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The year is 2060 and today our company’s time capsule, sealed back in the dark days of late 2009, was finally opened. In the capsule, we found, as you might expect, a treasure trove of old products, quaint logos and uniforms, and faded photographs of employees. But we also found some fascinating documents of the period: budgets, strategic plans, performance reports and, perhaps most interesting of all, letters written by executive managers addressed to the men and women who would be responsible for guiding the company’s performance in 2060.

We asked our team leaders to comment on their predecessors’ letters in their daily meta-net sensecasts. Here are some of their responses:

Phillip Jenkins, chief processes officer (in 2009, this position was called vice president of operations):

"Wow, I’m glad I’ve never had that guy’s headaches. He wrote, 'We have a few production control issues,' but it struck me that they had minimal control of anything at all back then. Their enterprise resource planning system was like a 1910 airplane’s rudder-and-stick compared to our sophisticated navigational and automated guidance controls today. And when I read his reference to 'somewhat unreliable' sales order forecasting and the resulting fire drills from unplanned events, it sounded like they might as well have used a crystal ball!

Today we’re so much more fortunate. We have frequently updated predictive modeling algorithms with their rich exogenous factor input sensors, including a 31-day weather forecast that’s usually spot on. That removes practically all our uncertainty in the short-term planning horizon and much of it for the intermediate and long term. Insight and steering — that’s what we have. How did that guy sleep at night?"

Maia Bischoff, chief value creation officer (in 2009, this role was chief financial officer):

"My poor predecessor CFO! She must have been pulling her hair out every day in frustration. My interpretation of her letter is that she was primarily worried about getting her external compliance financial reporting right so she wouldn’t end up in jail. For us, the universal accounting rules from the Global Accounting Federation (created in 2023, thank goodness, to clean up that IFRS reporting mess) are all automated and directly integrated to every legal enterprise on the planet. And with our single global currency – the yeneurodollarrupee – foreign currency translations are a relic from the past.

Financial reporting is effortless and incorruptible. My staff rarely spends a minute thinking about the “how-to” of financial valuations for investors and government regulators. Our attention and energy is almost exclusively focused on internal managerial accounting and analysis for economic value creation for our stockholders, achieved by quasi-optimal decision-making software tools used by all of our employees.

Also, our job is much simpler since the shrinkage of that behemoth, economic-bubble-creating-and-bursting financial sector that mushroomed at the beginning of this century, with its exorbitant and unjustified high salaries. Banking today is like the buggy-whip manufacturing industry of 1910. Now companies compete on products and services, resulting in real, not artificial, economic wealth creation that banks can no longer drain from the real economy."

Jamal O’Keefe, Zen innovation officer (responding to our 2009 vice president of research and development):

"My predecessor’s staff had more fun than our innovation team today. Back then it was a wild time of discovery. Continuous innovation had become the prerequisite entry-ticket to compete, similar to what quality control had become in the 1980s. Today, although constant innovation remains an absolute given, every competitor in every industry is near parity in their rate of innovation. It’s not the competitive edge it once was.

The fusion of our learning and knowledge systems fused our predictive analytics is essential, or we would fail. To be sure, our new depth-intuition techniques and insight incubation processes show great promise. But since the shift to customer relationship optimization as our company’s key driver, my staff’s work of creating new products, services and processes has become largely routine. It’s like a marathon run without a finish line."

Donna Pugliese, chief customer acquisition officer (in 2009, chief marketing officer):

"Judging from the letter to me from the CMO back then, I’d say he wasn’t actually doing marketing – he was just throwing money at any prospective customer that had a heartbeat. My older staff members still refer to it as “spray-and-pray” advertising.

The letter claimed the company had improved the 'targeting' of customers in its marketing campaigns. But his marketing plan reminds me of the wooden trebuchets used in the Middle Ages to lob boulders against castle walls - occasionally they had an impact.

My predecessor would be impressed by our laser-like customer intelligence and marketing spend optimization tools. We not only identify and acquire new customers based on maximum potential financial return through our communication channels (all compliant with the Global Citizen Privacy Pact), but we also ensure that our growth rate is in perfect harmony with our asset and employee capacity addition plans. We acquire only the highest rank-ordered lifetime value customer leads. For us, customers are investments – like the components of a stock portfolio – and we’ve solved the optimization challenge of converting customer equity to shareholder wealth creation. My predecessor appears clueless that such a relationship even existed."

Andrew T. Huntingdon III, chief customer relationship officer (in 2009, vice president of sales):

"My predecessor wasn’t selling; he was bribing. No, I’m not talking about illegal bribes like those we remember from the Great Corruption era of the late 2040s. I mean wasting the shareholders’ potential for higher wealth by offering ridiculously huge price discounts, deals and giveaways.