You have to respect murphy. Wasn’t it Murphy who said “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”? Well, Murphy must live at IE.

It has been a week to remember at Investment Executive. And I can sum it up in three “B” words — big, bureaucratic and blowups.

I have never been fond of big. It just means too much of everything to worry about. But I was particularly upset when I came back to my car — my adorable red Mini Cooper S — to find someone had left one of those “pulling out of a parking space” grazes on my right back bumper. I immediately suspected the big, honkin’ SUV that I had parked beside when I arrived.

I have often wondered if, when they bully their way into traffic or take up two lanes instead of one, they just can’t see the smaller vehicles around them. Maybe they aren’t really rude and obnoxious and think they own the world because they’re big — maybe they’re blind.

Here was proof of it. The driver couldn’t see my little car parked so neatly beside it. But that was just an early indication of the week to come.

When it comes to business, big and bureaucracy go hand in hand. Big business loves processes. (Ooh! a procedures manual! Be still, my beating heart.)

Is there is a big company anywhere that doesn’t have a love affair with paper and forms and signatures on forms?

Of course, having a procedure for everything robs people of the ability to make decisions.
There are no creative solutions because there isn’t a form for that. All the power is wielded by the people who put their signatures on the forms — which is no doubt exactly the way they want it.

But our company is demanding its senior management go for “leadership” training and by some bizarre reasoning, it has been decided I have to go. I have ranted and raved to anyone that will listen — and to some that won’t. No one sees the irony. Bureaucracies don’t want leaders, they want followers.

Then there is the day of the blowup. It normally takes about eight business days to put Investment Executive together — editing stories, finetuning pages and putting them through the process. Because three of us were away at Advocis’s annual conference in lovely Halifax, and because of the holiday Monday, we were down to an all-out five days for the June issue. Then Wednesday our fileserver — with all our pages and stories — died. Gone. A hardware failure, according to our IT guy, J.P.

Now we have backups — we (by that, I mean our IT guys) went to the previous day’s tapes and rebuilt our files on a new server. But we lost a day in the production process. Six people with no newspaper to put out.

I did my best to make good use of the time, however. Off I went to HR to get some more forms to fill out so I could send them off for more signatures. I even wrote a memo.

Thursday, we’re back up and running — but not without glitches — by about 11:00. Once we finish our pages, we send them to the production department, which does something to them and gives us back printouts in order to prove they did. By 4:30 we had seen no printouts. Hey, guys, where is everybody? This is getting dangerously close to Friday.

They were in a day-long meeting — deciding how to make the production process work better. Murphy could write new laws about this week.

To top it off, James Walker, our managing editor for the past eight years, is leaving us, returning to the National Post as national editor at the Financial Post. We wanted to make it a nice last week for him. Well, Jamie, it will be memorable. IE
Tessa Wilmott, editor-in-chief