The Interim CEO of Mordor, Inc. Has Some Frank Feedback for OneRing Search Leadership

The Witch King of the Nazgûl acts like giving 110% isn’t a Core Value anymore?

Update: this poem is directly from the Lord of the Rings, and it’s really all you need to know to get the most out of the following piece when it comes to parody of the source material:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

OneRing: A Platform Solution To Rule Them All

Let’s have the minutes reflect: the motion to have this board meeting come to order is seconded. As the interim CEO here at Mordor Inc., we want to start with a readout to the board on momentum in a pivotal moment in our quest to dominate… the market. Let’s start with traction:

Winners celebrate our wins. I can see that our marquee partnership with the White Wizard, Saruman, has been performing extremely well. I expect you can relate our congratulations to the account lead on that project? Who is that? Wormtongue? That’s their real name? Oh, goes by Grima. Let’s make sure we have the right pronouns in Hubspot for Grima? Thanks.

Grima— A-player that they are— has internalized the go-to-market motion in a relationship-based strategy like no other. They built a personal relationship with the White Wizard—and what a strong brand that man embodies himself? Am I right? I mean he’s like the wizard. He’s a real KOL for wizardry.

And among Wins in Q3, I have to say Grima Wormtongue also stands out, again, for his tactical alignment with Théoden, King of Rohan. Among the kingdoms of man, this is really another strong and recognizable brand. Rohan is not some bullshit lake town like Dale— Rohan is a real kingdom. People know Rohan. Dwarves know Rohan. Elves know Rohan. Rohan is just a mithril standard for kingdoms of middle earth. We are so thrilled to have one of our brand ambassadors, Grima, bringing their 110% white glove service to that relationship. And I know it had to be subcontracted through Isengard, mostly for optics, but it’s a win for Mordor. Do we have a press release on this? A lot of moving pieces, and Grima, they are just living our core values on the bleeding edge of thought leader liaison engagement best practices.

Oh, the two Towers?… That really hits. That almost doesn’t even need to be focus grouped. Did we run that up the flagpole with our marketing agency? If not, let’s double click our staffs on the stone on that one. That is just pure gold. The Two Towers. Let’s circle back on this.

Nine Difficult Employees to Manage

No, I know we have to get to the ring wraiths. Is their manager ready to join the meeting? He’s out of pocket…often. Yeah, I was thinking to put that off, but if he’s here now, I guess we can talk to him. Ok, talk at him. Is he in the waiting room for one of the Palantir? Oh, here in person? Wow. Well, he always knew how to make an entrance.

Welcome, Mr. Witch King of Angmar, thanks for joining our board meeting, and for your long service as the senior manager for all of the other eight men doomed to die. Your history of service to the company is notable. It’s why you have the vesting options package you do, and the 4 year cliff…oh, it seems you are fully vested.

He doesn’t talk much does he?

So look, there have been some concerns….

…We have been investing for a really long time now. We have a value investor timeline, and the board brought me in as interim CEO to make sure we execute on that vision. But the business plan really does hinge on the One Ring being, and I hope you’ll understand me putting this bluntly, found. It was a lot of R&D, and much of it by Jeff Sauron, our founder and Executive Chair of the Board, that went into that product. It’s why our venture investors brought value—this is not our first MaaS platform solution. Magic-as-a-Service. He likes it when I call him Jeff. Mr. Witch King, I understand, to you, he is the Lord Sauron.

To be clear, The Mordor Investment Group saw product-market fit with the rings of power. They were the “it” product. Our NPS numbers were unbelievable. No. No it’s not. Again, it’s not Nazgûl Promotor Score. Net. I mean, seven individual dwarf lord early adopters? Those halls of stone don’t often get this kind of market penetration, especially with key opinion leaders in the Rare Metals space. RM alone is a huge market, and that is just our service obtainable market. The TAM blows everyone away.

And, of course, the dark writers, which I believe is the name our PR firm came up with for your team? Oh, sorry. Dark RIDERS. Sorry.

Some Actionable Feedback on OKRs

Look, at the end of the day, there are 9 of the Nazgûl. You have one job. You’re supposed to be adding value. You manage a team. A-Players all, former kings I hear. The job description on Indeed read as follows: looking for moral men with > 10 years of experience in: market intelligence, wraithing, OSINT, proprietary search, willingness to travel, a discreet approach, and at the end of the Day— or Era even—you own one mission critical Key Result: Numbers of Rings of Power Found: 1. See, it’s measurable. It’s not like we’re asking you to boil the ocean of the Grey Havens here. We need your team to take your proprietary search methodology and bring us a ring. Our burn rate of gold bars in the mountain of fire is just too high. I will admit, it is still disappointing to have it end up over the wall in the first place. No, no one used the words “corporate espionage.” Look, I don’t think I have to repeat the kind of liability that legal warned us about? The board would be facing substantial claims. Of course we have a directors and officers policy—but if the rangers of the north or other human media got wind of the misappropriation of the OneRing core tech? Not a good look. That is Theranos level bad.

