Practical Advice – The Frustrated CFO

Why Do I Stay Subscribed to Quora Digest?

The truth is I have no idea why I receive Quora Digest emails. I don't recall subscribing to the feed. Of course, nowadays one can passively "accept" electronic deliveries of bullshit by failing to unclick some hidden option box. I am certain, however, that I'm not registered on Quora website. I wouldn't.

Quora, as in plural of Quorum – in the same way as Data is plural of Datum. It is basically a blogging hub masked as a Q&A platform: one registered person posts a question and all other registered contributors are invited to answer. Strictly speaking, this unrestricted invitation to participate clashes with the name, which refers to "select groups." Maybe the founders confused it with fora (the Latin plural of forum). I don't know and I don't care: The whole concept reminds me of Coffee Talk with Linda Richman, when Mike Myers would get "all verklempt" and invite us to talk amongst ourselves by providing a discussion topic.

Moreover, many things about Quora simply creep me out. For instance, Quora's T&C state that contributors retain the copyright to their content. Well, it's great that they threw that in, however, the enforcement appears to be highly problematic. Questions posted to the site are open for editing by everyone. This includes official editors and all registered users. Users can also submit unlimited number of suggestions for editing the responses. Therefore, the possibilities for modifications of the original material are endless. The apparent absence of a solution for the copyright sharing basically nullifies the notion of IP protection.

It's weird that the site demands its users to register with their real names instead of handles and go through email verification. It's not that I think people should hide, but they must remember that Quoara automatically releases users' names to the search engines. We don't know whether the site gets some sort of fees in return, but it wouldn't surprise me if they do. Just like it wouldn't surprise me if they intend to sell the subscribers' lists to other marketers as well. But these are just my speculations. In the absence of a clear mission statement, that's the only thing one can do – guess.

In reality, the fact that Adam D'Angelo (CEO) doesn't seem to be interested in generating revenues makes me very suspicious of his actual intentions and motivations. It seems only logical to suggest that they are spying on the contributors, studying their interests, behavioral patterns, and tastes in preparation for eventual commercialization of the site. Or is it something even more sinister? How the hell did they get a $900 million third-round valuation? What sort of potential revenue this number is based on?

As I said, it's creepy. I don't even open Quora Digest emails. But I'm not unsubscribing either – because of the subject line, which always shows the top question of the day. I don't want to give up the opportunity to glance at it. Most of the time, what I see reeks of laziness. I mean, we live in the Internet age – go on Wikipedia or just google this banal crap! But once in a while some amazing shit pops up.

The other day I read: "How can you maximize your happiness in life?" Wow! Is this person for real? 60,000 antelopes just died in Kazakhstan for unknown reason and half of Europe is covered in water and mud, but this human is not only happy, he wants to bring the bliss to the next level! Even crazier, he expects to receive constructive instructions from his fellow Quora members?! Well, good luck with that!

Actually, it's not this kind of oddities that keep me looking. I am more interested in patterns and trends. For instance, recently I've noticed an increase in frequency of the questions concerning material self-sufficiency and economic survival. Well, it's surprising that people on Quora don't talk about their inability to support themselves all the time. I'm guessing that most of them consider bringing it up under their real names in front of the strangers embarrassing. Nevertheless, the number of such queries is apparently spiking.

Below are three questions I found to be most typical; with my brief comments (remember: I'm not subscribed, so I don't know the answers that followed; I can only provide my own):

1. "What kind of salary guarantees comfortable living in NYC?" What a terribly formulated question! It should've come with a separate note explaining what "comfortable" means to the inquirer. Cause, what's comfortable to a person fresh out of Idaho who has never spent more than $100 on a pair of shoes and considers a $350 Michael Kors bag a chic statement may mean financial misery to someone with a different background.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the questioner is single and actually meant comfortable, but not extravagant, i.e. a good one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with no roommates; year-round pleasant climate control; full range of cable and streaming entertainments; cell and land phones; a car kept in a garage; designer coffee in a favorite shop; going out for drinks at least once a week; eat out twice a week; cooking with high quality ingredients; good cheese, wine, and fruit in the fridge; mid-range ($800-$1500) outfits; 2-3 new pairs of $500 shoes a year; one new $2000-$3000 bag a year, at least one annual vacation; a play and a concert once in a while. And the answer is – $250K annual salary should do it, assuming the drinking is actually limited to once a week.

