Chapter 20
The morning meeting went smoothly because Jack minimized his presence to the point that the teacher had almost forgotten he was even part of Chengshi's team. Therefore, the teacher only listened to a brief overview of the work progress and Jack gave a short speech before adjourning the meeting, which lasted only half an hour.
After returning to his workstation after the meeting, Cheng Shi sat up straight, ready to begin his work for the day: thinking.
Cheng Shi's work philosophy is that those who use their minds govern others. Therefore, as a middle manager, he naturally has to make "thinking" his main job, because only when he thinks things through can he lead the team forward.
Chengshi's inbox was full of emails he had received over the weekend. After thinking for 10 minutes, his first action was to click through all the "unread" emails one by one, and then start processing the last email.
When Chengshi processes emails every day—or rather, when he's in the mood to process them, because often he doesn't want to process them at all and just opens each one—he first filters out emails that he knows from the subject line and don't need to read the content, marking them as "read." Then, he marks emails that might need processing with "FYI," "RSVP," "ASAP," or "TBC" according to his mood and forwards them to relevant colleagues in his team, such as Eddie. At the same time, he decides whether to CC the emails with his boss or his boss's assistant, Joanna, depending on the specific situation.
However, Cheng Shi knew that this perfunctory attitude towards handling emails would cause him trouble later on. For example, sometimes emails he forwarded would return to his inbox on the same day—his boss would give him a pre-arranged reply. So a safer way to handle emails was to CC his boss's assistant, Joanna, or Joanna's secretaries—Cheng Shi only needed to glance at the email subject line to know which emails were not urgent or important, and he would do that anyway—after all, Haosikai's email sending rules were quite chaotic.
If an email Narumi receives is truly important, he'll mark it with "EOD" and forward it to the relevant people in his team for processing, while also CC'ing the sender to avoid them bothering him repeatedly. Of course, Narumi also accumulates a considerable number of emails that only he can handle. Naturally, he's quite impatient with these emails, so he'll roughly sort them by importance, print them out, and pile them up on his desk—then he'll deal with them slowly, depending on his mood, but this will give the impression that he's very busy and that he's very important.
At this moment, Cheng Shi had already printed out the emails he needed to handle that day and placed them in front of him. On top of the stack of printed papers was a polymer clay SpongeBob SquarePants figurine that Cheng Yushan had made for him when he was in kindergarten. At the same time, Cheng Shi's desk was also filled with samples of various Haosikai products. However, Cheng Shi would never take those health supplements, much less let Huang Ruoyu use those cosmetics, even though he could exaggerate the products' effects in the promotional materials, claiming they could make people look young again.
However, Narumi's mind wasn't on the documents he needed to process; he was still thinking about Candy: Asking her to have lunch together wouldn't be difficult, would it? No, it was actually quite difficult, and that was the crux of the problem. There was an unwritten rule on the 15th floor: male and female colleagues never ate out alone—they ate in groups of men and women, or groups of women, or groups of men, never alone. Narumi didn't want to challenge this long-standing, unspoken rule on the 15th floor, so he felt he needed to plan carefully.
As Cheng Shi absentmindedly processed the documents that needed to be handled that day, two men's faces suddenly appeared above his partition: one thin, the other fat. These two were Will and Cheng Shi's deputy, Eddie, who lived further inside on the 15th floor—it was time for a smoke.
“Boss,” Eddie asked Chengshi with a grin, “shouldn’t we go brainstorm?”
They call "smoking" "brainstorming," which makes it sound very professional.
Fifteen minutes later, the three men returned to their workstations. During that time, they patiently listened to Eddie's rant, explaining that his girlfriend had been pressuring him to marry her, leading to a weekend of arguments. Jack, who had been chugging black coffee in the break room, seemed much better than in the morning, although it was clear he actually preferred alcohol. To prove he was fully sober, Jack went to the smoking room and paced back and forth in front of the group of men, even mimicking the old manager who led the morning meeting in the conference room. He imitated the manager's head-shaking and chanting slogans, like he was chewing on his teeth: "The Central Support Department is extremely, extremely important in the group, especially your team! But look at your efficiency! Efficiency! You must get things done! And even more! Even more, even more efficient…!"
The Minister of the Central Support Department, Ban Jiande, seemed to have a toothache every day, and hissed like a snake when he spoke.
