Original message-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Walter Houston, CEO
Sent: Friday, March 12th, 2008 5:12pm
To: Alan Wamser
Subject: Yesterday’s Promo Event for LIVING: A fragrance for everyone
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ALAN, THE DEAD ARE WALKING! MASS MURDERS! THE CITY IS CHAOS! DEAR GOD, WHAT DID YOU DO?!?

To: Walter Houston, CEO
Sent: Friday, March 12th, 2008 5:20pm
From Alan Wamser
Subject: RE: Yesterday’s Promo Event for LIVING: A fragrance for everyone
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Sir,

While the public may seem a bit dazed by yesterday’s successful launch of LIVING, I see it as a clear indication that we have revolutionized the perfume and cologne industry. As I type this, literally hordes of eager consumers are still shuffling around the community center parking lot where our promotional van released a steady stream of the scent into the area.

The media coverage I’ve seen looks positive, although, I don’t understand this whole “zombie holocaust” slant. The fact is that the population is affected—or better yet—infected by our new product. Just look out your window. What we have is an entirely new, ungroomed cross-section of society that is already growing at an amazing rate. We need to get out there and start selling to them now.

Despite what competitors and the Emergency Broadcast Network may allege, claims of “amassing armies of the undead” are just their desperate attempts to coin a catchphrase and cash in on this phenomenon before we do. No, what I see outside are misguided, yet dedicated buyers of all ages, races and status all uniting for one common goal: Living.

I don’t see yesterday’s event as a “biochemical disaster of apocalyptic proportions” but rather a shifting of the global entropic paradigm. Sir, we are at its heart, and I for one am hungry.

We should conduct a feedback forum with the others on Monday. I will bring donuts.

By the way, how are Sharon and the kids?

Alan Wamser
Director of Marketing & Planning
NLD Cosmetics
awamser@NLDcosmetics.com

To: Executive Management
From: Technology Services
RE: System Optimization for Compliance with ITIL/ITSM Policy

Sirs:

The weekly meeting of the ITICMPDG (IT Infrastructure Change Management Preliminary Discussion Group) successfully addressed the linear process of Service Level Management (SLM) in accordance with the Service Level Requirements (SLR) and the Service Specification Sheets (Spec Sheets) as they integrate within the Service Quality Plan (SQP).

It was determined that to merge the existing budgetary constraints with the current level of System Quality Potential (SQP), we can achieve our Critical Success Factors (CSF) by lowering the Infrastructure Uptime Expectations (IUE) to meet the Overall Performance Indicators (OPI) of the functional realities.

Henceforth, Infrastructure Services will implement state-of-the-art round-robin technology to address the company’s Capacity Management (CM) issues. Resource users will be allocated processing time based on Fluctuating Flatus Frequency (FFF) using a Time-Dilation Factor (T/DF) algorithm. Demand for processing resources will rotate within the parameters of the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and the overall attenuation and prominence of the user.

Modifications to the IT Services Network Optimization Plan (ITSNOP) will be deliberated with Perpetual Prospectivity (PP), then black-boxed to a service management vendor for continuation engineering.

Regards,
Ira DuFwap
Systems Engineer

Management insists on compliance with the latest quality standards, but refuses to fund any additional hardware expenditures, and will waste additional resources by conducting worthless meetings and inventing meaningless acronyms. In the meantime, the system will continue to crash on a regular basis if anyone attempts to open a spreadsheet and pass gas at the same time. Users who complain about system performance will be ignored unless they yell a lot or could actually fire Ira, the only IT person. He will continue to hold useless meetings until he can find a vendor naive enough to provide a service contract.

Memo:

The highly mobile marketing division will be relocated to an advantageously intimate corporate office appropriately named the Venue. This unprecedented opportunity will facilitate exchanges, think-tanks and connections with colleagues in a teambuilding setting.

The fresh start will be symbolized by the creation of an uncluttered open-spaced concept accentuated by sparsely chosen pieces of furniture. Notions of day and night will disappear as the tightly woven team of the Venue develops new prioritized skills enabling partnerships with local inhabitants.

This grounded facility will provide contacts of a new nature with potential clients in a wealth sharing community. Minimized adjustments are anticipated as growing opportunities abound. Envision the Venue as it awaits you.

Small, windowless, and infested basement office in a bad area of town.

To: CEO

From: Project Director

Our latest product has met with some resistance in market penetration due to customer misunderstanding of the benefits involved to migrating to this new platform. Since we have met this kind of resistance before, the department suggests the following remedies:

1) Right-size customer expectations for the new product by leveraging our traditional marketing force more fully. We want to emphasize to the potential customer that our new platform is a whole new paradigm of excellence, and will deliver exactly the usability and reliability they expect from us.

2) Distribute a substantial looking, but largely window dressing set of enhancements to our product. It was perfect to start with, but we need to let our customers know we have heard their concerns and have addressed them. We should also create a lot of industry buzz around this latest enhancement, as the pinnacle of what a world-class product can do. Marketing has commissioned a demo song outlining the direction we should take.

