Read the gift list

A few weeks before the fasting month, marketing is asked to do the gifts.

It arrives as a small job. Choose a box, get the logo on it, agree a figure per name, book the couriers. Then the list comes down from upstairs, and the list is the interesting document.

Nobody in marketing wrote it. It is assembled by whoever has been in the building longest, partly from memory, with additions from the chairman's office, and it is never explained.

Read it anyway.

There are names on it that are not customers and not suppliers. A landlord. An office at the ministry. A bank manager. The head of the family that owns the distributor in one market. Two people whose entire role is that they answer the phone when something goes wrong on a Thursday night.

And there are absences. A large account nobody upstairs is worried about. A whole department. Sometimes the agency.

The org chart says who reports to whom. The customer list says who pays. The gift list says who the company believes it depends on, and those three documents disagree, every year, in the same places.

It is also a status document, which is why the tiers exist and why the arguments are never really about the gift. A box one tier below last year says something the sender did not intend and the receiver reads before it is open.

Nobody drew the gift list as a stakeholder map. That is exactly why it is a true one.