So, you’re asking about Will McIntire. Yeah, I’ve had my run-in with that name, or rather, the ideas tied to it. It wasn’t a person I met at a barbecue, mind you. It was more like a storm that hit our office a few years back.
Our department head, Dave – good guy, mostly, but a sucker for the latest management fads – he went to one of those fancy leadership conferences. Came back with eyes wide as saucers, clutching a book. And guess whose name was plastered all over it? Yep. Will McIntire. The next Monday morning, it was all hands on deck. “Team,” Dave announced, “we’re going to revolutionize our workflow! We’re adopting the McIntire Max-Productivity Framework!” Sounds impressive, right? Mostly just sounded like more meetings to me.
My Journey into the “McIntire Max-Productivity Framework”
So, what did this “framework” involve? Well, from what I could gather, it was a lot of stuff that sounded good on paper. We had to:
- Implement “synergy pods” for “cross-functional ideation.” That meant they moved our desks around. Again.
- Start each day with a “McIntire Morning Mingle” – a 15-minute stand-up where we had to share our “top three value-adds” for the day. Most days, my top value-add was just trying to figure out what McIntire wanted.
- Fill out new “Progress Alignment Sheets” – basically, more paperwork to describe the work we were already doing, but with new boxes to tick. So much ticking.
I remember we were working on this big client project, a real beast. We were already under the gun. And then, boom, McIntire time. Trying to fit our actual, you know, work into these new structures was like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. A very annoying, jargon-filled round hole.
The first week was pure chaos. Nobody knew what a “synergy pod leader” was supposed to do. The “Morning Mingles” went on for 45 minutes because everyone was confused. And those “Progress Alignment Sheets”? I think I spent more time figuring out how to fill them in than actually progressing on anything.
I specifically recall one afternoon, I was just trying to debug a nasty bit of code. Had my headphones on, deep in concentration. Then Sarah from marketing, bless her, taps me on the shoulder. “Time for our scheduled ‘spontaneous creativity burst’ in the synergy pod!” she chirped. Spontaneous. Scheduled. Right. I nearly threw my keyboard across the room. That was McIntire for you.
We tried. We really did. Dave was so enthusiastic, you didn’t want to burst his bubble. But after a month, productivity, if anything, had dipped. Morale was… well, let’s just say the coffee machine saw a lot more grim faces. The “framework” felt less like a supportive structure and more like a cage built out of buzzwords.
Eventually, bits of it started to fade away. The “Morning Mingles” got shorter, then became optional, then vanished. The desks slowly migrated back to their old spots. The “Progress Alignment Sheets” ended up in the recycling bin, probably. Dave never really mentioned Will McIntire again. I think even he realized it was a bit of a non-starter for us.
So, that was my practical experience with the whole Will McIntire thing. It wasn’t a disaster in the grand scheme of things, no company went under. But it was a solid few weeks of frustration and a good lesson in how sometimes these “revolutionary” ideas are just, well, a bit out of touch with getting actual stuff done. Made me pretty skeptical of the next guru who rolls into town with a shiny new book, I can tell you that.
