The Slow Slide into Shittiness

By now in your career you've probably been employed by, hired, partnered with, or competed against a company that was bought out by another company.

Think about what they were like. Roll it around on your tongue.

If you had any experience with that acquired company prior to its acquisition, no matter what your role was at the time and no matter whether that company employed you or was one of your vendors, partners, etc., chances are that you either worked for or with or against them because they were a pretty well-run company, with something that, if pressed, you might even say you really liked about them.

Until...

They were bought up or out by another (usually larger, often older, certainly more bottom-line-focused) company and run right into the ground.

It might have taken awhile, but the first signs appeared early - layoffs, management changes, mass defections, and release dates for new products and/or services either pushed back (often more than once) or shelved, with the PR folks spinning an endless cloud of vague language to try and downplay the fact that the company you liked better was now circling the drain.

The reason for this is because almost all acquisitions take place in order to grow the buyer's market share. They completely ignore what made the target company attractive enough to become a target in the first place: Customers. Loyal Customers.

When you buy a company, unless it's carved out in the legalese as a sop to the original owner(s), you get the whole thing: IP, products, employees, property, documentation, goodwill, history, and on and on. But if you only walk away with their Customer list (perhaps chopping up the rest to sell down-market) and somehow believe that those Customers are now yours, you haven't been paying attention to corporate acquisitions over the past century or so.

Something about the acquired company appealed to those Customers. It might have been their products, or how great their rep was, or their lower cost, ease of use, simple terms, terrific service, culture, inclusiveness, processes, or a hundred other things. Or (most often) a mash-up of all of those things.

The company doing the buying typically has a culture that is focused on acquisition. That's how they got so big in the first place. But as they acquire Customer lists and discard the rest, those Customers jump ship to the next company to come along that offers all of the things that were jettisoned in a race to instant gratification and the bottom line.

During due diligence, as you're looking over the books of the company that you want to acquire and figuring out how to make them part of you by forcing them to be you, with your people and methods and rules, why not do this:

• Have each of your department managers spend time with the managers and crews of the company that you are buying. Not an afternoon. A solid two weeks at least. Not to explain your company's way of doing things, but to specifically look for things that they do better than you do.
• Record everything you see and hear.
• Take all of that knowledge - that you are paying for, by the way, and now own - back to your own company. Map it against how you do things. Figure out how to adopt the things that they do better. Even if it means - horrors! - changing things in your company.
• Start doing things the new way, before the acquisition is complete, or it will never happen.
• Don't let everyone who isn't in sales leave. People are more often than not what made that company great - their knowledge, experience, ideas, attitudes, excitement. I understand that you can't and don't necessarily want to hire everyone. There are always redundancies. But what if their HR Manager or one of their line workers or IT people is better than one of yours? Trade up!

Most acquisitive companies tend to take a Darwinian view: We must be the better company, this line of thinking goes, because we're acquiring them. But this completely ignores the fact that acquisitions aren't why most companies exist. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When you've paid all that money for another company, why leave so much of value on the table? Or, worse yet, there for the taking by a competitor with a wider view and a long-term vision?

Hey, it's your money; do what you want. I just (used to) work here.

Eliminate GAS

Something that happens once you’ve been in any job awhile is that you start to notice patterns in what Customers want and do. Human brains are hard-wired to spot patterns. That’s what helped you remember your mother’s face when you were two weeks old, and that’s what helped us spot the leopard in the grass 30,000 years ago. Pattern recognition is one of the things that has made us such a successful species.

Once you’ve been on the job a little longer, though, you start to make assumptions about what Customers want, and that tendency only gets stronger over time. We think we can guess what Customers will say if we tell them that they need $800 worth of brake work, or assume they don’t want leather seats, or speculate about the state of their credit based on the clothes they wear.

The trouble is, we’re often wrong. People are individuals, not pre-programmed robots. And it’s not just that we’re wrong with our first guess - a single Customer’s answers can change over time, too. And they may not want to tell a complete stranger what they really think right out of the gate. That’s part of why many sales classes teach you to ask the same question three different ways.

Don’t guess. Don’t assume. Don’t speculate. Find out. Ask, and ask more than once, and in different ways. That’s the only way to know.

