The guest list, not the chart

The corporate iftar invitations go out in the fortnight before the month, so in most buildings this week or the next, with Ramadan expected around the eighteenth depending on the sighting.

Nobody treats the list as a document. It is the most honest one the company will publish all year.

Watch how it gets made. Somebody opens last year's list. Names come off it without a meeting. Names go on it because of something that happened in the autumn. One client is offered the first night and another the fourth week, and both understand the difference perfectly well. There is a table near the front and a table by the door. There is a seat beside the chairman, and it is not filled by seniority.

Then there is the part that never becomes a list at all, which is who hosts. Who stands at the door. Who says the two sentences before the plates go down. Being asked tells a person something about their standing that no appraisal will put as plainly, and not being asked, two years running, says the rest.

The organisation chart is accurate and dull. Everybody already knows who reports to whom, and it is drawn by somebody who was handed the answer.

The guest list is rewritten by hand every year by the people who actually decide, and it answers the question the chart does not, which is who matters now.

It is read that way by everyone on it. The supplier who was on it last year and is not on it this year does not ask why. He knows why, and he tells the two people he trusts.

A company will spend a quarter writing its values and an evening writing this, and only one of the two gets read closely.