Race, Don't Chase - Part 2

Very timely and greatly appreciated. It has definitely given me some direction that I haven't received on the job.

Interestingly, the concept of a company needing to rapidly respond to an economic downturn is one of the key topics that Sequoia Capital presented recently to their CEOs in what has been called "The PResentation of Doom." Slide #48 and following specifically talks about "Survival of the Quickest."
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/sequoia-capitals-56-slide-powerpoin...

Great content (as always) guys. Had not covered the race part of this in my years as a manager or in business school for that matter!

One note I thought is worth making that others may find useful is that if looking at headcount freezes or reductions then you need to be careful to differentiate direct from indirect charging heads. Freezing directs can cause revenue to freeze also - especially in service-based companies. Seems obvious, but I thought I'd mention it given I've seen it happen as part of blanket directives in companies I've worked.

Thanks again for the wonderful service you provide - keep it up!

Mark.

Anise-

I wouldn't give advice to your boss/that GM. I can say that whatever your boss says, you're unlikely to change. Do what you can with what you have where you are.

Mark

What advice do you have (if any) for a General Manager who says he can not delegate budget responsibility, because a majority of the budget is 'wages' which are outside of the control of management level below him.

PS I voted (again!)

Another good cast. Thank you M&M.

Even if your budgets do not come to you as a PDF document, the full version of Acrobat will perform optical character recognition (OCR). So you may run a copy of your budget through your scanner, perform OCR, then copy and paste into a spreadsheet.