And you thought that those who made $250K a year are rich?! Not in this town, baby!

2. "At Facebook and Google, why are many new CS graduates offered 120K+ with a 30-120K signing bonus while those with a few years experience are offered a baseline salary with no bonus?" Well, the direct answer to this question is simple: Computer Science, in a sense, is like Medicine and Pharmacology – they continuously undergo major changes and developments. I mean, double-entry bookkeeping was created 600 years ago and it will remain fundamental as long as accounting records will be needed on this planet. On the other hand, today's standard surgical techniques were experimental only 5 years ago. It happens even faster in high-tech where innovations occur pretty much on a monthly basis.

While doctors never stop studying and researching, most (not all) computer engineers and programmers are not as motivated to stay on top of the game. Those in training are taught the most up-to-date techniques and methods; they are subjected to the most recent trends. And that's what Facebooks and Googles want – the newest and the freshest; in order to keep ahead of the rat race. So, it's not about whether you graduated this year or five years ago – it's the set of skills you put on your resume. Veteran coders who can match the knacks with 22-year-olds can demand pretty much the same level of compensation.

But what interests me the most in this inquiry is its fiscal aspect. There is no way the $120K/year new hires of Facebook and Google will be able to enjoy the comforts similar to those listed in point 1. These companies operate largely in San Francisco Bay area, which, according to my observations of exactly 2 years ago, is even less affordable than NYC. Of course, high-tech nerds of both sexes go to work in khakis and polo shirts and don't carry Prada bags to the office. On the other hand, they buy more electronic devices than any other human and their coffee is far more expensive. So, some corners will need to be cut.

Obviously their lower-compensated older co-workers have even harder time (hence, the exasperation and the bitterness). Let's hope that they are smart enough to share expenses with their partners/spouses and don't plan on having any kids.

3. "I'm unemployed, broke, balding, living with my parents, about to turn 30, friendless, depressed, and miserable. How can I possibly turn it around?"

Ah, and here we come to the reality of the vast majority. This boy probably forgot to mention that he has a degree(s) in Liberal Arts and no practical skills. The horde of young people in similar situations is ever-expanding. They are so far removed from the idea of "comfortable" living that a $120K salary seems just as fantastic to them as a $3 million book advance or a $20 million per movie compensation package.

They were brought up on the illusion that in this Land of Opportunities they have the freedom of pursuing their interests in humanities and, "as long as they work hard," their "rightful" place in the economic system is guaranteed. They failed to realize that this clinically dead ideal has been kept on life support by the tuition-hungry education institutions for years. They probably still don't know that the economic system in question has been deformed and became unrecognizable, just like the sociopolitical structures, environmental conditions, and human relationships.

I can just imagine the answers elicited by this question. They probably fell into two categories: the ones from the peers ("Dude, you are totally fucked!" or "I hear you, bro!") and the ones from the middle-aged politically correct deniers of reality ("It's okay, things will get better" or "There is nothing wrong with being bold").

As for me, only a few years ago I would've still tried to be motivational and push my entrepreneurial agenda, urging this person to crystallize his aptitudes into a small business idea and work hard on making it happen for himself. I used to say that if misplaced children of my peers went into landscaping, housekeeping, and maintenance businesses, it would've solved both the employment and the immigration problems in one sweep. But now we operate under the most severe government interference in the small-business matters (minimum wages, Obamacare tolls, US Treasury restrictions on borrowing, etc.) and the number of illegal immigrants became unmanageable. So, giving such an advice would be adding insult to injury. All I can say is – you are totally fucked, dude!

IBM Predictive Analytics, or Are We There Yet, Watson?

I have no clue what a Venn diagram for conjuction of this blog's readers and tennis fans would look like – probably unnoticeable to human eye, but whether you care about professional tennis or not, bear with me and I'll explain its relevance to the subject at hand.

Those who watched Australian Open during the last two weeks of January on ESPN2 (or any grand slam in the past few years) incidentally exposed themselves to various elements of IBM's "Let's Build a Smarter Planet" promotional campaign. IBM has been sponsoring ATP and WTA tours for years. They don't limit themselves to the ads that run during commercial breaks, but it's a good starting point for our topic.

