Sam, AGONA

Our company spent $86,000 hiring consultants to eliminate timezone confusion. Their recommendation: Standardize every company meeting to UTC. "One company. One clock." I pointed out that employees still live in different countries. They said I was resisting digital transformation. So our first global all-hands was scheduled for 9:00 AM UTC. London: 10 AM. New York: 5 AM. San Francisco: 2 AM. Singapore: 5 PM. The London team joined normally. The New York team joined from their beds. Nobody from California showed up except one engineer who was already awake because his newborn wouldn't sleep. The CEO was furious. "Why isn't everyone attending?" I explained that it was 2 AM in San Francisco. He said the calendar clearly said 9 AM. I explained that UTC doesn't change when the sun comes up. The consultants called an emergency meeting. They said the problem wasn't time zones. It was employee resistance to global alignment. Their proposed solution was a mandatory training program on UTC awareness. $24,000. I suggested rotating meeting times so the same region didn't always get screwed. They called that approach "operationally complex." Then I scheduled our next consultation at 9:00 AM UTC. The lead consultant declined. He lives in San Francisco. His response: "Unfortunately, 2 AM falls outside our team's standard working hours." I forwarded it to the CEO. We now rotate meeting times. The consultants submitted their final report recommending "regionally adaptive scheduling." They billed us another $12,000. We paid $98,000 to discover that the Earth rotates.