Typical Day
Wanda Buysomething strides into the office early, and heads straight for the coffee machine in the kitchen. The clock ticks 8:57 a.m., and the office at Bird—a company that doesn’t make anything to do with birds but instead makes shampoo, conditioner, and apparently small chocolates—is relatively quiet.
She rifles through the first couple pages of the newspapers, taking care to spend a couple second looking at the first page so that anyone watching thinks she cares about that days top headlines. Then she flips through.
“Arts and style… blech. Sports…no. Local… how about not. Ah!” she says upon reaching the Business section. “Come to mama.”
Sipping her coffee, Wanda catches up on the latest market news: who bought or merged with whom, strength of major indexes, market summaries for different commodities. Standard, light reading, suitable for breakfast.
Ready to start her day, Wanda heads to her office, and boots up her trusty computer. Immediately after logging in, six different spreadsheets pop up on the screen. What would seem like clutter to any other person is to Wanda a highly efficient system of tabs and Stickie notes and windows kept open at specific sizes.
Slipping into an Excel coma, Wanda stares at the screen, almost without blinking. The only parts of her body that moves—less a movement than a twitch—are her pointer finger and a few muscles on her thumb. Focusing her mind like a Jedi, all parts of her brain except for the one percent she needs to navigate the spreadsheet shut down. Suddenly:
“WANDA!”
“Sorry, what’s that?” Wanda emerges from her Excel coma to find Addy Vertise, a senior corporate officer in charge of marketing at Bird. Addy stares at her like she’s an idiot.
“It’s 12 o’clock. The presentation. For marketing. Remember?” Addy sighs. “Please tell me you remembered.”
“Yes, yes. Yes, of course I did.”
Bundling her materials up, Wanda hustles into the boardroom where everyone from the marketing team is already there. She’s new to the company, entry-level, and not an official part of “The Team”. An outsider. All the same, Wanda battles down the butterflies in her stomach and fires up the PowerPoint she created.
She launches her presentation:
“Our research shows our consumers love our line of personal care, products like our shampoo, conditioners and soap. Research also shows that our consumers love our line of chocolate bars and ice cream. So why not put them together? I’m thinking edible, chocolate-flavored shampoo…”
Having captured the attention of the marketing team, Wanda dials back and spends the next forty-five minutes giving a general overview of the research methodology and key data that she used. She concludes with the results of a recent survey questionnaire she devised and carried out.
At the end of her presentation, the team breaks for lunch, and Wanda heads to the nearest deli for a quick sandwich. After thirty-seven minutes exactly, Wanda trudges back to her office, where she buries herself in her work, this time minimizing her six Excel windows (with a total of forty-three tabs between them). Then she focuses her energy on turning the presentation she just gave, and the feedback they gave her (“Is there any existing data on edible shampoo, or are we in uncharted territory here?”) into a written report.
On the open Word document, Wanda begins to type the first words that come to mind: methodology, market potential, manufacturing, customer profile (“Customers tell us that your new shampoo is a vast improvement over the past shampoos, which they say can only be improved by making it able to be eaten”), and their major edible shampoo competitors (“None”).
The pieces of the report are coming together, slowly but surely, when Wanda needs to go to the 3:30 p.m. all-staff meeting. Though Wanda is generally pretty quiet at them, she appreciates hearing about the work everyone else at Bird is doing since she always seems to know more about the people who buy Bird than the people who work there.
Released from the all-staff meeting at 4:30 p.m., Wanda heads back to her desk to send some more emails, wrap up a second presentation (this time about a shampoo-flavored chocolate), and is home by 7:30 pm, scouring the internet for the latest development in market trends—beyond soap and chocolate.