The current versions of these TV spots are a lot of fun – very slick, very futuristic, very high-tech, very white-surface, and they feature Dominic Cooper (whom I first saw on stage [I cannot help myself, can I?] back in 2006 as Stuart Dakin in Alan Bennett's The History Boys)! Handsome, in the contemporary sense of the word, and serious, but tongue-in-cheek, British actor promotes IBM's cloud, smart day in the office, and… PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS.

Aha! Very interesting: Did IBM branch out into Astrology Charts and Crystal Balls? The advertisement's copywriters are appropriately non-specific and vague so not to bore an averagely challenged viewer, but let's look a bit closer at the core issue here.

Predictive Analytics belong to the realm of other popular concepts, such as business intelligence and performance assessment – none of them new ideas, by the way. Data warehousing may sound like a novelty, but collecting and organizing records in a particular order for easier access existed for centuries. The concept of information as a key to business success is millennia old. In ancient times tribal chiefs were estimating how many spearheads their craftsmen needed to make in order to win a battle.

Yet, in the past 10-15 years, the obsession with gauges, graphs, and all other forms of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have become pervasive to the point of silliness, especially in business, financial, and data-management spheres. Everyone and their mothers are absolutely convinced that they MUST have KPIs or they will be running a danger of failing, while analysts and software developers just know that they MUST provide KPI capabilities or their services will be deemed obsolete.

Truth be told, the escalation of urgency is totally understandable. The pace and
vulnerability of the business environment and entire human existence have increased exponentially. Today, more than ever, we need to have timely and valid data that has a power of springing us into immediate corrective actions.

Of course, as it always happens, the form obscures substance and common sense. In most cases, the procurers of reports with colorful dials, bars, and pyramids end up just staring at pretty pictures, nothing more.

Now, the Predictive Analytics are a very special brand of information manipulation because they claim that on the other side of chewing up and digesting tons of historical data they can poop out specific recommendations for WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE IN ORDER TO SUCCEED, i.e. an action plan for a prosperous future.

And I have to say, when it comes to chomping massive inputs of data, while allowing flexible and customized outputs, various IBM Business Intelligence Suites, including Cognos, are probably the best performance analytics software out there in the land of information management - terribly expensive, of course, but awfully powerful in terms of the facts-and-figures consumption (imagine Coneheads at breakfast).

And as noted, IBM wants to take you a step further on the road to the future of business intelligence. In 2009 the computing giant bought SPSS, which stands for Statistical Package for the Social Science, a software product that was created in 1970 to deal specifically with the analysis of what I personally call “data with a psychological twist.” In other word, it digests information that doesn’t necessarily have dollar signs or volume units attached to it. It was widely used in sociology, marketing, health care, education, and government.

In its current developmental stage SPSS has become an integral part of IBM's predictive analytics solutions, which presumably can be applied in any field. According to IBM’s own description, the SPSS’s mission is “to help organizations to predict what will happen next, so that they can make smarter decisions to improve business outcomes."

Are they succeeding in this futuristic endeavor? It’s hard to tell, because there is not enough readily available feedback: everyone’s KPIs are proprietary. Even public companies will not disclose how IBM’s predictive analytics compare to the actual results. Fortunately, there is one application of IBM’s analytical intelligence that is very public. Here's where tennis comes back into the picture, offering us an opportunity to look at the system’s predictive aptitude.

Nowadays, IBM's sponsorship of the Grand Slams also includes the powering of the websites of individual tournaments, including the Wimbledon, Australian, French, and US Opens. And so, if you go on one of these sites’ home page you will see right there, in the top-right corner: Smarter Analytics by IBM.

Well, right now it says “Completed Matches” above it because we are still almost 7 months away from the US Open 2015, but if you were to track a live match during a tournament, you can observe the IBM’s predictive functionality in real time:

This here is one of the most important predictive KPIs provided by Smarter Analytics – it is designed to show most important milestones one must achieve to reach one’s goals, and supposedly it is applicable to any data set.

