Blamed on the summer

For years I let the summer explain the miss, and I had that wrong.

The pattern is always the same. A Gulf number comes in under plan, the review happens once everybody is back, and the answer is in the room before the meeting starts. It was the summer. July and August. The city was empty. Everyone nods, because everyone was also away, and an explanation that implicates nobody is the cheapest thing on the agenda.

What I did not do, for a long time, was check whether the miss actually happened in the summer.

Often it had not. A soft April. A price move that did not hold through May. Something launched in the spring to an audience that never assembled. All of it sits quietly inside a shortfall that already has a cause attached to the two months at the end of it. The summer is such a good alibi that it absorbs offences it did not commit.

So now I cut the year in half before I read anything. Everything up to the week the flights start, and everything after it, each half against its own plan rather than against the total.

If the first half was on plan and the second was not, the summer is the story and what is needed is a summer plan. If the first half was already behind, the summer is a coincidence with excellent timing, and the thing worth examining happened in a month when the whole team was sitting at its desk.

The explanation everybody accepts is the one nobody audits.