Simply The Best
I thought that this week I would share some excerpts from these missives over the past year because, firstly, I have a lot of new readers and secondly, I can’t be arsed to talk about the antics of the various emotionally-damaged, powerful white men who are going through breakdowns in public right now. I mean, it’s Christmas, a time for happy thoughts, right?
So here’s a selection of my verbiage during 2022. My witticisms, my insights, my predictions and my terrible jokes. I’ll let you decide what fits in which categories.
Following Sue Grey’s report on PartyGate
“If we look at the senior ranks of most organisations, I fear we see rather more ‘Johnsons’ than is desirable.
Some are led by massive Johnsons (Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, for example), others have many small Johnsons spread throughout the management structure.
Some deliberately recruit Johnsons. By choosing people like them a Johnson can perpetuate the preponderance of Johnsons. Others enable Johnsons and, in so doing, force otherwise quite reasonable people to start behaving like Johnsons in order to survive and get on.
Johnsons breed Johnsons, literally and metaphorically.
It’s hard to see how we decrapify work when the people who hold the power are Johnsons. I believe that junior and middle managers do have the power to effect change, and we all have the power to improve our own environment (our sphere of control) but if the top of the organisation is full of Johnsons, they will be an obstacle to major change.
However, we know it’s possible to have better, more human, more equal work places. We used to have them and they can be brought back again.
But, like the Prince seeking to revive Sleeping Beauty from her slumber, we will have to fight our way past a bunch of pricks to get to the happy ending.”
On productivity
“I think ‘zero inbox’ is the most stupid idea I have ever heard of. It’s the epitome of ‘busy-work’, an utterly pointless objective that can consume huge amounts of effort, attention and time for no tangible benefit. I’ve had email since the early 1980s, I’ve developed and launched many email products and services and the only time I’ve ever had a zero inbox is when I opened one up for the first time (actually, that’s probably not true as people like me decided we should auto-generate a welcome message so you have something to look at …)”
On Culture
“It’s perhaps not surprising that both ‘Purpose’ and ‘Authenticity’ figure in the lexicon of ‘Corporate Culture’. ‘Culture’ is the bucket that all the silver bullets get thrown in.
So why is ‘Culture’ a dangerous idea? Because it’s a smokescreen that diverts attention from the deeper issues.
Leaders spent huge amount of time energy and money on ‘Culture programmes’ to avoid addressing their own behaviour and doing the hard and necessary work of developing themselves.”
On today’s work environment
“Employers routinely demand more be done with less, that staff be available for more of the day, that work be done more quickly, that responses be instantaneous. They also subject them to higher levels of surveillance, micro-manage every aspect of their work, monitor their actions against ever-increasing targets and demand conformity and compliance. Transgressions are pounced upon and lead to punishment.
All the time, salary levels are being repressed and benefits being salami-sliced away.
Doesn’t that sound rather like an abusive relationship?
Coercive control is dressed up as performance measurement and cultural fit.
Gaslighting is done through espoused values that are at odds with the observed behaviours and by a constant upbeat internal message that is at odds with the lived experience. And also by getting you sign up to the ‘company purpose’ so they can guilt you into giving them your discretionary time.
Demeaning and belittling of people is a common occurrence.
Blame and scapegoating is used to push responsibility for your circumstances onto you or others.
All things that are, sadly, not uncommon in workplaces today.”
On async working and introversion
“Firstly, it is built around asynchronous working. That means there’s loads of lovely quiet time for deep focused work, for thinking and reflecting. It also means there is a premium placed on well-written and thoughtful documents, which introverts excel at producing. It puts an end to the exhausting wall-to-wall meetings (whether in person or on zoom) and the hours wasted listening to extroverts take their half-formed thoughts and verbally hammer them into a vaguely recognisable shape whilst you scream quietly inside. Thinking is done before the meeting and everyone has to read the document beforehand.”
On the endless procession of middle-class, middle-aged white men pontificating on the future of work
“Have they sat in a bland office on a bland office park on the outskirts of a bland town doing some bland and tedious ‘work’ day after day? Have they been a step in a workflow, on a bureaucratic production line, without any sight of what is being achieved? Have they been told their opinions and ideas are of no interest to anyone and they should keep their mouth shut and their heads down?
This lot wouldn’t know reality if it punched them in the face.”
On ‘Quiet Quitting’
“…it refers to the utterly heinous acts of employees who are insisting on doing what they are contracted to do and no more. It is about their utterly traitorous insistence on having and sticking to clear boundaries to prevent their work bleeding into their personal time. What villainous behaviour!
What’s happened is that, after years of gaslighting from employers exhorting them to ‘go the extra mile’, ‘give 110%’, ‘strive for excellence’ and all the other supposedly inspirational bollocks (whilst simultaneously cutting pay and benefits and increasing workloads), people have realised what a crap deal they are actually getting.”