In tennis application they call them Keys to the Match. Right there on the screen, in just two sentences IBM delivers the gist of the chart, explaining both the terminology and the methodology: “Keys to the Match system identifies key performance indicators – what players need to do to succeed in a match. Each player’s performance is measured against their keys and updated in real time.”

This one in particular was for the 2014 Championship match between our very own champion extraordinaire Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki. The system isolated three performance keys for Serena: 1^st serve points, medium rallies, and the returns of the opponent’s 1^st serve.

According to the system’s algorithm these parameters are the most impactful in terms of the winning statistics. The calculated "musts" are in blue and according to the statistical analysis of the historical data, Serena won 74% of sets when she won more than 61% of points on her own serve; 87% of sets when she won more than 49% of medium rallies, and 81% of sets when she won more than 38% of points returning her opponents 1^st serve.

The red sectors show where Serena was in this match. She exceeded all requirements: reaching 62% in the first parameter (very close), 54% in the second (also pretty relevant), and 68% in the third. It is no surprise that she won the Championship match, but that wild discrepancy between the prediction and the actual in the third indicator (38% vs. 68%) makes me question its relevance.

We will come back to my doubts about the validity of the entire model in a moment. Now, let’s see how we would apply the same approach to a business. Here is a chart that identifies AZ Company’s Keys to a Successful Month: what needs to be done to achieve sufficient profitability and positive cash flow.

AZ Company's Keys (640x495) These are very familiar to all business runners and highly vital parameters. Product mix is a crucial profitability factor. The same goes for the portion of the gross profit eaten up by the overhead. And, of course, the speed with which we manage to turn our inventories into receivables and receivables into cash determines whether we can generate more cash than we disburse during a particular period, in other words, produce a positive cash flow.

The green bars represent the levels of the parameters at the moment this snapshot was taken. Orange ones are the objectives that simply must be achieved, and pinks are desirable targets that supposedly guarantee a financially successful performance.

According to the model’s algorithm the share of the highly profitable product X in the
trading mix should be at least 39%, because 69% of the months when such mark
was achieved were profitable. Obviously the overhead has far more definitive impact on the bottom line – the model confirms it by calculating a higher probability of success (79%) at its relatively lower levels. There is even closer interrelationship between receivables and inventory turnovers on one side and the positive cash flow on the other – respectively 80 and 85 percent.

Many business owners and executive managers, when they see a chart like that, get very excited by the prospective of having a system that can “see the future” – they think they’ve got the ultimate solution in their hands. The widespread assumption is that Technology is smarter than a human, calculates everything faster and with higher accuracy. And this application presumably eliminates the need to process information yourself – analyze, ponder, be anxious, listen to your gut feelings, or rely on anybody’s expertise. Just follow the model’s suggestions and everything will be fine.

If you sense sarcasm between the lines it’s because I am very resentful to such a blind reverence of computing technology. And coming from me it’s a very serious statement, because I love progressive computerization. But I cannot tolerate the lack of common sense.

Look, the selected parameters themselves are great – no question about it, but do we need a fancy program to tell us that the business is going to be okay if we push sales of a high-margin product to nearly 40% of the volume and turn most of our beginning-of-the-month AR into cash? I don’t think so. The years of our own expertise will kick in and reassure us – we don’t really need the statistical confirmation of the possibly successful outcome.

But I have even more troubling concerns about this “keys to success” model. Let me show you that the examples we just reviewed are fraught with at least two serious problems.

The first one is the size of the statistical sample. In quantitative research, you need a sufficiently large sample in order to be able to pinpoint trends with an acceptable level of realism. Did you notice that Serena’s KPIs were related
to sets rather than matches? That's understandable. The Smarter Analytics uses just 8 years of grand slam performance. In the period from 2007 through 2014 Serena Williams played 157 matches in the four major tournaments of the year.

Women play “win-2-out-of -3-sets” matches. Sometimes it’s 2 sets, sometimes it’s 3, and sometimes your opponent retires before you get to finish the first set. Serena has a high percentage of straight-set wins, so we can safely estimate her average at 2.25 sets per match. This means that the predictions produced by IBM are based on a pool of
data collected over 353 sets. It’s not US census, of course, but it's an okay sample size.

