The last third

Two thirds of the year are gone, and everywhere I have worked the annual target is by now one of two things. Safe, or gone.

The arithmetic is not hard. Take what has landed, add what the last third normally delivers, add the peak, and you have a number. If it clears the target, the rest of the year is execution. If it does not, no plan written in August will close a gap that seven months of trading opened, because the plan that could have closed it needed to start in March.

What is hard is the meeting. Somebody has to say, in front of finance, that the number agreed last December is not going to happen. Nobody wants to be the first voice, so the meeting does not get held, and the year carries on as though the target were still alive.

That is when the last third gets expensive. The October discount goes deeper. The November plan borrows from next year, because a peak that was already going to be big is now asked to be impossible. Retention money moves to acquisition, because acquisition shows up this year. The people who should be building the next twelve months spend four of them chasing a figure that everyone in the building privately gave up on in June.

I used to think of sunk cost as the money. The campaign that did not work, the retainer that ran a year too long. Those are sunk, and most people can let them go.

The thing nobody can let go of is the target. It was set in a different year, on different assumptions, by people negotiating for reasons that had nothing to do with the market that actually arrived.

The sunk thing is not the money already spent. It is the target.