The Return of Merk

Merk has rejoined us. I can't get a straight answer out of anyone as to how long for. I treat him as a kind of consultant and sounding board, but FO has worked with him before, and likes to see him as an addition to the team, no matter how temporary. Fo has tried to drag Merk into his own pet project - this will be the third attempt to find a sucker, and the second nomination for Merk.
Failing that, or perhaps because of it, Merk set a meeting for Arkel, FO, and myself to talk about short-term strategy. It was actually FO who was supposed to have set it, but he's now claiming that his email doesn't work - he got Tutu to set the last meeting, and she had no idea what was going on. FO then claimed he was waiting for a phone call, leaving we three to work out what we were doing. It was Merk's idea to start laying out a strategy based on real and expected benefit. I haven't been involved in one of these for ages, and I just go into fascination mode as ideas are collected, and the map just gets bigger and bigger as you enumerate all of the things going on around you, and try to identify their importance.
It was all new to Merk, but Arkel and I plunged in with everything we knew, until we hit the big market, and I begged off as not knowing enough, and Arkel laid claim that it was MadDog's domain, and he wouldn't like to second-guess. It was around here that FO sauntered in, still clutching his phone like a security blanket. He turned everything upside down, so that the markets he knew about and the clients he had contact with were obviously more important. At this point, we were only talking active product, money-generating stuff, not his pet project, which to be honest, has no clear objectives, no real client, and has spent the best part of six months achieving this state. Not my problem.
Then the discussion went into its usual shouting match - FO defending his position before we realised that he was being attacked, and then illogically pointing out that the resources should go to where the money was, without being able to justify that his project had any potential revenue. In fact, with his statement that we didn't need to invest any more resources into the current product because our market position meant that we didn't have to compete on a product basis, merely territory, then it seems obvious that we don't need more product, just better marketing.
Now, as much as I don't along with MadDog, a good excuse for his not delivering is that he knows Sales, but not Marketing, and poor Belle is on her own, without support, without guidance, and generally without content worth making into Marketing material. Given that it takes both Arkel and me to proof-read anything produced from that quarter, I have little faith in the pair.
The other arm is Client Services, which I refuse to call by the misnomer Professional Services. With a staff of one, who are we kidding? Where are the resources? Well, we're a small company, but we are still concentrating on delivering product, without understanding what we need to deliver to satisfy our clients. What we're mostly doing is chasing our tails trying to work out what we're doing wrong when spending all this time trying to work out what we're doing.

As soon as we sit down to work out a strategy - and we haven't had one since most of the executive joined me in this mad-house - an exclusive committee (non-representative of the company's company) makes sweeping general statements based on one dominant voice, and the work is done. Where is the direction? What is the strategy?

Here's a simple one I tried to communicate to FO. We should follow through on something. Anything. It doesn't matter what. Just finish something and move on to something else. We should trust each other, share the responsibility, lead, rather than direct our people, supervise rather than interfere. Let the people whose job it is to find solutions to problems be given the freedom to come up with their own solutions, rather than be told what solution to implement.
OK, it wasn't so simple after all. If it was simple, someone would have thought about it before, and we'd have tried to do it.