President and Regional Clothing Stores

You’re one of the 10 VP’s of a small chain of regional clothing stores, where you’re in charge of the women’s apparel department. One of your jobs is to review each month’s performance at a meeting of all 10 department heads and the company president. Like your fellow VPs, you prepare a PowerPoint presentation showing the results of the previous month and your projections for the upcoming month, and during your presentation, you take the podium ans lead the discussion from the front of the room

On the whole, the meeting ia part of a pretty sound overall strategy that allows everyone to know what’s going on and what to expect across the board. Typically, the only drawback to an informative and productive session is the president’s apparent inability to deal with bad news. He gets irritable and likes to lambaste “underperformers” and as a result, you and your colleagues always enter the meeting with stomachs in knot and leave it with full-blown gastric distress. The president himself thinks he’s fostering an open and honest discussion, but everyone else in the room knows plain old-fashiones bullying when they see it.

As luck would have it, you know found yourseld at the front of the room, looking up at the floor-to-ceiling screen on which are emlazoned, in what looks to you like 500-pont font (red, of course), your less than stellar monthly numbers. Sweating profusely, you’re attempting to explain some disappointing sales figures when you hear a noise- a sort of thudding ans rattling- against the wall behind you. Startled, you spin around towars the room and are suprised to see thet everyine was seems to be looking for something on the floor or checking the weather through the window on one side of the room. Finally, you galce toard the wall behind you, where you discover a bend meeting chair lying on the floor, and as you look up again, you see that the president is standing, his arms crossed and his face scowling. “The next time you show me those numbers like those,” he snarls, “I won’t miss!”