Now, in business, to approximate the tennis-model’s reliability of conclusions we would need to look at least at 30 years of a company's monthly performance data. And that's a lot to hope for: 25 years ago the majority of small to mid-size companies were not even computerized and the paper journals and ledgers are either rotting in some storage unit or gone!

But the bigger problem is the quality of the historical data, its relevance to the very specific, very present moment in time. We operate in remarkably dynamic environments. Business conditions change every moment. One day everything is going great and another day everything falls apart. Labor costs grow exponentially in every corner of the world. Foreign exchange policies force one currency to soar and another currency to drop below everyone’s expectations. Cyclicality shifts all the time: what was true for February of 2005 may not be applicable at all for this month. And there are multitudes of industry-specific stressors.

For decades Kodak was competing with BASF, TDK, etc. for the worldwide market share of film distribution. Who knew that the biggest challenge would come from the photo and video equipment that didn’t need any film at all?

20 years ago American agricultural sector exported nearly 3 million tons of frozen meat and poultry to Eastern Europe. Then came 1999 and protectionist governments in the region declared US produce unsanitary. Prices tanked and multiple industries contracted.

15 years ago fashion industry had six major seasons. Today it operates in micro-cycles with styles changing every two weeks. This dramatically altered the landscape of apparel importation.

Well, business insiders live and breath this knowledge, but does the prediction model take into account all these factors? It simply cannot – any mathematical algorithm can only account for a limited number of time-proven constraints. How can we presume then that what might have been true historically will apply to our current conditions?

Even Serena’s keys to success, as far as I am concerned, are not too trustworthy, even though they are based on the game that have been played by the same rules year after year, on exactly the same courts, tended in exactly the same way. But was it the same winning Serena Williams in September 2014 as she was in 2007, when she fell away in quarterfinals? Or was she even the same in January of 2014, at Australian Open? Can you spot the difference that made a significant improvement to her swing?

Can IMB’s "social" software comprehend that? I don't think so!

There is no way I'm putting away the years of expertise and my business instincts to start relying 100% on some computerized predictions in my strategic and tactical decision-making. It may be a good contributing tool (again if you can afford it), but a computer is nothing more than a sidekick to the human brain; even if it's the IBM’s star artificial-intelligence child Watson. Hence, the appropriate name it's given. Yes, it can answer questions posed in natural language and wins Jeopardy! thanks to the 4 terabytes of information stored inside its metal guts. Yet it's not able to intuit the right response to a simple clue “This hat is elementary, my dear contestant!” My mind, on the other hand, serves up the answer instantaneously.

An expert with a common sense should be able to formulate her conclusions and make fast decisions herself, without any magical software, as long as she is steadily provided with timely and relevant information – whatever it is: business, sports, or arts. It's as I always say: give me sensible data and I will tell you what needs to be done.

What is Frustration?

Well, what kind of a psychological animal is Frustration? Is it a cognitive and somatic ailment such as anxiety or a mental disorder such as depression?

Those exposed to your expressing the frustration would like you to think that there is definitely something wrong with you. But no, feeling frustrated because of legitimate agitating factors doesn’t mean that you are ill and need to seek medical attention.

As the matter of fact Frustration is nothing more than a normal emotional reaction to opposition, restriction, obstacles – anything that we perceive to contradict with our will, goals, purpose, plans, schedules, etc. It is sometimes referred to as problem-response behavior. There is a problem and the frustration is the first-response signal.

Sometimes we are frustrated with ourselves. Procrastination and indecisiveness are the biggest causes of self-dissatisfaction for most people. However, overachievers who reach top level positions in corporate finance and accounting, the CFOs, Controllers, VPs, Directors, especially in smaller companies, are unlikely candidates for lazy postponements. And even if, for whatever reason, it happens to us, we are usually capable to control it and use the frustration with ourselves as a motivational tool.

No, our causes of frustration are primarily external. When you have allocated your already extended working hours to 10 urgent tasks that must be tackled today, and then your Boss wanders into your office and you have to listen for 2 hours to his blubbering about his workout regimen, the time loss is beyond your control and the frustration is further intensified by your inability to throw him out.

When you give an urgent assignment to your employee, explaining its importance and value to the company’s big picture, and an hour later come over to check the progress and provide further advice only to see her scrolling through boots on Zappos.com, the frustration makes your blood boil in your veins.

