The late summer and much of the autumn had passed off without Paul having done anything much more in the way of incomprehensible management. The drivers were surprised for he could usually be relied upon to baffle them with some odd decision or initiative at least once a week. They wondered if he had, so to speak, nothing left to offer. Perhaps he had shot his bolt?
But they were wrong. He had apparently just been having a short rest before embarking on a spree of spectacular managerial incompetence the like of which they had not seen before.
Ever since the General Election the whole country had been plunged into a programme of saving in an effort to try redress the enormous debts that had been accrued by banks who, guided by several of Paul's cousins, had gambled heavily on selling expensive houses to underpaid Alabama labourers - a gamble that had mysteriously and spectacularly backfired. The result was that all public sector pay had been frozen, although sadly inflation had not. All the workers in the National Hire Service had not seen their pay increase at all for nearly two years. And it was with this as a background that Paul thought it fit to award himself and his five executive directors pay rises of between 7 to 13%. The local press heavily criticised him. His personal share of the bounty was an extra £20,000 a year. As was pointed out, this was more than the salary of some of the clerical staff he had been plotting to sack earlier in the year in his so-called Customer Service Improvment Exercise.
Having spent tens of thousands of pounds on this deeply unpopular initiative and continually urged staff to consider voluntary redundancy (presumably to save himself the aggravation of firing them), the drivers were surprised to see a small item hidden in the company's website. It seemed that the original target of a loss of 107 posts had been revised down to a mere 6.7. Whilst pleased that the majority of their secretaries would now keep their jobs, the drivers wondered how the original calculation could have been so spectacularly wrong. They felt that if ever they would have got some important maths wrong by a factor of over 15, then they would be facing some serious questions. Not so Paul.
"On re-examining the accounts we found an extra £2 million," was all the explanation he volunteered when pressed.
"But Paul," countered the drivers, "we thought that these job losses were a by-product of the administrative restructuring that was to improve the customer's experience. How is it that finding extra money suddenly means that these people can keep their jobs? It almost looks as though the point of the exercise was to save money in the first place."
Paul didn't answer, and because the drivers didn't want him to change his mind yet again, they remained silent too. Paul had been taught this management tactic very early on in his career and had often employed it to good effect.:
1. Take a situation that may or may not be a problem.
2. Turn it into a big problem.
3. Suggest a draconian solution.
4. Weather the storm.
5. Propose more lenient solution.
6. Garner the ensuing praise.
After all, it's what Sir Humphrey would have done.
