Hilarious Barclays Goodbye Email

Received this floating around last week. Apparently it was written by a Barclays kid that just left. For those of you who have bosses who love to use business metaphors and figures of speech, you're gonna love this.

The email is lengthy, but if you can relate to its contents, you will find the comedic value.

"All,

Now that I’m the client, I have a new assignment for you.

I have a feeling someone might be doing some weekend work on this, so before we start this process, let’s make sure not to put all of our eggs in one basket – if there are too many roosters in the henhouse and too many cooks in the kitchen, we will be letting the wolf into the chicken coop and this will be a hard nut to crack. At the end of the day - looking at the product from 15,000 feet – it’s just a blackbox resting on a slippery slope. But from a bottom-up perspective – we’re pretty smart guys and doing this from soup to nuts will leave us with bird in hand and create some serious value-added.

Provided we row downstream and don’t spin our wheels – there’s no need to be caught with our pants down.

Let’s take a top-down approach - focus on core competencies, think outside the box, keep it apples to apples and bake in your assumptions, and spread, dig into, play with, juice, goose, vet, run, flesh out, go through with a fine tooth comb, sanity check, scrub and flush the noise out of those numbers. I need you, right now, to sharpen your pencils, get cranking, take the lead, turn these comments, not tread water, bang this out, push it through, get it across the finish line and drop it on my chair. And before you send this to me, make sure to take a step back, get your arms around it, not miss the forest for the trees, and check under the hood – it better hold water. I’m not religious about this, but net-net I would guess there will be some layered switches, hockey sticks, sensitivities, color-coded sheets and zero gridlines. I know you want a rubberstamp – but there is a definite possibility that the Director will want to get his hands dirty – I want us to stay on top of the ball, keep our coach’s whistle on, stay behind the wheel and keep ownership of the work.

After the heavy lifting, we just need to get the deliverables out the door and keep everything else under the kitchen sink – we’ll figure out its highest and best use later. Keep in mind I am in no way wed to this analysis, but this is a two-horse race, and we can’t afford to have our heads in the tent. There is no need to recreate the wheel here, but this will be a great learning experience. Let’s discuss when you get in.

Basically, you’re preaching to the choir here. To get a little more granular here before we press the print button, let’s touch base now. (I’ll be out of pocket later, so swing by while I’m on the ground.)

First of all, this is a good chance for you to step up. Right now, the two companies are feeling less than romantic, but remember, all girls talk. I think they’ll eventually give up more than a girl on prom night – our job is to get them across the finish line. I want us to manage the process and keep the ball in our court. I appreciate that this may be a bit of a lick in the armpit, but I want us to work smart, not hard, and I don’t want to recreate the wheel – this doesn’t need to be gold-plated. Let’s divide and conquer. You do the blocking and tackling and I’ll socialize it with the board. I want us to run this to ground before we lob the missile over to the other side. My fear is that our client will land on a grenade or try to catch a falling piano. We don’t want to open up the kimono too soon, or we may bleed to death by a 1000 cuts. Just so we’re crystal, let’s get on the same page – I don’t want us to trip a mine. I’ll focus on the care and feeding of the board and you bottom this out. For ease-of-motion and because all the moving parts, I will appoint you scribe. Just blackberry me if you need more guidance. I need to be on a plane now.

Before you sign off, let’s not lose sight of the big picture. What’s driving all of this is that we could put all the buyers in a Civic and still have spare seats. But, at the end of the day, it is what it is. We may have to kiss a lot of frogs to get there, but I think the other side has been leaving some breadcrumbs on the trail. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just to be sure were not drinking our own kool-aid, let’s stress-test this, just for our own back-pocket. I want 100% of your bandwidth. If someone calls, put them on the box and I’ll talk to them. With this kind of thing, the devil’s in the details. In the mean-time, you keep your head down and I’ll keep my ears to the ground. I don’t want us to get all hot and heavy yet. Let us bat this around internally and send it over to our scientists in the lab. We need to kick the tires, or else we may find ourselves sitting in neutral. I want to be efficient with the team’s time and not spin our wheels – after all, we’re all wearing several hats here. The companies are doing the lover’s dance but we need to focus on putting this to bed. The industrial logic of this deal is sound, but the issue is the CFO is sitting in the CEO’s lap, talking his book. We need some air cover here and if we don’t get it, we’re going to have to run an audible. For now, we should keep our cards close to our chest.

Thx,
Jon"

Mod Note (Andy): Best of 2016, this post ranks #16 for the past year