The (Lack of) Persistance of Memory

The human brain is an amazing organ. Despite our current technological expertise, it has yet to be equaled in terms of computing power per ounce, but it does have something in common with the hard drive on your computer:

Every time that you remember something, your brain re-commits it to memory, effectively playing post office with itself and fundamentally changing the memory. This has such a profound effect on your perceptions that it's actually possible to create memories of events that never happened, so vivid that your brain can't tell the difference.

Aside from how disturbing this is when applied to the idea of 'eyewitness testimony' at a trial, this has potentially destructive implications for your business. Even Customer Service and Salespeople that are 'young and sharp' remember things differently than they actually occurred.

How do you combat this? By making it part of your organization's culture to record everything in your CRM or database as soon as it happens (while it's happening, if possible, so that even the wording used is retained). If it was a phone conversation, record those and attach them to Customer accounts (in my call center experience, 95% of Customers remember a phone conversation differently than what actually occurred). If it was an email chain, make certain that those are attached to the Customer account, too.

The essential ingredient here is urgency. If a rep or anyone else who has direct communication with Customers is slow to record those communications, curb this behavior immediately. The longer anyone waits, the more that will become your culture, and the less accurate the information in your database will be. And then why are you spending so much money for it?

Kick Your Company Out of the Nest

I've talked about hiring friends & family, pocketing & knowledge retention, deciding whether your organization is a club or a business, generational businesses, and chain of command, all of which are difficult changes for the established, non-business-school-graduate. But the difficulty factor doubles if you're an entrepreneur, because of an added element: The business is your baby.

You started your business in your garage, spare room , or attic, but it really began as a dream. Your spouse and kids probably helped you, at first, and then maybe a friend or a neighbor, because you couldn't afford anyone else. As time went on, your growing infant organization ate up more and more of your time. Eventually, things got to the point that you slept only when you fell over, sweated the books (you're still sweating the books), never took a day off or a vacation, and made every sale yourself because there wasn't anyone else. And finally, after all of that work, you join the ranks of the less than 1 in 10: A start-up business that lasts for more than a year.

Year two, you maybe hire a high school kid or two to work part time. You miss your kids' school plays, concerts, and games because you have to work. You always have to work; you no longer even seriously think about doing anything else. But you start to see a little success, so you reinvest that and go to a trade show or a networking event where word of mouth grows. You eventually have enough money for your very first ad, which does nothing, but that's okay because you learned from it, and your next ad gets some attention and pretty soon, you can actually hire a couple of real employees and learn to sweat over payroll.

Another year or 2 or 3 go by, and you have a full-time work force. Each person wears 10 hats because there are no hat stands. Everyone works late (but never quite as late as you); no one claims overtime. You have shared your dream and these people believe it, fearless because they don't know any better, and clueless enough to do everything wrong over and over again until they eventually find a method that works.

And now, 5 or 6 years in, you can finally afford to hire someone who can actually tell you what you're doing wrong: Your very first consultant. It's almost like a first kiss, what we used to call 1st base, in that it promises bigger and better things to come. And then, day of days, you hire your very first employee who has actually done this before, and maybe even many times before, which is the entrepreneur's equivalent to 2nd base, and then another and another pro join up, 3rd base and now the bases are loaded with people who know what they're doing, and...

... you jump out of the back seat and say, "Take me home!"

I understand. Like any new, extremely emotional experience, letting your company go is like sending your son or daughter off to prom or spring break. You had control, and now a bunch of pencil pushers are trying to tell you how to run your own company. Things used to be so much easier, back when you didn't have to get approval or document or assess readiness. And the thing that sends you over the edge is this: The very first dip in revenue.

Panic! Someone is groping your child! All of these people are going to kill your kid!

Stop. STOP! Take a deep breath. You hired these people because they know what they're doing, right? And they've managed not to destroy previous employers. And you agreed that, to make this whole thing work, you have to get the hell out of the way and let them do their jobs. And you know that - you know it - but you don't feel it.

This is the glass ceiling where the 10% who made it through year 1 fail: They can't let go. And while their business doesn't die right away, they begin to lose people by the truckload, because they see it even if you can't: The company has stopped growing because you are standing in the way. That's right: You have become an obstacle for your company to overcome, and there are only 2 ways that things can go from here: You can fight to regain control over your teenage company and lose its respect, loyalty, and love, or you can do what all good parents do:

Trust that you brought it up right, and finally take that vacation you promised your spouse so long ago that you can't even recall doing it. Tell no one where you go. Take no phone. Watch no news. Stay gone at least a week, but preferably a month. If your business really can't live without you that long, you've already failed. But when it does, it will thrive and blossom into a strong, functional adult, stepping right out of its diapers and into its first acquisition, merger, or IPO.

