Work…if it was anything else, they'd call it fun!

We’re well into our annual planning cycle at the J O B. This is the fun time of year where we all get to make wild speculations about what might happen if we just spent a little more money, all talk to each other about how we need to focus and spend more time huddled up in conference rooms than is good for our health. This year is different in a few respects from recent years past: we are actually starting in the previous year vs. planning for the current year in January and we have a pretty good structure in place in which to plan.
My team has been working on our plans and I think they are pretty good. We have well defined goals, activities and metrics. The only little problem is that in the grand scheme of things, the stuff I am working on doesn’t seem to register with the rest of my peers. It gets paid its due amount of lip service, but when it all comes down to it I get the sneaking suspicion that whether we did the stuff in my plans or not wouldn’t matter a whole lot to rest of the team. I think it would have a tremendously negative impact in the market, but my peers wouldn’t notice one way or the other.
This is a major downer. Everybody likes to they are doing good work that is valuable…I truly believe that, but get very little validation from anyone else. I guess I just have to remind myself that there is a downside to doing the really important job: everybody has a better idea of how you should be doing it.