When you schedule a meeting with the VP of Sales to discuss the failure to meet volume targets for four months in a row and he is not there 30 minutes past the appointment, evil scenarios invade your frustrated mind.

So, feeling frustrated is natural. However, the way we act while frustrated depends on our personality, self-awareness, self-control and our psychological makeup.

The most frequent reactive mechanism is aggression. Whether we immediately explode at the source of frustration, or wait until we are alone and transfer our anger on an inanimate object, or get home and take it out on the innocent members of our families – it’s pretty much the same response.

In some cases frustrated people engage in a passive-aggressive behavior. You’ve seen it many times over: a person puts on a sullen expression and starts procrastinating, obstructing, failing to meet the expectations, etc. I am sure most of us not only observed it, but also had an episode or two ourselves.

It takes a lot of experience, self-control and tremendous will power to resist this behavioral patterns related to frustration and force yourself instead into constructive removal of the obstacle or resolution of the irritating circumstances. And, unfortunately, even if we can function reasonably on the outside, it doesn’t mean that the psychological disturbance inside goes away.

In the next couple of posts I hope to share with you few coping devices that I have accumulated over the years myself as well as discuss the relation of frustration to anxiety and stress conditions.

CFO Folklore: The Illusion of Irreplaceability

This is what always happens with severely responsible and talented people who take pride in the quality of their work and apply themselves hard, regardless of the rewards and recognition, material or otherwise: They do an extraordinary job in every function they are assigned, they show initiative and undertake tasks beyond their scope of responsibility, they set their own lofty goals and high performance standards, they pull off feats of creativity and miracles of ingenuity. Truly they accomplish things that no one else would in their place.

More frequently than not they don't run around screaming about their achievements – after all, they simply cannot operate any other way and they don't care that nobody asked them to be like that. They themselves know that they are the best. Plus, people around them acknowledge such efforts in one way or another – subordinates show respect, peers get testy, etc. And the bosses? They either don't notice anything, because their heads are usually up their asses, or they are too limited to appreciate the ace-level pilotage they are witnessing.

As someone afflicted by this condition, I can assert that there is nothing healthy about it. Privately wallowing in the knowledge that you are "simply the best" and that your work ethic is a cut above everyone else's, while not being adequately rewarded for your efforts, is nothing more than an addiction to one's own ego. It's vanity of the worst kind, because it violates the principles of objectivism and merit-based recognition. And, like any addiction, it is accompanied by a couple of supplemental attributes.

One of them is the inevitable development of passive-aggressive behavior: no matter how many times a person is going to say that she does it for the sake of her own self-satisfaction, something deep inside wants to be celebrated for the extraordinary abilities, efforts, and results. This secret desire is in a constant fight with an extreme dislike of boasting. Thus, the feelings and impulses get mostly suppressed and come out in the form of classic indirect hostility and resentment.

Another attribute is the illusion of irreplaceability. The tormented crazies convince themselves that without them the company will not be able to survive; that everything will fall apart and go to hell. They believe that there is no way somebody else could be found to fill their shoes. And why not? Nowadays, people like that are quite rare. It's most likely that, if an employee in question leaves on her own accord or is let go for some reason (because she becomes unaffordable or her attitude becomes unbearable), the employer will never ever have someone that good in the same position. But does it really mean that losing these truly invaluable workers is an incurable disaster? Are they really irreplaceable? Let me answer this question by doing what I frequently do – relating the readers to an example from popular culture.

In case you have not had a chance to check out the Netflix/Lionsgate's co-production Orange Is the New Black, I urge you to do so – trust me, you will not regret it. The show's creator, Jenji Kohan (widely known for her Showtime offspring, Weeds), is a member of a still rare breed of entertainment developers, who is able to focus on female characters without reducing the finished product to gender-specific genres. Orange is the New Black takes place in a women's federal prison, and its ratio of male to female characters is about 1:10. Yet, 47% of IMDb users who rated Orange is the New Black (8.5 stars overall) were males.