And isn't that what every corporate parent really dreams of?

Perspective: How to Get Some

One of the truisms of any organization is that organizational growth and/or your ascension through the ranks is in inverse proportion to the amount of communication you receive from the bottom. There are 2 main causes for this. Either one is bad; both together are death:

• People below you in the org chart assume that you already know everything.
• People below you in the org chart know that you don't know everything, but they're A) afraid to be the one to tell you, or B) decide that it's not their job to tell you.

To be effective, a manager must know what's happening at every level of the organization.

So how do you get the perspective that you need?

In every organization that I've ever been a part of, Customer Service was and is the repository of (almost) all knowledge. While they may lack the 'Big Picture' view, CS reps live and breathe issues from outside (external Customers) and inside (internal Customers) every single day. They are the first to hear when there is a problem, and the first to know whether or not a proposed solution actually works. Also, because they are in direct communication with both kinds of Customers, they have their fingertips on the heartbeat of your company.

Even if your relationship with the Customer Service Manager is good, it can be a touchy thing to sit with Customer Service. Wouldn't you feel funny if another manager asked to sit with your direct reports for a few days? To avoid that whole thing, we pay thousands of dollars to consultants to sit with people for us and tell us what they say. Then we tell ourselves that we spent all that money because we just don't have time to do it ourselves, or that it's somehow beneath us. The real reason is that we don't want the confrontation that we think will result.

Everyone's job is to hold everyone else accountable for doing the best job they can, and to help them do that in whatever way you can. If you purposely create a culture where everyone sits with everyone else on a regular basis, it stops being scary. And here's the magic word that you will use to make it happen:

Cross-training.

Rolls nicely off the tongue, doesn't it? And it's even true: You really do want to know how things work in that other department, because then you'll also learn what dumb things you unintentionally do that make their lives hell, along with being able to provide fresh eyes for all of their processes. How can it possibly be a bad thing for everyone to understand what everyone else actually does, and what their challenges are? Getting inside our colleagues' skins is right in line with the whole philosophy of Customer for Life!

If I could, whenever I joined a new company, I would hire in as a Customer Service rep for 2 weeks, and not let anyone know that I was anything else. I'd take a notebook and a bunch of pens and write down everything I saw and heard. At the end of the 2 weeks, I'd think about everything good and hard, and then put together a plan of action the following Monday to address the dozens of things Customer Service assumed I already knew, or that they  (or their manager) were too afraid to tell me.

Since you can't do that, you can at least listen in on calls and watch Customer Service in action as yourself. Bring a big box of good chocolate or cookies with you; it's amazing how people loosen up over a little sugar. What is their process? Look for inefficient workarounds (there are always inefficient workarounds, most of them unintentional). Look for how often calls are transferred as opposed to completed on the spot, and ask why. Look at what extra work the Customer Service reps do (all Customer Service reps perform dozens of tasks that have nothing to do with Customer Service). Should they actually own those tasks, or are they the result of an inefficiency in your own department, or someone else's?

Question everything.

This should be a regular part of your routine, especially after any kind of reorg or process change in your own department, and don't stop with Customer Service (although you should certainly start there). The more often you do it, the less scary it is, and the more it becomes a regular part of your culture. Especially if you take the other department's manager out for lunch and speak in private about what each of you saw and heard (she gets to sit with your team, too, right?). One pair of eyes and one brain are good; 4 eyes and 2 brains are better; everyone's eyes, ears, and brains combined are the first steps on the path to Kaizen (or CANI... Constant and Never-Ending Improvement).

Delegate, Dammit!

If you are like many managers, you have a hard time delegating tasks - at least until you are overwhelmed, at which point you may shed tasks that you should keep. You want to make sure to give your company maximum value, but how do you know which tasks should be delegated, to whom, and when?

Here's a very simple flowchart to help you figure out what should be delegated:

The who part is easy: Delegate the task to whomever has the least to do. 

