公司职员的工作问题(2/3)

Well, I now know to take all this talk about the importance of communication skills seriously.

I used to think it was all rather woolly,

but when you've seen the damage misunderstandings can do.

I suppose the board was a grouping of people with such strong backgrounds individually

that each of them expected to be top dog,

and that it was perhaps inevitable

that they'd clash over what direction the company should go in.

Anyhow,

it looked very grim for a while but,

in the end,

two of them took the pretty sizeable payoffs they were offered and moved on.

From our point of view,

at least it saved us from the prospect of the group being split up

and the shares sold off.

We were all extremely glad to see the back of that particular episode in the company's history.

I know there's quite a trend to constantly reviewing your sourcing in the search for cost savings,

but it was crazy to move over to such an untried firm.

The trouble was we were getting nearly all our parts from them,

so everything was leaving the factory here with faulty components,

with appalling results.

We should have listened to the consultants,

but on this one we thought we knew better.

It got so bad that predatory offers were being made for the division,

and we had to think hard about how to save the brand's reputation.

Raising fresh capital through new shares was the right way to go

and enabled us to cover the losses we made in sales.