When I was still trapped in the corporate terrarium, there came a day when, without warning, the head of Business Development vanished from the scene. He was a difficult man—abrasive, unyielding, and not exactly a team-building poster child—but his departure was not forced by the company. He simply walked.
A few days later, the Managing Director called me in and offered me the position. At the time, I was knee-deep in operations, negotiating supply contracts, living in the world where things either worked or they didn’t. Business Development, by contrast, was responsible for LNG—a domain I cared for profoundly. So I accepted.
I was under no illusions of grandeur. I knew full well that I was stepping from the tangible world of operations into a paper kingdom—a place where memos breed like rabbits and PowerPoint decks substitute for actual work.
But they made a critical miscalculation: I am, at heart, a roughneck entrepreneur and a compulsive problem-solver. I don’t do well with ornamental roles. Within a week, I tore the department down to the studs and rebuilt it into a kind of corporate special-ops unit, dedicated to tackling the company’s nastiest problems head-on. I delivered projects, not paper.The modern world is drowning in paper divisions—endless bureaucratic paddling pools where no real swimming happens. What we need are fewer ornamental departments and more people who actually do things. If we’re looking for candidates to abolish, perhaps we can start with the UN.