This may sound self-evident, but how many times have you seen someone else assign a task to the employee who has the most going on? Even today, I bet you've seen at least one example. This is because we have a natural tendency to give tasks to the person who seems the most capable. And if they've already got that much going on and they're handling it well, they must be capable, right?

The trouble with this impulse, though, is that the employee who gets all of the tasks learns everything, while other employees languish, never able to test their wings and gain the experience necessary to become more capable. Meanwhile, the person who gets dumped on lives under constant pressure and stress. You know what happens when one employee feels like they're being passed over and another feels like they're being pissed on?

They both leave. And one of them left to go work for your competitor and took all of that knowledge they acquired with them. Now you're short at least two people, maybe more, and no one knows how to do more than the bare minimum.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. But we still do it all the time.

Yes, delegate to everyone. If you don't think they're capable of doing the work, why did you hire them? Yes, make sure that your expectations are clearly spelled out, as well as the timeline and milestones. Yes, meet regularly to assess progress. Yes, give counsel if asked, but only if asked. You may be surprised, not least by the fact that just because someone does something differently than how you would have done it doesn't make them wrong. In fact, they may find a better way than you do.

The last question is the easiest one of all: Delegate tasks soon as they are identified.

Never touch anything more than once. This includes emails, meeting notes, phone calls, and anything else that involves a task. The first time you touch it, apply the flow chart above, and then either do it yourself or delegate it, on the spot. Your inbox will empty out, you'll help all of your people grow, morale will rise, retention will improve, and your organization will get what it's paying for: Your time, doing the tasks that you alone are paid to do.

Databases for Dummies

Have you ever noticed that database people are fussy? Really, really fussy. (It's okay for me to say this, first because it's true, second because I am one.) It's because we have to be, because literally everyone else in the company constantly tries to mess everything up. Our lives are spent rolling our eyes and fixing problems that cost you a tremendous amount of money and lost man-hours, and that never should have happened in the first place.

If you don't have a database of your Customers and prospects, it's time to create one. If you do have one, it's time to clean it. The first will help you make money; the second will help you save money.

A database, for the purpose of today's topic, is a place to save Customer information. There are 5 main must-do's when creating a database:

• Only have one database, ever.
• Figure out in advance what information you want to save in your database, now and in the future.
• Create clear, meaningful names for each database field, with no redundancy.
• Decide which data fields are mandatory and what constitutes acceptable data for each field.
• Require that everyone use the database, always (especially salespeople).

And there are 2 must not's:

• Never, ever use Excel in place of a real database.
• Never, ever use Act in place of a real database.

The reason that you only want one database is to avoid pocketing and the cost & aggravation of having to merge dozens of databases later (trust me; I used to do this for a living). You have to figure out in advance exactly what information you want your database to include, now and in the future, because of a triusm that applies to a lot of things in business:

Plan carefully now, or regret expensively after.

You always want your database fields to have real-world names, without cryptic acronyms. Otherwise, you are just begging for people to put the wrong info in the wrong fields, means turns your database into worthless crap. Never use the same field more than once. You've already asked for the info; why do you need it twice? Some fields can be optional, like the Customer's birth date, but you should set most so that they have to be filled in. What good is a Customer name without an address, phone number, and email address?

Also, don't allow anyone who uses the database to use abbreviations, or I guarantee that you will have duplicate records. If your Customer's name is 'David', use 'David' and not 'Dave'. If he likes to be called 'Dave', put that in a 'Nickname' or 'Goes By' field. Otherwise, when you buy lead lists or someone else enters him under the other name, you'll have duplicate records. Also, always spell out street names, city names, and country names. (I once had to work with a database where a single city name appeared as 6 different abbreviations, plus spelled out correctly, which meant the company was spending money to send the same mailer to each Customer 7 times. Now imagine if the street names and county names were sometimes abbreviated, too.)

If you already have a database, now you know why you need to get someone to clean it. The sooner the better.

If your organization has salespeople, I'm going to suggest that you create a new rule, if you haven't already: Any sale that takes place before a Customer is entered into the database belongs to the company. No exceptions, period. This will ensure that every Prospect is entered into the database, because there are salespeople who have a bad habit of sandbagging leads, in the mistaken impression that your Customers 'belong' to them.

Customers belong to the company. Period.

Not only will this create a more flexible corporate culture, it will also make things much easier when you have to reassign a Customer to another salesperson or split a territory.

