One of the runaway hits of last year’s fringe, James Schloeffel – Chief Disruptor and Strategy Optimisation Evangelist – and Charles Firth – Customer Engagement Jedi, return this year with a new Wankernomics show, aptly titled Just Touching Base, as they invite us all to a town hall meeting, with teams opt-in, to address two big problems the company is facing at this mission critical stage.
The first is the outbreak of clear, succinct emails triggered by someone who dared to send a nine-word message that didn’t even attempt to discover if it found the recipient well. The second is that the company has been acquired by a US Hedge Fund who may want to find out what they actually do.
The two problems are inextricably linked as, moving forward, communications that show increased avoidance of phrases loaded with adjectives and nouns that embellish and obfuscate the essential meaning of what they are attempting to convey – or in other words, use plain language – may mean that the new owners realise that the company does not need its 800+ staff and could probably manage with two unpaid interns.
Schloeffel and Firth have superbly captured the meaninglessness of the language and rituals of modern working life and presented it as comedy mixed with dystopian tragedy and despair. It is frequently hilarious because it always true, as shown by some of the actual definitions of North Star values shown on the larger screen at the back of the stage. Taking aim at IT departments, HR, excessive positivity in LinkedIn messages and more, the show provides the opportunity to laugh at all the irritants in day to day working life without fear of management finding out and dismissing us.
There is probably a limit to how far they can take this, and this year’s show is not quite in the same league as last year’s, with some ideas feeling overplayed at times, but, moving forward, they will no doubt circle back on this and come up with a new stakeholder-focused value-driven strategy that will lead to another customer-focused engagement session in 2026.
Runs until 25 August 2025
