Off-Topic

A few years ago, I was managing the replacement of a patent-management system in aerospace. A project of rare complexity : several countries, inventions to protect continent by continent, legal, cultural and political stakes.

Kick-off day. Peak summer, a small room, about fifteen people. The business sponsor, alone, heading a division of 2,500 people. The global CIO with his strategic advisor. The country representatives. The integrator runs through 80 slides — brilliant, dense, remarkably built.

At the end, he asks if there are any questions. Few reactions — it all needs digesting. Then my manager raises his hand. He asks to go back to the org-structure slide. He looks at it for a long moment. And he says : “My name is missing.”

Eighty slides on a project of extreme complexity, millions at stake — and the only thing that stops him is a box on an org chart.

It isn’t vanity. It’s more unsettling : faced with the real, the first human movement isn’t to enter it, but to look for oneself in it. Beside the point. Off-topic. And that’s often where projects begin to fail — when attention goes to one’s place rather than to the project, while the one carrying the real weight stays silent.

Everything was there. He was looking elsewhere.