Stories
The useful comments name a drawer, a lunch, or a meeting.
These are principals and production managers who let us into appointment books. They are not anonymous scores. One of them found the on-site week longer than they liked. That belongs on the page with the rest.
I had been thanking the same three solicitor names at every Chinese New Year lunch. The register showed one of them had not sent a case that bound since the year before last. The other two were real. I kept the lunches. I stopped the standing courtesy on the silent one.
The first week of pulling old appointment books was tedious, and two of our consultants grumbled that outsiders were reading their margins. Fair. The leakage note at the end named three courtesy lines we had been paying on habit. I would have liked the on-site days shorter. The note itself I still keep in the accounts drawer.
We thought we had nine HR introducers. After the mapping they were two factory groups and a payroll clerk who used three different company chops. That is a different conversation with our own board.
I took the stapled file to a bancassurance annual sit-down and, for once, did not open with a story. I opened with what they had sent and what had bound. They did not like every line. They also stopped claiming a fleet we had written through a different desk.
A longer case
Ampang, three solicitor names, one silent courtesy
Datin Noraini’s office had treated three solicitor introducers as a set for as long as anyone could remember. The Chinese New Year hamper list was identical. The source review, coded from two years of diaries against commission statements, showed one name with no bound case in the second year and only quotations in the first. The standing courtesy was still leaving accounts every quarter.
She did not ask us to telephone the solicitor. She stopped the standing instruction, kept the other two lunches, and used the register in a partners’ meeting so the decision was not gossip about a person. That is the shape of work we are willing to be known for: a closed door, a named source, and a principal who still owns the relationship.