A used GPS unit, two months of customs limbo, and what it taught me about the kind of leadership no one owns
The device sits in my palm and weighs about as much as a chocolate biscuit. It clips onto the top of a camera and does one modest thing: it listens to satellites and writes the coordinates into my photographs, so that fifty years from now someone can see exactly where in Đà Lạt I was standing when the light did something worth keeping. It cost me less than a good dinner for two. Getting it into Vietnam took two months, more than thirty emails, and a slow, steady erosion of my faith in how large organisations think.
I coach people on how organisations behave under pressure. Which meant that even while I was stuck inside this one, some detached part of me was standing off to the side, taking notes.
So let me give you the notes
It began reasonably, the way these things do. The courier’s customs agent wrote to say the shipment had questions against it. Of course it did. Then the questions started breeding.
First they wanted a safety data sheet. Then confirmation about a battery. Then technical documentation. Then a clarification about whether the thing contained encryption. Then a quality inspection under a circular I had never heard of. Then a quality certificate I had to obtain myself, at an inspection centre nobody could name. Then a return to sender. Then a signed commitment letter so they could have one more go. And then, two months in, the quiet revelation that the fee I had twice agreed to pay, believing it was the inspection, had never been an inspection fee at all. It was the postage.
Twice I was asked to approve that fee, and twice I approved it within minutes. Whatever this delay was, it was never me refusing to pay.
Each of those emails arrived carrying the same automated footer about a customs code changing from one string of letters to another, and somewhere around the fourth or fifth I began to feel a very particular kind of helplessness. Not anger. Something flatter and more tiring than anger. The sense of being moved around a board by a hand I couldn’t see, where every square I landed on had already been vacated by the time I arrived.
I have a dedicated folder for this parcel now. It holds more sustained correspondence than one or two of my early relationships did.
There is a specific indignity in being sixty-seven, with a working life’s worth of getting difficult things done behind you, and finding yourself unable to rescue a small object from a warehouse forty kilometres down the hill. I mention it not for sympathy but for accuracy. That feeling is data. It is exactly what a stuck system does to the person stuck inside it, and any leader who has never felt it will badly underestimate how corrosive it is.
The wrong question, asked for two months
Here is what I keep coming back to.
For two months, every person in the chain was busy answering the same question: how does this customer produce the document we are asking him for? They answered it earnestly. They chased it, escalated it, apologised for it, re-explained it. And it was the wrong question.
The right question, the one that was never asked by any of the people whose job it was to ask it, was simpler. Was this item ever actually within the scope of the rule, and was the inspection everyone kept referring to ever carried out? That question got asked in the end by me. The consignee. The one party in the whole arrangement with no institutional standing, no customs login, and no idea what the circular even said until I sat down and read it at my kitchen table.
When I did read it, the rule turned out to be aimed at devices that transmit a location over the mobile network. My unit only listens. Whether it belonged in that category at all was a genuinely open question, and the sort of question that decides whether a person waits two months or two days. Nobody in the chain had raised it. The system had a slot marked GPS, the box had the word GPS on it, and that, apparently, was that.
What the system was missing
Three things were absent, and none of them was competence. The people I dealt with were, as far as I could tell, working hard.
What was missing first was a shared definition. The whole saga turned on a Vietnamese phrase that can mean ‘add the freight charge’ and was read, by everyone including me, as ‘the cost of the inspection’. One unexamined term, left to drift for six weeks. In cross-cultural work this is the rule rather than the exception: the word nobody stops to nail down is the one that quietly costs you the month.
What was missing second was an owner. Each new requirement replaced the last, and nobody held the thread that ran through all of them. It was a chain of relays with no source, everybody passing the parcel of responsibility along, nobody setting it down on their own desk and saying, right, this one is mine until it is finished.
What was missing third was a way up. I asked, on four separate occasions, for the name of a supervisor. Four times, silence. A system with no visible route upward has, in effect, decided that your problem belongs to no one in particular, and it is remarkable how quickly a customer works that out.
The part I could control
I could not make the rule sensible, and I could not make the system answer for itself. That was never on the menu. What I could do was decide how I conducted myself inside it, and that turned out to be the whole of my actual leverage.
So I stayed courteous, because the junior person in front of me was not the system, and burning him would have cost me the one ally I had. I kept every message, dated and in order, until the record could tell the story on its own. I asked narrow, answerable questions instead of broad, furious ones, because a question a person can actually answer is far harder to ignore. And when I finally escalated, I did it in proportion and on paper, with a deadline, a clear list, and the relevant channels named, rather than in temper.
I keep meeting people who believe leadership is a thing you are issued along with a title and a car space. This parcel reminded me that it isn’t. Sometimes leadership is simply being the one person in the arrangement who insists on asking the right question, especially when you are also the person with the least authority to ask it. The title-holders were all present. Not one of them was driving.
What actually travelled
The unit may still find its way to me. It may go home to the shipper and quietly become somebody else’s stuck parcel. Either way, I have already extracted the more valuable object from the affair, which is this: a clean, fully documented, two-month case study in what happens when a system is full of busy, decent people and empty of anyone willing to ask whether the task in front of them is the right one.
I would genuinely have preferred the GPS unit. But the case study travels better. And, unlike the unit, it cleared customs without a certificate.
Lesson for leaders
Every requirement in that chain got answered, promptly, by people doing their jobs properly. Not one of them got tested for whether it applied. A system that rewards answering questions almost never rewards questioning them, and when nobody holds the thread from one end to the other, the thinking falls to whoever has the least authority to do it.