Eleven days earlier every year

Ramadan moves about eleven days earlier every year. The company calendar does not move at all.

Budget sign-off happens in the month it happened last year. The annual media deals are negotiated in the autumn. The agency contract renews on its anniversary. The financial year ends where somebody set it a long time ago, in another country, for a reason nobody in the room remembers.

So the month that decides the year in a great many categories lands on something different every time. One year the brief needs approving in a week when the budget has not been signed. The next year the month sits across a quarter end, with a reporting story to write in the middle of it. The year after, it opens on top of the annual negotiation, which is either luck or a month of nobody answering.

None of these collisions is hard. Each is knowable years ahead, to the week, with arithmetic anybody can do.

What is missing is an owner. The media plan has an owner. The brief has an owner. The collision between a moving month and a fixed organisation belongs to nobody, so it is found each year by whoever happens to be holding it, usually somebody junior, in a hurry, being told that this is how it goes.

That is what a default looks like inside a company. Not a bad decision. No decision, repeated annually, paid for by a different person each time.

The fix is unglamorous and takes an afternoon. One person, named, whose job includes knowing where this month will sit three years from now, and moving the fixed things around it while moving them is still free.

Next year it begins in the second half of February, depending on the sighting. That is true already, and nothing in the plan knows it yet.