One of the primary characters in the first season of the show is an inmate of Russian origin, Galina "Red" Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew). This formidable woman runs… no, she rules the prison's kitchen and has an influence on pretty much the entire social canvas of the place. By the show's start she has apparently been there for years and assumed a role of a Godmother for a tight circle of her "daughters." She can be a real bitch, and a newbie should think twice before contradicting her. But the truth is she is doing a remarkable job, keeping her fellow convicts and the staff fed and even rewarded with treats under the conditions of ever-shrinking budget, broken fridge, and oppressive hostility from some nasty guards. As early as the 5th episode, it is impossible for the audience to imagine the kitchen without Red. Obviously, she herself thinks she is irreplaceable.

Guess what? Towards the end of the season, the combination of some people's foolishness and others' unsavory scheming gets her kicked off the throne and out of the kitchen. So, what happens? Do the lights go out in the mess hall forever? Do the prisoners get shipped to another facility to be fed? Nah ah! Another head cook is found right there in the general population and installed in front of the range; she brings in her own crew; the cooking continues somehow. True, there are no more yogurt favors, the menu is severely skewed towards Latin-American cuisine, and even the oatmeal comes out spicy. But the plates are not empty, people are not starving. Life goes on, while Red is driving herself insane with displacement anger.

So, the answer to the above question is: No, you are not irreplaceable. It may take a whole team of less adequate and more expensive people to pick up your tasks. And collectively they will accomplish less and it will not be brilliant, but it will be just good enough for the business to continue, at least in the short run. Let me assure you that nothing will fall apart, because doing things half-assed and with little care has become a widespread norm. Everyone accepts poor quality at a higher cost nowadays, and so will your bosses. And you, with your talents, skills and unsolicited attempts to jump over the high-standard bars, are just an ego freak.

One CFO’s Personal Tools for Frustration Relief

So, my fellow CFO’s and Controllers, as promised in my previous post, here are the few tricks I use to privately release my frustration after calmly presenting the composed image to the rest of the world. They are in no specific order. I pick whichever feels right at a particular moment.

(1.) Go to the washroom, enter a stall, close your eyes and start cursing. Five minutes of swearing usually gives a tremendous relief. The volume doesn’t really matter. If raising your voice helps you personally and you are sure nobody is around, go ahead. For me, however, loud whispering (the way actors whisper on stage, so that everyone can hear them), works the best. The dirtier the better. Just pretend that you are in a Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino movie. If you know other languages, use all of them. Remember, don’t call the objects of your frustration by their names, but keep their faces in front of you mentally.

(2.) This release method is not my original. It was shared with me by one of my European colleagues and she has learned it from someone else – I am sure it’s been passed on from one generation to another. I can vouch that it works like a charm. You have to create a “Page of Frustration.” Draw some monster on it, something absolutely revolting. Your artistic abilities make no difference. You can ask a child to draw it for you. The most important thing is to write the title and the destruction instructions on the page. For example: “Page of Frustration. In case of emergency, throw it on the floor and stomp it to shreds.” For some people “viciously crumple and tear it into small pieces” seems to be more appealing. Whatever works! Make yourself a stack of copies and keep them in your desk. Make sure that you don’t run out!

(3.) Another useful inventory for a chronically frustrated CFO or Controller is a favorite treat. Don’t get me wrong – the last thing I want is for anybody to become a closet eater, consuming large quantities of food in search of unattainable solace. No!!! That’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about very small quantities of very small treats, eaten at a very slow pace: three of Godiva chocolate pearls, or five gummy bears, 1/2 oz of trail mix, etc. Separate them into these small portions in advance, keep only few in your office and consume only as a release remedy. It works more as a meditative solution than as aggression liberation, but sometimes that’s all you need.

(4.) On my Front Page Raison d’etre, I talk about the therapeutic effects of writing. And I maintain that committing your grievance to paper is the best form of releasing frustration, tension, stress and anxiety. You can do it in different ways. You can pour your heart out in a diary. You can pretend to write a letter or an email to the source of your pain (without sending them out, of course) describing the situation, verbalizing your feelings, expressing your concerns. Or you can go a step further towards more satisfying resolution. You can write that email and send it to me. Not only that I will become the receptacle of your turmoil, but I will give it even bigger audience by sharing it with other CFO’s, Controllers, etc.

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