On redundancy
“I consider redundancy to be an everyday brutality that is inflicted on many and yet it is seen an a normal business practice, sanitised with euphemisms like ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’. In my youth, it was a rare occurrence, something businesses sought to avoid. Now it’s become an annual event, a tactic to artificially pump up results to preserve executive bonuses.
It’s doing untold, unmeasured and unjustified harm. People who have been made redundant suffer from a significant and long-term loss of trust, a loss of the belief that ‘things will work out in the end’, in the fundamental benevolence of the world and humanity.
And some pay the ultimate price.
Decrapify Work or Die. It’s not just an empty slogan. It’s time to stop the violence, for all our sakes.”
On how modern management works
“ ‘Trickle-Down Management’ - when they piss on your heads and then tell you it’s raining.
And then try to sell you an umbrella. That’s got the company logo on it.”
On resilience training
“That’s why ‘resilience training’ doesn’t work. It frames the problem as one to do with the individual when it is actually to do with the environment. You can’t ‘strengthen’ the individual to solve the problem.
I often refer to resilience training as giving people wellies so they can stand in the crap for longer instead of cleaning the crap up. In fact, it’s actually the case that the level of crap is rising and the training is just giving people bigger wellies. You can only make the wellies so big, so eventually, the wellies will be overtopped and then … I’ll let you finish off that analogy yourself!
We need to stop handing out the wellies and deal with the problem at source.”
On today’s dangerous workplaces
“The hazards are very different. The lack of safety and security, the precarity of employment, the constant scrutiny, the relentless pressure to do more, the stress, the demands that you be ‘always on’, the lack of meaning and purpose in your work, the quixotic behaviour of management and the capriciousness of corporate life.
These roar quietly, in air-conditioned surroundings and pastel shades, but are just as deadly. It’s about time we updated our approach to Health and Safety to cover these present dangers.
The workplace should be a generative one, not a killing zone.”
Well, that was a fairly random selection that caught my eye and were reasonably pithy. If you have any favourites I’ve missed, please let me know!
If you like these and want to dip into past issues a bit more, they are all on my archive page on Substack (this is one of the reasons I moved to the service).
The Joker
OK, I did promise some jokes and there were nowhere near as many as I thought in my missives, so here’s a few for your Christmas Crackers.
Putting rum on my cornflakes doesn’t make me an alcoholic, it makes me a Pirate!
How do you make a Pirate angry?
Take the pee out of him.
What kind of phone does a pirate have?
An aye phone.
Why did nobody want to play cards with the pirate?
Because he was standing on the deck.
Why was the pirate sad when his parrot left?
It gave him the cold shoulder!Why are all these jokes about Pirates?
Because they ARRRRRRR!
(you have been reading my stuff, haven’t you?)
That's enough, I’m not a monster. If you think these are bad, you should see the ones I rejected…
Cocktails For Two
Did you know that amongst Pirates’ many ground-breaking innovations, they also invented cocktails?
When I was a kid, the nearest we came to a cocktail was when ‘the ladies’ had a Snowball at Christmas. This was the only conceivable use of the bottle of bright yellow liquid with the funny name on it. Every house had a bottle of Advocaat lurking at the back of the cupboard that only saw the light of day during the Yule festivities.
No self-respecting young adult would be seen drinking the stuff. Or so I thought until we went skiing in Bormio, in Italy. One of the local specialties there was a kind of souped up Snowball called a ‘Bombardino’, made with Advocaat (egg nog) and brandy, served hot and topped with cream. I think it might even have been served with a sparkler. OK, so it wasn’t complete make-over and retained a little of it’s mildly camp naffness, but it went down surprisingly well when doing a bit of ‘apres ski’ on the slopes.
There are several variations of the recipe (it’s Italian, after all, every village probably has its own version), one of which replaces the brandy with rum and is known as a ‘Pirata’!
In the restaurant where we had it, they warmed up the egg nog using the steamer on the coffee machine, which also frothed it up. Then they added the brandy (or rum!) and put the cream on. You can make one at home warming the egg nog in a saucepan (don’t let it boil) and then putting it into a glass and adding the rum, topping it with some squirty cream (squirting extra directly into the mouth is optional but hard to resist!). I think there might have been some cinnamon in there too but, hey, you can experiment.
Bottoms Up!
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas
And if it’s not by the time you read this, boy, are you in trouble!
I’ve packed away the laptop and cracked open the egg nog to start the celebrations already and I won’t be back at the workface until January 5th. I hope you are taking a good break yourselves, it’s been a tough old year on top of a really terrible year and we’ve all been running on fumes for the past month.
May you enjoy your holidays in whatever way you choose and recharge those batteries. Mine will mostly spent hanging out with family and friends, drinking and eating heartily, having duvet days and getting cuddles with my new grandson. There may be walks and pubs involved too.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!
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