My sister and I were on the same time zone for the first time in our adult lives in the beginning of 2020. I was living in LA for a couple of months, taking advantage of an office opening to get away from NYC’s winter funk, while she was in Portland, working in an office that would shut down a few months later and never reopen.
She’d call me in the evenings and complain about work. Decision makers layers away were about to make a change that she was determined to prevent, and she was listening to customer calls every night to build her case slide by slide while I cooked scrambled eggs for dinner in my Culver City airbnb and listened to her try out different storylines. I called it her “Custer’s Last Stand,” a metaphor you’ll have to forgive because I realize now more than ever how many of my work metaphors are about going to battle, and also because my understanding of American history is actually total shit. But the analogy was meant to be about realizing you have to go all out when you’re facing an existential loss, about channeling your frustration in order to fight for a different outcome— realizing you care enough to try.
I’ve seen a few people build these “Last Stands” now, usually an exasperated product manager or p&l owner drafting a moving story instead of just another dry market analysis. It always circulates quietly, a designer getting added before that one critical executive gets looped in, people starting to whisper about it. Inevitably someone gets annoyed that they haven’t been asked to contribute, a counter argument comes together from somewhere on the sidelines (Finance). But there’s something magical about watching people build these plans, the slow trickling “maybe this is it” feeling that moves person by person through an organization. There’s something intoxicating about people talking about work like they care.
I only built my own version for the first time this past Friday, a frenzied four hour sprint on my couch after a long day of stewing, screenshotting slides from a board deck to copy paste them into my zine of a master plan. I don’t know why I haven’t done this sooner. It’s a little different here, at an organization this size and in a role where I’m proposing organizational changes instead of a new business strategy. There is no slow circulation across stakeholders, just an abrupt “hit send” on a Saturday morning to the CEO. But I called my sister afterwards, and took a cab to her house which these days is just on the other side of the park, to joke with my niece that Aunt Jena might get fired.
