…and I feel, well, okay. Maybe not necessarily “fine”.
Critical Mass has done a bit of a reorganisation. I emphasise “a bit”. Mostly because this is not the radical shifts we’ve seen in the past. I think this is my third or fourth reorganisation since starting with Critical Mass back in 2000 (admittedly, I’m losing track), and this is the most minor change we’ve had.
At least when you look at the big picture.
In short, no promotions, no demotions. Just changes in role and responsibility. Which, when you think about it, is the real purpose of a reorganisation: shuffle the existing chart to align with your needs. And our needs are global. We have production offices in Calgary, Chicago, Toronto, and London. Costa Rica starts up in 30 days.
In our old system, it was becoming hard to handle all that. We had department VPs who had to spread their influence across many offices. Control was all centralised at Calgary, which while we thought it was good for ensuring standards and practises, tended to impose controls on the other offices, which was detrimental to their operation.
So now we’ve got independent offices. Each have General Managers, four lead people from each of the former departments (Creative, Technology, Planning, and Operations), and their own controls. They still report to Critical Mass Global Operations (aka Head Office aka Calgary), but the influence of old is greatly lessened.
We’ve effectively given them all much more rope, and more room for success. We’ve also likely created more competition. I just hope it remains the healthy kind.
The trick out of all of this is that we don’t have our over-arching leadership at the department level. It’s going to be up to the office leads to ensure that communication remains. The last thing we need is to turn into our competition where the individual offices have no clue what the others are doing. It’s a lousy way to learn when you can’t/don’t talk to each other.
There is one part in all of this I don’t like. Allard Losier, my 8-year leader, mentor, devil’s advocate, prank target, talk show host, Defender of the Right and Just, and friend is leaving. I can’t even begin to rhyme off the things I’ve learned from him over the years, and there’s no way to calculate the huge effect he’s had on my career development. An era officially comes to and end with his departure. To the few of us multi-year veterans still left in the (now former) Technology department, this is a hard loss. It also puts the onus on us to ensure that we live up to the expectations, to the things we still believe are right.
We’re going to miss you Allard. Just so you know.
It’s (a bit of) a new world. I’m going to be a part of it, even if at a distance. But I can say that if this goes the way I’m told it will go, we should see some new and exciting things come from Critical Mass in the coming months.