And, while everyone who touches Customers should have access to your database, only Sales, Customer Service, Accounting, and Tech Support should be able to enter or change data. Not only that: any good database should also record who entered or changed that data, and when.

Finally, why not use Excel or Act?

Excel is not a database; it's a spreadsheet (duh). Microsoft puts all kinds of code in each field that you can't see to make it work well as a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, this code makes it difficult to do anything with the data if you try to use it for anything else, and a costly conversion if you have to convert it to a true database format when you eventually move up to SQL or some other real database, and someone has to manually clean out all that gunk (and your pockets, while they're at it; remember the Leaky Roof rule).

Act, while easy to use and great for a self-employed, standalone salesperson, does not share data well across a network - the whole point of having a database.

Betty White, Plato, and the Titanic

There is a natural tendency for any congregation of human beings to become insular. This is just as true for organizations and departments within those organizations as it is for states, regions, countries, religions, political groups, and on and on.

Human beings are herd animals; we always have been. We don't have thick hides, claws, or fangs. We're not particularly fast on foot or when swimming. A 3-year-old chimpanzee can literally tear our arms out of their sockets. What we do have is each other, and the need to communicate and defend each other led to big brains, an amazing aptitude for pattern recognition and, eventually, fully-formed language.

But even now, there are issues regarding the formation of effective new ideas in the face of emerging needs, threats, and appropriate responses to both. There is nothing new about this. In fact, Plato spelled the whole thing out in something called The Allegory of the Cave.

In Plato's story, a man wanders into a cave in which are imprisoned a group of people. These people are chained facing the cave wall, and have been since birth. Because of the chains, they are unable even to turn their heads. In the center of the cave, behind the prisoners, a large fire burns. As people, objects, and people carrying objects pass between the fire and the cave wall, they cast shadows on the wall that the prisoners can see. The prisoners attempt to build an explanation of the entire world, its contents, and its processes based on these distorted shadows.

The man who wanders into the cave, of course, has a lifetime of experience other than being chained to a cave wall, plus the added benefit of being able to see and accurately interpret everything he sees. From an organizational perspective, this is why it is so important to frequently engage outside consultants and to hire new employees from outside your industry. You and everyone in your organization that has been there for any length of time already see things with a very fixed lens.

New eyes are clear eyes.

The natural tendency, of course, when you hear the ideas of these new folks is to say, "That won't work, and here's why: You don't really understand our business." Those words are often the epitaph of the organization. You can only see things one way, because you are chained to the wall of your experience, and cannot see things objectively or from the outside.

Another issue regarding our hard-wired response to threats is that nature plays the odds.

In any group of people facing a mortal danger, a certain percentage will do one of the following:

• Act instantly based on recent information (10% - 15%)
• Panic and go crazy (15%)
• Stand around and do nothing (everyone else)

From a survival of the species perspective, this is a good strategy. Two of the answers will likely always be wrong, but at least one will probably be right. From nature's perspective, having enough members of a species survive to reproduce is a win. (The fact that so many people who survive a disaster tend to feel very close to each other afterward is nature's next step in this process.)

The problem is, from an organizational perspective, it is very easy for the third group to delay action until any decision no longer matters.

A good example is the town that I grew up in. When a mall opened up outside of the city limits, the downtown merchants debated for years about how to address this competition, talking the city into bringing in expensive consultant after expensive consultant with plan after plan until all of their stores closed for want of customers. What was once the center of commerce became a ghost town.

Another excellent example is the newspaper industry. Every month or so a journalist writes a new story that explains how newspapers can save themselves from extinction. The problem is, for everyone outside the newspaper industry and its dependents (such as the wire services), newspapers died a long time ago. As the new NPR CEO once said, "No one under 30 has ever read a newspaper. And they never will".

Newspapers are Abe Vigoda. They are not Betty White.

To avoid this trap, obsessively collect and listen to your metrics. Intelligence gather from your competitors and those in industries that are outside of your own, but who serve a similar Customer, or have similar business models.

Standing still while your ship sinks guarantees that you and everyone around you drowns. It is still going to sink, and an irrational belief that your ship will not sink because it never has and so it can't will not help you any more than it did the captain of the Titanic.

