The CEO meets me almost daily – either uttering irrelevancies or issuing stale instructions or stating the obvious – but he sees to it that he sounds sweet.
B wants to work with only 4 existing customers. With this, the CEO had got opportunity to see only Belgium and Germany, whereas yours sincerely (that’s myself!) work on widening the market base. Inquiries keep flowing in from Israel, Italy, USA UK and Spain.
This sincerity of work helps the CEO in two ways. Firstly, it enables him boast-of with tea-drinking Director (who is too tired to manage things!) thereby earns him some browny points.
Secondly, the CEO gets to see new destinations. Mind here, the poor export manager should stay back in the office to make sure that things are under control, so he will not be traveling. Moreover, Directors and CEOs are expected to utter only niceties and not specifics when meeting customers in their own countries. So the export manager who knows only details need not travel. Of course, the export manager will get the reward of eating in expensive restaurants when the customer visits here.
There are pitfalls if new customers are not discovered. That means that the export manager is useless and will need to be replaced. Nowadays CEO finds it convenient to continue with B only. New candidates nowadays are so demanding that they do not join unless they are assured that they will be allowed to travel overseas.
With people like B, around there is no such problem, you see! B will be content not to be traveling as meeting overseas customers means that the sentences in English have to be completed in English only and Hindi words also cannot be mixed into to the sentence to make sense. Very inconvenient!
Sometime back, I had requested H (CEO’s secretary) for CEO’s tour notes when he visited Germany in October last year. She gave a note-book, whose pages were totally blank and only three business cards were posted on the first two pages. No scribbling, no notes. After a few pages, a City Map of the place he visited was there and some spots have been circled in them. This map must have been torn from the tour directory that must have been kept in the hotel room he stayed. In another page, a scribbling pad was inserted. I am sure he must have taken the ball-point pen also from the hotel room. Most probably, his son must be using the pen to write the notes in his college.
H further revealed that during last trip three big-wigs visited Europe – Director, CEO and VP – together. They travel in groups only, so that one guy speaks and the rest listens. Since the Director himself was present throughout, CEO and VP are not answerable and held accountable for the success or failure of the trip made. Very convenient, isn’t it?
இலைகள், மலர்கள், மரங்கள் 
dear corporate mystic, you are out of touch with corporate anecdotes. recall the one about this big bull who bulldozed the animals on a farm to get him atop a tree because he was the biggest n the strongest, and because he wanted a vantage view of the farm? well, the farm animals cooperated in the hope that pushing him to the top would mean getting pulled up by him in due course. after all, he was the biggest and the strongest. but when he finally did reach atop the tree, all that happened was he got terribly entangled in all the leaves n branches, and just lay there stuck. so what did the animals at the bottom get? —> a whole load of bull-shit on their waiting faces! ciao