If I had a hammer

“To a man with a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.”

Ah management. Just when you think they can’t possibly make a situation any worse, they proceed to do precisely that. And they do this again and again and again, every single time. It’s uncanny.

Case in point: the ongoing saga of Jimmy the Kid. Contrary to all reasonable expectations, the management’s masterstroke of promoting Jimmy to head of investor relations has worked out very well. Of course Jimmy doesn’t know a thing about finance, but he is very well dressed, he has an expensive education from an elite school, he works very hard, he’s available to handle questions at all hours of day and night, he never lets an email go unanswered, and he can talk the hind legs off a donkey. He’s on the phone to investors from dawn till dusk, holding their hands, massaging their egos, explaining every little fluctuation in the market with reams of jargon and sophisticated terminology.

Most importantly, Jimmy is a true believer. He truly believes in the Sopwith way of doing things – in our traders, our technology, our magical ability to make money. You can’t buy sincerity like that. This sincerity is in fact his main weapon in going out to sell the fund, and it has served him very well. Not that Jimmy has ever actually closed a deal; he lacks the brashness and sense of timing – the killer instinct – required to get a client to sign on the dotted line. But he does enough to keep current and future investors off the traders’ backs and away from the CEO’s desk, which is all that anyone really cares about.

If only matters had stopped there. But no. It appears that senior management, emboldened by their success at promoting Jimmy, have decided to apply the same solution to another pressing problem facing the firm: our abject lack of leadership.

For years, leadership at Sopwith has been minimal to the point of non-existence. Our multibillionaire CEO, at whose desk the buck supposedly stops, is utterly uninterested in the day-to-day grind of running the firm; for him, Sopwith is just a vanity project, kept in place to maintain his self-image as a Wall Street hotshot. The traders, who are the real power in the firm, are likewise disinclined to manage, because frankly it’s boring; playing the markets is much more fun. Other senior figures like the CFO and COO and so on might have been good managers but they have no political power in the firm compared to the traders (who after all are the ones who bring in the dough). So management at Sopwith is a vacuum; in fact, the entire concept of administration is considered a tedious and unrewarding chore, best avoided.

And people know this; it's no secret. Everyone knows it’s an unhealthy situation, but it’s in nobody’s self-interest to do anything about it.

Until now.

You can see where this is going. Yup. The management committee has, as of today, decided to promote Jimmy the Kid to the role of executive manager of the firm.

Let me remind you again of Jimmy’s background. Jimmy is barely six months out of graduate school. He has no experience, no expertise, no credentials, in fact absolutely nothing to recommend him beyond his tailored suit and his perfect set of teeth. Being put in charge of investor relations was already a step too far for him, but now he’s also being put in charge of managing the traders, operations, technology, risk management, settlements, lawyers, the works.

And the amazing thing is, everybody is thrilled with this arrangement. With all the managerial responsibilities dumped onto Jimmy’s shoulders, Sopwith’s other employees are free to do as they please. The traders can trade merrily, the programmers can program away with minimal supervisory intrusion, the CEO can hit the golf course at 11am instead of 3pm, and nobody needs to bother with administration.

In fact, it gets even better. Not only has our management lacuna been filed, but investors, some of whom were beginning to chafe at the removal of their direct line to with the CEO, are now being granted full-time access to the guy who actually runs the fund from day to day. The one, the only, Jimmy the Kid. Needless to say, they are thrilled, when in fact they should be screaming and rushing for the exits.

I will be watching Jimmy’s career in management with the closest of attention. These will be interesting times.

To be continued...