Back at his workstation, Narumi was trying for the second or third time to decipher the contents of the top sheet of papers in front of him. The email appeared to be from the general manager of a branch office; although written in Chinese, it was extremely obscure, a mix of classical and vernacular Chinese. Narumi stared blankly at the A4 paper, then closed his eyes, then opened them again, rubbed them, and strained to read the text. This time, he finally understood it.
The email from the branch manager read: “Please review this email. We would like to know if you would like to know if you would like to know if we could reply to a previous email we sent to complain that there were many serious errors and misleading words in the promotional brochure for this year’s Spring/Summer ‘Rejuvenation’ series products (please see the attachment).
The "Rejuvenating" series is Haoskai's flagship skincare product line, which has been on the market for nearly 30 years. The ingredients have remained unchanged, but the group requires annual updates to the packaging and promotional materials, creating the illusion of continuous product upgrades – a practice often described as "old wine in new bottles." This spring/summer's "Rejuvenating" promotional brochure is a 16-page, 64-page booklet printed on premium gold paper. The cover proclaims, "Haoskai Rejuvenating Series, giving your complexion a fresh new look!"
Cheng Shi felt a headache coming on when he saw the thick stack of attachments marked with problems printed with the email. This stuff was produced before last year's Spring Festival by an advertising copywriting outsourcing company that he had never worked with before, but somehow ended up in the purchasing database. After completing this copywriting, HO ended its cooperation with them. However, tens of thousands of copies of this material were still printed and sent to the sales departments of various branches after the Spring Festival holiday. Moreover, the manual also included the usual instruction sheet: "For details, please contact Mr. Frankie Cheng, Deputy Director of HO's External Publicity Group," along with Cheng Shi's email address.
Actually, when the outsourcing company provided the sample of the promotional brochure, Cheng Shi only glanced at it and immediately noticed that it was a complete mess: the layout was dense and haphazard, with no logic in either the text or the images, and many illustrations had no connection to the text at all. However, at the time, he was rushing to finish the annual meeting plan, and the Spring Festival holiday was approaching. Moreover, his supervisor was pressing him hard—one day before the Spring Festival, his supervisor caught Cheng Shi in the corridor, hissing as he asked, "Have you distributed the promotional brochures for the spring/summer new products? Efficiency, hiss! We need to improve efficiency!"—So Cheng Shi didn't have the outsourcing company redo it. Instead, he signed it off for printing and distributed the brochures as soon as the Spring Festival was over, thinking that his supervisor wouldn't personally review them anyway.
Before the first month of the lunar calendar was even over, emails inquiring about details from all over the country began to pour in from Chengshi. Chengshi ignored most of the emails because none of them were CC'd with Laoban. These branch office staff who only did sales did not know that Laoban was Chengshi's direct supervisor. They did not even understand the hierarchical relationship between the various departments of HO, especially the mysterious 15-layer Central Support Department.
However, Narumi vaguely remembered that the branch office manager had indeed written him a complaint email before this one. The previous email, similarly written in a semi-classical style and using the traditional Hoskey "we" as the subject, had left a strong impression on Narumi. And this email continued as follows:
"Mr. Frankie Cheng, we intend to request 5,000 copies of this brochure from HO so that we can distribute them at our regional direct selling conference at the end of July this year. However, as we have stated, we believe this brochure is very poor quality, failing to meet our needs in both design and content. Therefore, please respond as soon as possible to our request in our last email: What arrangements will HO make to ensure that we receive a sufficient number of the correct brochures by July 15th?"
Upon seeing this, Chengshi put down the A4 paper in his hand, quickly opened the email, and confirmed again that the email did not have a CC—as for BCC, Chengshi believed that the bunch of bumpkins in the branch office would not understand it at all—and sent it to the boss or Joanna, which made him feel much more relaxed.
Cheng Shi knew he was lucky this time, but even so, this email was still a tricky thing: even disregarding the cost, since it was only the middle of the year and Cheng Shi still had a lot of money available for approval, it was still a difficult task to complete in terms of time and manpower: not only did he have to find someone to redo the copy, but he also had to redesign, retype, print, and arrange logistics... More importantly, this matter might not alarm his boss, because if it did, he would definitely question Cheng Shi about why he hadn't reported this matter to him two or six months ago, which was annoying just thinking about it!
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