Firm's smooth-running operations credited to manager's degree in cat herding

For years the phrase “it's like herding cats” has been used to describe the impossible. Danielle Ford simply went and got the degree.

The operations manager at The Cyber Escape Room Co. is, as far as anyone can establish, uniquely qualified for a job that involves keeping a room full of creative, strongly-opinionated, easily-distracted people all moving roughly the same direction at roughly the same time.

“People laughed at the degree,” she said. “They stopped laughing the first time three deadlines, a delivery van and a director's calendar all tried to go wrong at once, and none of them did.”

The course, she explains, covered the fundamentals: patience, positioning, the art of making a creature believe your idea was its idea all along, and never, ever chasing. “You don't herd a cat by running at it. You make the right thing the easy thing. Then you wait. Operations is exactly the same. So is most of life, frankly.”

Colleagues describe her as “the reason anything happens at all”. One noted that things only descend into chaos on her days off, “which is, when you think about it, the strongest possible endorsement of the qualification”.

Asked whether she ever herds actual cats, she was diplomatic. “The principles transfer. Although the cats complain less than the humans, and they don't reply-all.”

She returns to keeping the entire operation upright in the morning, which she will do without appearing to break a sweat, because she is, on paper and in practice, qualified.