The Client was unable to speak for a moment. The Coach sat down in a nearby Eames chair.
“You okay?” was all he said.
A verbal avalanche cascaded out of the Client. The latest request was further evidence of massive mismanagement, built on an inconvenient truth: his division was out of sync with what the market wanted. Despite the company's best efforts, or half-hearted tries, more nimble competitors were providing responses that went unmatched. He explained to the Coach how he loved to win, but the company and its products were ill-positioned to do so.
The Coach listened.
He heard the disappointment. The frustration. The veiled rage.
The Client felt strangled, shackled, subverted. He had ideas, but those ideas had fallen on deaf ears. Because his ideas required investment, or transition, or transformation – things that, for whatever reason, the senior leadership would not embrace. Why? He didn't know.
The CEO's request for more information was another shoulda-coulda-woulda exercise. It coulda been handled in real time by the software systems the Client had proposed. They shoulda gotten closer to the customer, before a “cone of silence” descended on the bid process, then they woulda shaped the proposal to their capabilities. The bid was lost, in part, because of outdated technology, ...
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