To survive, you must constantly adopt, adapt, and improve based on changing conditions. Action must be swift, decisive, and stem-to-stern.

Just ask T. Rex.

Liar!

The average human being lies 4 times each day (this number does not take politicians into account, because they obviously throw off the scale). So why in the world do you expect someone to be honest with you on a survey?

Long, long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I worked for a software publisher and reseller that was building an online catalog. Online catalogs were a new thing at the time, as was the idea of a user interface that was actually geared toward an average user. To do it right, we met with a fellow who did consulting for companies that wanted to do business with big players like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, or to emulate them.

We walked him through what we had, and our head of new product development explained how we had structured each page to push Customers toward other pages to control their experience and expose them to useful content.

"Stop," he said. We stopped. "How successful have you been at getting Customers to go to that page?"

Not very, we admitted, but we had this great plan to change that by doing this, that, and another thing.

"Stop." We stopped again. "What makes you think Customers want this?"

"We did surveys," said our product development guy. "And the majority of..."

"They lied," said the consultant guy. "They told you what they thought they should say, not what they really do." Silence.

"Why would they lie?" we finally said. "It's in their best interest to tell the truth."

"Because people lie," he said. "The U.S. spent $24 billion on porn last year, but if you ask anyone, they don't buy porn. Somebody's buying it."

Furrowed eyebrows around the table while we digested this.

"So what do we do?" we said.

"Do what Amazon does: Don't listen to what Customers say. Watch everything they do. If they don't go to a particular page, get rid of it. If they go to another page a lot, give them more of whatever's there. Don't make anything more than one or at most two clicks away from where they start out. And recheck your results every single day, so you can anticipate shifts before they become widespread."

Another note about surveys: They are hollow. By that I mean that most people don't do them, and those who do tend to be people who are strongly motivated to say something positive or strongly motivated to say something negative. If you are like most organizations, 80% of your customers fall somewhere in the middle. And, since the average survey response rate is around 3%, why are you making business decisions based on what 1% or 2% of your Customers took the time to say?

I am not saying don't provide Customer for Life (perfect, on time, personalized) service. I am saying that watching what your Customers do - how many respond to offers and when, how many you lose or retain and why, increases or decreases in spend, etc. - matters more than what a small number of them say. Don't make major changes because of a single complaint or two, or reward based on a compliment or two. Which leads us to GAS:

Don't Guess. Assume, or Speculate. Find out. Eliminate G.A.S.

Pocketing & Knowledge Retention

Two of the most frequent communication failures for organizations are pocketing and knowledge retention.

Pocketing occurs when an employee - anyone from an entry level hire to the CEO - learns something new and does not share the information. This is most frequently unintentional. In many cases, they may assume that what they have just learned is something that everyone else already knows. Even if they do share this knowledge, it is unlikely to travel beyond their immediate working group or hierarchical strata. As a result, their knowledge exists in a pocket. Unfortunately, oftentimes this knowledge is something that would have helped the organization make or save more money.

Knowledge retention works like this: You spend a great deal of time, money, and effort training new hires. The longer they stay, the more they learn on their own. Because of pocketing, when layoffs occur or when a knowledgeable employee leaves the organization for other reasons, their accumulated knowledge goes with them. The loss of this information often costs the organization money, if for no other reason than that anyone new is likely to make many mistakes learning the same lessons on their own. Leaving aside the cost of having to train someone new from scratch, why in the world would you want to keep reinventing the wheel?

There are two solutions, and both are necessary: First, run your organization as lean as you possibly can - especially mid-level and senior management staff, where costs and knowledge tend to pool. Second, invest in a shared knowledge base.

Originally, knowledge bases were the province of technical support. Today, any organization without one operates at a serious deficit. Whether a full-blown wiki, intranet, or something as simple as a collection of Google Docs, encourage everyone to contribute (and I do mean everyone), and make sure that everyone has access to view everything (but limit edit rights to each document's author or work group). Make it a living, breathing resource, with someone in charge of keeping it organized, up to date, and eliminating redundancies.

Think of it this way: What would happen to your organization if you were hit by a bus tomorrow? What if it was your head of sales, marketing, product development, or a key member of your sales, customer service, or technical staff? The amount of information that goes into your knowledge base should be complete enough that if this actually happened, your replacement (or theirs) could walk in tomorrow and immediately take over, with minimal impact on the organization.