Literally all of our sales are done through super markets. No-one buys cereal from catalogues.
CTO: This will change. The internet is the future. Look at pets.com. Their sales are sky-rocketing. It’s the dawn of the digital era.
CEO: Yes, I read about them this morning!
CMO: I really think…
CEO: Wait, he’s onto something. I know people like our new recipe. I feel it in my gut [points to his gut]. We just need to make it easier for them to buy our cereal.
CMO: It is easy! You just have to walk into a store!
CTO: I just need $10m to set up an office in California. Trust me, we can make this work.
CEO: Done. If the choice is going back to how my grandfather used to run this company, or being part of the future, well gentlemen, it’s an easy choice.
The CTO relocated to Palo Alto, where he spend $15m setting up the company’s internet division. He sold 23 boxes of cereal before spinning off the division, which he IPOed as ‘Clickflakes’. He’s currently a thought leader on Web 3.0.
Scene: the CEO’s office, London, 2005
CEO: Thanks for joining guys. John, I have good news for you. Mike here has a solution that will help you turn around our profitability.
CFO: what is it?
CTO: Two words: big data.
CFO: What do you mean?
CTO: I am talking with some vendors who can help us crunch our data in ways we’ve never imagined before. It will help you understand why we’re losing money.
CFO: I know why we’re losing money. It’s because we’re selling products below cost.
CEO: That’s our strategy. We need to gain market share.
CFO: Okay, fine, but that’s why we’re losing money.
CTO: No, you don’t get it. Big data will help you unlock synergies, spot emerging trends, maximise ROI, and uncover new insights.
CFO: What kinds of insights?
CTO: Well, for example, it can help you pinpoint which products lose the most money, so we can do something about them.
CFO, to the CEO: If I told you which products lose the most money, would you let me increase their prices, or stop making them?
CEO: No, no, I can’t do that — already our prices are too high compared to what the Chinese are selling.
CFO: But then I don’t see what value such insights can add.
CEO: Okay, I hear you. Let me mull it over.
CFO exits.
CEO: John clearly doesn’t get it. He’s stuck in the past, no imagination. I’m afraid we’ll have to let him go. There’s a young man about to graduate from LBS, who’s specialised in analytics. A true visionary — I think we need to bring him on.
James joined the company upon graduation. He put together some beautiful slides on how Big Data can streamline inefficiencies in the supply chain.
Scene: an auditorium, NYC, 2015.
HR: Thank you all for joining this lunch-and-learn session. Dave from the data team will be talking to us about the power of A/B testing.
Data scientist: thank you. Let me start with a question: what do you think will happen to our conversion rate if we let customers pay using Paypal on our website?
Audience member: it will go up?
DS: Good yes! Exactly. No-one could have predicted this with any confidence, but last month we ran an A/B test, and we confirmed with statistical significance that yes, conversion and sales will go up! Let’s try a harder one: what do you think would happen if we started publishing our customer’s purchases, with their names and all, on our blog?
Audience member: … they’d complain?
DS: Right again! Thanks to A/B testing, I can confirm that 90% of customers will complain if you publish their purchase history! Okay, one more: what would happen to our profit if we gave away our products for free?
Audience member: … we wouldn’t make any profit?
DS: Yes! Maybe you should join the data team, ha ha. You’re right, we tested this and found out that revenue would drop to 0 — actually, I’ve never seen this before in my career, the p-value was practically 0.
Dave ran thousands of A/B tests over the following years, proving, among other things, that users don’t like being cussed, that adding BNPL options to checkout impacts cashflow, and that Cambridge graduates are morally superior to Oxonians.
Scene: Soho House, 2018
Founder: Hi guys, I thought to arrange this investor briefing here, less stuffy than our offices, ha ha. So I have exciting news. You’ll be glad to hear we’ve been hitting all our KPIs.
Investor: Great to hear! What’s your ARR?
Founder: Oh, we’re not generating revenue yet. But we have more and more users sining up and creating profiles.
Investor: But they’re not buying coffee from your platform yet?
Founder: Not yet. But we’ve also struck a partnership with a vendor who’ll help us integrate a blockchain to our platform.
Investor: What for?
Founder: It will track and guarantee the origin of the coffee beans we source.
Investor: Don’t you know where your beans come from?
Founder: We do, but this way it will be tracked by a distributed ledger at source.
Investor: What does that achieve?
Founder: So when users log in, they can can scan a QR code, and download an app, which then lets them scan a QR on the bags of coffee we sell, and the app will tell them where they were sourced.
Investor: Can’t you just list the source on your product listing?
Founder: Yes but with blockchain the users will know they can trust it.
Investor: Don’t they trust you? Anyway, is lack of trust in the source of origin that’s stopping people buying?
Founder: You don’t get it. Everything’s on the blockchain now — people don’t buy things that don’t come with NFT certifications of fair trade supply chains.
Integrating blockchain to the platform did nothing to boost sales, but it did increase valuation by 10x.
Scene: Zoom call, 2025
Global Products finance manager: our AI model predicts sales growth of 8% in EMEA next year — so that’s what we’re setting as a target for your region.
EMEA finance manager: I’m gonna have to push back on that — our AI model predicts 6%, so there’s no way we can deliver 8%.
GPFM: I’m sorry, but we gave our model revenue over the past few years by region, client, and product, and we’re pretty confident in the output.
EFM: Well we gave it revenue by country and product, so it’s more granular — predicting growth at the country level is more accurate.
GPFM: Region-customer is more granular.
EFM: Country-product is more accurate.
GPFM: Region-customer.
EFM: Country-product.
EMEA GTM manager: Sorry to interrupt, but does the model tell us where the growth will come from? We don’t have any new products in the pipeline…
GPFM: No, no, that’s your concern. The model uses thousands of data points by looking at revenue by day to predict future growth. It uses some very clever machine learning algorithms.
GTM: No, right, I get that, but in the past we had new products to sell to our customers. You haven’t given us anything for next year, so I think even 6% is not realistic…
EFM: I agree that 8% is crazy, but 6% is totally doable, the AI says so. And no offence, but there’s no way your forecast is more accurate than state-of-the-art AI.
The Global and EMEA finance managers split the difference and set a 7% target. GTM delivered 3%. Everyone was promoted.
For a more serious take on this, read Solving the wrong problems. For more humour, read Corporate Power Plays.