Whoever had the time

Next year's budget is due in the same fortnight the peak has to be built.

That is the shape of October in every marketing team I have sat in. The promotional season opens in the second week of November, and everything it needs, the creative, the stock, the offers, the media deals, is decided in the next four weeks by the people who know how. In the same four weeks finance sends the template for next year, and that template is the most consequential document the team produces all year.

Nobody decides who writes it. The collision does.

In summer the excuse is that the senior people were away. In October they are all in the building, and it happens anyway. They are on the peak, because the peak is this year's number and this year's number is what they are judged on. So the template goes to whoever is not busy, which in October means the most junior person in the room, or the newest, or the one whose category has no November. They fill it in from last year's version, with the dates changed and a growth number that felt safe, because they have never watched a budget be defended.

Then the peak passes and the senior people approve it, in November, in an hour, in a meeting booked for two. The deadline was last week, and a document that already exists is very hard to argue with. So it goes up as written, and the plan becomes the year.

I have been the junior person with the template and the senior person with the hour, and the document looked the same from both chairs.

Nobody in this story did anything wrong. The seniors were right to be on the peak. The plan is not written by the people who decide. It is written by the people who had the time, and the org chart decides who that is.