The plan lives on one laptop

Ask for the year's plan in the emptiest fortnight of the year and you find out where it actually lives.

Not in a system. In a spreadsheet, on one laptop, belonging to one person, who is out of the country until the end of the month.

Somebody eventually sends a copy. Then somebody else sends a different copy. The two do not agree on the third quarter, and nothing inside either file says which one the company is running on. The only way to tell the agreed version from the drafts is the number at the end of the filename, and that number was chosen by whoever saved last.

I ask for it in August on purpose now. It is a cheap test and it has never once been wrong.

What comes back is not a plan. It is a person. The columns are full but they do not explain themselves: the second line is net of something, the fourth was agreed with finance at some point and never written down, and the tab called final is not the one being used. All of that lives in one head, and the head is on holiday.

The building does not notice for eleven months, because the person is at their desk and answers within the hour. August takes the person away and leaves the file, and the file was supposed to be the plan.

Nothing else in a company is allowed to work this way. Not the payroll, not the stock count, not the licence on the wall.

The quiet fortnight hands you that audit for nothing, and most companies spend it waiting for one person to come back online.