3) Create a synergy between our old customer base and our new one by hastening the life cycle ending of the old product. Since we know we will have some stodgy thinkers involved in the product choice decision, we should allow them to keep using the old product as long as they purchase the license to the new one. We should do this program cautiously, since we want the majority of our customers to stay the path with our newest product line enhancements.

Moving forward at this time, we expect to double our market penetration (both real and perceived) by at least another 50% over the next 12 months. We envision that to be enough to give the next team time to iron out the bugs in the next great version of our products.

Vista. You didn’t REALLY need the spoiler did you?

To: Chairman of the Board

From: CEO

We have received word of a counter-productive benchified response from the judge in our slander of title initiative against the company that sold us productionalized assets of their product. As you know, we have been exchanging memos re: concerning the realignment of Intellectual Property issues pursuant to our repositioning of the product, to which we had been getting less than full team player-ship from the seller.

We have been in court to demand the transferization of the related Intellectual Property, the other company has sued for 95% of our sales from their former assets as per the contract, despite our stand that we have only sold our own derivative works.

At this point in time, in order to managize costs outside of proceedings, we suggest right-sizing our work force by 95%, full payment of all monies owed our suppliers of which you have half interest, and full performance bonuses to senior management. We also suggest putting in place a liberal severance package for our top executives to retain their services in these down-cycle times. We envision the full executive requirements for this company to be the CEO, the Chairman of the Board, and our Legal Council.

We fully expect vindication of this benchified opinion in appeals court, however strategic maneuvers such as Chapter 11 may be a contrawise indicated fiscal approach to finish disposal of our available assets before the assessment of damages, and a likely constructive trust are mandated.

We believe that together we can forge a bright new future for our enterprise.

company facing a $32 million judgement with $6 million cash on hand

Note: Trust me; productionalize, managize, and contrawise have all been used in business menus dispite the fact they are not actually words. Benchified hasn’t yet - give them time.

You’re going to love this one chief: our little game box has been voted ‘hottest’ product of the year! That’s right, we are smoking! Sales are great, they love our games, and we even have the added feature of the three lights of death! Talk about excitement in an online first person shooter, just imagine taking a wrong turn and everything goes dead! It doesn’t get more realistic then that. To top it off, the reset feature includes sending it back to the factory for servicing! None of our competitors can touch that feature!

While this is one of our most sought-after features, we want to make sure not to build anticipation up too much - our customer might take up using something else while they are waiting. Our engineering department is looking into ways to fine-tune this feature, having it only go off when the user makes a crucially bad move. We are also adding additional shifts at the repair shops to get these machines back out in the customer’s hands as quickly as possible, and have gone with a “send one in, get another back by return mail” paradigm. Details are still to be worked out, since customers do store scoring information and saved games on their hard drives.

We also are aware that not everybody likes extra-hot chilli peppers on their taco’s, so we are offering a replacement energizing unit that cools things down a bit for our customers.

Customers like our machine so much, they are demanding a longer life-cycle for it, and we are accommodating them with a “three-year extension plan”.

Naturally with a boffo product like this, extra expenses are incurred to productionalize the added features, the price tag on these is calculated at a low $3,000,000,000.00. Try to get Sony or Nintendo to match that!

X-Box 360

The multi-disiplinary cross functional team received pushback from additional stakeholders which impacted our dashboard, therefore we have determined that the best course of action is to go back to our roots, connect the dots and focus on the low hanging fruit. This means taking a deep dive to ensure that we realign our priorities in order to drive the project and leverage our intellectual capital to empower them to get buy-in from these stakeholders to ensure we are on the same page. As we evaluate the disconnect, it is critically important that we are proactive in our charge going forward, to grow the business and stay in touch with our core mission and value propositions.

As we push the envelope and gain credibility for the game plan, a gap analysis will facilitate leadership’s vision and build a future-proof business case. This will validate our course of action and give us best practices and lessons learned to allow us to go the extra mile as we further streamline this customer-focused, scalable initiative. We’ll go from there to incent the team to foster a best-in-breed culture leveraging core compentancies to goal-set and maintain the big picture vision. We expect to be green-lighted for the next phase scenarios in the long term.

I’ll ball park you on the deliverables to manage expectations. Ping me if you need any additional input. We can dialogue about utilizing resources and whether we are rightsizing human capital. My door is always open.

We screwed up on something, got caught and now we're running waaaaaaaaaay behind schedule and missed all the deadlines.

To: Supervisor Randy Jameson
From: Project manager Sarah Jones
Re: Niche vertical deliverables

Randy,

A brief status update on the deliverables we discussed for your new niche vertical, which launched today:

· To build a cross-departmental foundation for this project, we're now leveraging the interactive task force's key strengths to create the companion online product.

· Interactive is efforting a cost-benefit assessment and developing their own benchmarks regarding ROI/revenue.

· A focus group will be convening in Q2 to examine Interactive's wireframes; before that time, we should caucus offline pull together our short list of expected outcomes.

· Our team's liaison will convene with Interactive to discuss a timeline and best practices for deployment following the focus group. At that time, we'll consider whether an in-house solution or a turnkey vendor product is the best choice.

I'm sure this is all the info you need, but look me up if you have any questions.

Sarah