Neolithic corporate meeting (episode 1)
Meeting agenda: Seating
Venue: Conference campfire
Attendees: Mook (marketing), Grok (engineer), Shak (legal), Muk (CEO), Gred (sales), Urk (workers union representative) and Oink (shareholder representative)
Mook: We have done some research and have discovered that the ground or rocks used for sitting on is hard, uncomfortable and difficult to get up from.
Muk: I need some figures.
Mook: Six out of eight tribes surveyed agree that the ground is hard. The numbers are good, there is a real opportunity here.
Muk: I can personally vouch for that. The other week a woman sitting next to me was trampled to death by a mammoth because she couldn’t get up in time.
Grok: I heard about this, it happened down in the valley, right?
Muk: Yes.
Urk: She was the wife of a union member. A witness said that someone next to her used her to help himself up.
Muk: Urm… did you say the valley? No, no, no I was at the river. That reminds me Shak I need to speak to you after this meeting.
Gred: Six out of eight tribes? Can we make that sound better? Can we say three out of four?
Shak: There should be no problem with that. It is the same ratio.
Gred: How about three out of four people?
Shak: If we average out the size of the tribes then that would indeed be the case.
Grok: But the size of the tribes vary hugely.
Shak: We could say we asked the same number of people in each tribe.
Grok: That would be true, but did we?
Muk: We could have, all we have is the general consensus for each tribe right Mook?
Mook: That’s correct.
Muk: So it might be that we asked the same number in each tribe, who knows? Three out of four people it is.
Mook: Yes well… as I was saying. A product that allows us to address this problem will be a big source of revenue.
Oink: How big? Will it increase dividends?
Muk: We will make sure that it does, after all, what is good for you is good for bonuses.
Urk: Speaking of pay, I have noticed that the wage increase for the workers has remained static for the last couple of years. In fact, with the cost of living going up the wages are in fact decreasing in real terms.
Muk: Tell me about it, I can hardly afford the new beachside cave I just got. And to be honest the hall I have in the village is decreasing in value rapidly. The shacks and tents springing up have really brought the area down.
Urk: Well if you paid us more…
Oink: That will affect dividends.
Muk: We can discuss this further at a later date. Let me check my schedule and get back to you. Grok, any thoughts on how you will go about this?
Grok: I was thinking of some sort of platform raised above the ground on legs, probably four for stability. We can use the best materials for the build, this will make it durable. Light enough to be portable so that you can take it with you from place to place. Also some sort of padding to make it more comfortable to sit on.
Muk: Sounds good, can you give me an idea on how long before you have something to show us?
Grok: Let me talk to my team and get back to you.
Muk: Fine, can you get back to me within an hour?
Grok: That should be enough time for a rough estimate.
Muk: Great, see you in an hour then.
Gred: I did not want to say anything in front of Grok, but the engineers only think of the challenge of making things and not the cost or revenues. We need to think of resale, we need people to buy more than one in their lifetime.
Muk: Good point, so for now let’s use less durable materials. It will also reduce the cost of production.
Mook: We can always use a more durable material for the next version and use the fact that it is more durable as a selling point.
Muk: Not a bad idea. What about the version after that? We can’t keep making durability a selling point.
Mook: Right, what about if we left out the padding for the first version. Add durability for version two and add padding for the third?
Gred: Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, what will we call this thing? We need a catchy name for our sales pitch. If you recall, we hardly manage to move any “Pointy stone sticks” until we rebranded them to “Spear”.
Oink: I remember it was terrible for dividends.
Mook: Luckily my team had a brainstorming session yesterday and we came up with a couple of ideas. The first one is a simple; the product allows a person to sit anywhere so we came up with “The Sitter”.
Gred: Too much like “shitter”... What? Don’t look at me like that, it does. We always give derogatory nicknames to our competitor’s products; we are good at it. Trust me. We do not want to call it that.
Mook: Fine. The second one is personally my favourite. The concept is quite simple but brilliant. We first looked at the product idea and we couple it with a sense of ownership of the product...
Muk: Let’s hear it.
Mook: “MySeat”.
Gred: “My Seat”?
Mook: One word, NOT “My Seat” but “MySeat”.
Gred: Sounds the same to me, plus it is two words.
Mook: No the point here is that we invent a completely new word “MySeat”.
Shak: I get it, clever… since it is a word that we have invented it also cannot be used by anyone else because we own it. This means that if anyone uses it without permission we can sue them, resulting in…
Oink: More profits.
Muk: Excellent “MySeat” it is. Let’s get back to versions of the product. Mook was saying MySeat 3 is both durable and has padding. How about if the one after that has more stability?
Gred: A fifth leg?
Urk: Nothing has five legs, not mammoths, not elk, cats, dogs…nothing.
Muk: I saw a dog with three legs once, remarkably stable.
Mook: That’s brilliant!
Muk: I thought so, too. I mean he wasn’t as fast as the cat he was chasing…
Mook: No, I meant three legs. Make MySeat 1, 2 and 3 with only three legs. Then for MySeat 4 it can have four legs. It also fits in with the version name.
Muk: I like it. Now is that the end of the product line? Can we get another version out of this?
Mook: Perhaps we can make versions one to four really heavy and hard to move.
Gred: Actually that’s not a bad idea. As you know the sales of our heavy-duty sacks have slumped in the past couple of quarters. If the MySeat is quite heavy it may boost sales. Better yet we can invent a gadget for the sack so that the MySeat can be transported by attaching it to the sack rather than putting it in the sack. That way the sack can still be used for other items.
Muk: That is a good idea, a whole new product as well as a boost for an older one.
Oink: Should be good for profits.
Grok: I’m back, what did I miss?
Muk: Just a few details, first let’s hear what you came up with.
Grok: Right, we want to use oak to make the main structure of the product.
Mook: We’re calling it “MySeat”.
Grok: Fine. We can use wool from yaks stuffed into elk skin leather pouches from our herds for the padding. The whole thing will be constructed using joins and glue from our chemical division. We estimate that it will take a couple of weeks to make a prototype once the technical details are figured out. A few days to test it and we should be good.
Muk: So let’s say three weeks on the safe side.
Grok: Providing everything goes to plan.
Muk: Well, we were talking while you were away and there are a few changes.
Grok: Changes?
Muk: We want you to make it with pine, three legs and no padding. This should save on costs and speed things up a little. There is one extra requirement however, we want it to be heavy so that it will be difficult to transport.
Grok: But…
Muk: I have another meeting to go to, Mook will schedule a follow up meeting for next week. Please have something by then.
Grok: SIGH