Letters
Notes from the table
These are letters we were given permission to print. They name the commission and the constraint. We have not smoothed the reservations.
We used to send eighty pages on Thursday evening and hope the independent directors had a quiet Friday. After Panelmatrixbase cut the headline sheet to six figures, the March meeting reached the capex item before lunch. I still miss a couple of operational charts they moved to the annex — the plant manager likes to see them — but the chair no longer asks where the cash variance is hiding.
The metric audit was uncomfortable reading. Giorgi listed four pages that had appeared in every pack for a year and had never been spoken to, including a utilisation chart I had personally asked for. We dropped three of them. The fourth stayed because the managing partner still wants it. Fair enough. The letter paid for itself in the next secretary’s print bill.
Ana sat with us for the first table of the new board. She would not let the sales director open the annex until he asked a question that actually lived there. Two of our older directors found her manner dry. I found the meeting shorter. We booked her again for the finance committee, not for the full board.
The monthly pack arrives the day before, bound, with a slip if a source broke. Last November the receivables extract came in late from our Yerevan office and they held the run rather than print a guess. I was annoyed that night and grateful in the morning. We now send the Armenian figures a day earlier.
A longer note: the fittings plant
The electrical fittings company on the Kakheti highway had a pack that had grown like a shed: each department nailing on a lean-to. Independent directors started missing meetings. The secretary’s pencil marks, which we asked to see, stopped around page twelve of eighty.
The sitting took a full morning because scrap and cash were being defined three ways. Giorgi refused to put scrap on the headline sheet until the plant and finance used the same reject code. That delay cost them a week and saved them a row in April. The new pack is twelve pages and a thin annex. The plant manager still carries his old Pareto chart in a folder. The chair lets him speak to it after the headline, not instead of it.
We do not present this as a conversion story. They still argue. They argue on page one.