Yes, I know about the Gollum situation. Sméagol? Whatever his name is. Look that guy is just going to be a thorn in our side for the LOTR knows how long. At this point, we have to be satisfied we have run all the angles on this. Quoting his account manager: “he’s an edge case.” We should’ve just acquired that little ”founder” when we had the chance. But frankly, the market has moved on, and we don’t want to be where the market was. Mordor, Inc and our OneRing platform is where the market is going.

We did a readout earlier. Let’s double-click on some of the outputs together? The invoices that I’m reviewing—Expensify is a time saver!— speak to a fiscal attitude that, frankly, needs right-sizing. It’s a down market, but maybe we reduce “wraith cowl-count?” Perhaps considered a project management hire with the remaining budget we free up?

I see stable expenses for your steeds from across at least three separate kingdoms at any given time. Sometimes we are talking about multiple steeds in the same Inn at the same time. You have, so I was told, you consider the other—riders?—to be nine project leads? And who reports to them? We seem to see no direct reports on any of the 15Fives for your team.

When we drill down, does it really seem like having multiple “leads” on the project following up at the same time makes sense in this market? Use HubSpot—this is what a CRM is for. As you know, I spent time at SalesForce, and that is why I’m in an executive role here. Yes, it is the number one CRM platform solution on earth, not just middle earth. Thanks for breathing audibly in a way that got me to intuit that you craved more information. That’s called intuitive leadership.

Look, let’s imagine any of you found the ring. What is the value add of having all 9 of you on a single site? I mean, did we create the Orcs only as a foul mockery of the elves? Or were they a solution for our staffing crisis so as to scale our ability to execute? Yes, the double meaning was intended. Execution of execution.

Because— I will be direct about the data we have here?— we’ve got feedback on your team. Nothing is what I’m seeing here on the company Slack, and we’ve got a lot of orcs that seem like they might benefit from some direct management from experienced managers. It’s about mentorship. Mordor, Inc. is a data-driven learning organization now. It’s not just about collection of the data with our giant-lidless-eye-solution, it’s about analytics— actionable business intelligence! We moved the goal posts with that giant eye, and we will do it again.

What we’re seeing with your team—and I’ve managed a lot of teams, thus joining the team here to turn this ship around—is a lack of alignment. Not only have you been allocated nine rings of power, and unnaturally long lives with which to execute, but it seems as if, and this meeting is certainly evidence of it, there is a lack of communication from the Nazgûl—is the plural Nazgûls? 15Five has a whole tutorial section. Yes, it’s accessible on mobile.

We’re seeing less results. Not more. And if you had bothered to come to the company off-site in Rivendell, you’d have fallen in love with the rebranding from Leo Burnett: More-dor (TM). That’s right, we expect more, not less. More-dor (TM). Any organization is about culture, and Mordor is a culture organization. We have a culture of more. It’s a culture of more winning, more orcs, more domination. But because we are adding value, all leveraged with less rings. Our OneRing philosophy is our culture. And it seems like the Nazgûl are more focused on their individual rings than on the OneRing culture we are building. More-dor, where we do More and more efficiently. We strive – that’s why Andy Grove developed OKRs for Intel, and that’s why Mordor has adopted “objectives and key results” as a way to scale to 10,000 humanoid OneRing platform users in Q1. Humanoid includes all our key user groups: elves, orcs, humans, and is the language in the style guide. Are you even listening?

Can I be very frank? Direct feedback is an entire slide in our culture deck. It’s right up there with “one ring to rule them all,” and “one ring to find them.” The Nazgûl team is on thin ice—we dropped the fluff about “in the darkness, bind them”—didn’t resonate in elvish communities. We need you filling out your 15Fives—would it kill you to offer a high five?—yes, updating your contacts in HubSpot, and using some of the tech stack we have spent endless time selecting for Wraith-accessible features in order to get the job done. One ring to find them. Have you found anything recently? This would never pass for 110% at SalesForce.

Every time you intimidate someone into telling you something about wherever that goddamn ring is, just put it in HubSpot. Or Asana. I don’t care. It’s about documentation. Are the Nazgûl using Monday.com and just not telling the board? I mean, at this point, it’s got an API, and we can work with that. It’s about policies and procedures and following a workflow. Only six of your dark riders have even signed the employee handbook. It’s time. Get alignment with the vision of “More.” Or some of your team are going to need to find new roles where they are a better cultural fit. I hear the Sword of Shannara needs finding? Maybe they can find a thesaurus for whoever the hell is writing more Twilight fan-fiction at this rate?

Look, if you’re just gonna stand there and breathe in that sinister way and not say anything, just come via the Palantir. Minis Mogul has one. Isengard has one. But don’t waste your travel budget just to mouth breathe at the entire Board of Directors.

We are going to have to table this. Jeff has a hard stop in five. Your performance improvement plan starts Monday. It’s already been pushed to your Google Calendar, thanks to the 15five API. You’ll be having a one-to-one with Jeff directly. Fine, the Lord Sauron. Thanks for coming, Mr. of Angmar. I hope you bring some of that extra-ordinary—and frankly a bit unsettling—focus to the table in the service of taking the Nazgûl team to the next level. OK, I get it, hard stop.