Monthly Archives: July 2015

New Book! How To Get To The Top Without Working Too Hard is now available

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Book Fan small

Published: 28th July 2015
available at  Amazon UK and Amazon.com plus many other online book stores

Publisher: Troubador

HOW TO GET TO THE TOP WITHOUT WORKING TOO HARD

Is surely what most of us crave….

Millions of workers are slaving away in offices from the Americas to Zambia and enduring the soul destroying 9-5 routine producing very little with salaries to match. Office life wouldn’t be so bad if we were the CEO or at least an ESVP as we would be driven to work, have lunch on expenses, with evenings saturated with free corporate entertainment. And all we would have to do all day is offer guidance and do a bit of shouting.

Dick Lannister got to the very top at Amalgamated Industries without either an MBA or having read any book like 23 Habits of Mediocre Managers, or Who Ate My Cheese. His key advantage was having the emotional intelligence of a Kumquat and a rampant psychopathic disorder.

On the positive side, Dick, whose alimony outgoings resemble Greece’s national debt, decided to share his knowledge and wisdom so that other could also rise up the greasy pole to success.

This book is the result of his generosity to the working man….

Using a splash of satire, some funny fiction and heap of humour, How To Get To The Top Without Working Too Hard finally debunks the need for an MBA or any other formal business qualification to progress up the slippery pole to management success.

The Master of Corporate Administration (MCA) covers key topics such as finance, marketing, projects and presentations. It’s a course guaranteed to set readers on the path to financial rewards, power and stock options, by answering a variety of questions that include:

  •  Why do CEOs with a 4-year contract always have 5-year plans?
  •  Is a liability a financial metric or a description of the leadership team?
  • How can an inanimate object like a company have corporate values?

In summary this book could make you richer and more powerful than you could ever have imagined……

The 3 Rs of Leadership: Restructuring, Redundancies and Rewards

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How To Get To To the Top Without Working Too Hard is the Institute of Mediocre Management’s Book of the Month.

3Rs

Restructuring: In effect dismantling what your predecessor did, although that was also implemented originally to ‘provide better returns for shareholders’.

Redundancies: Wages eat into profits. Remove as many workers as possible.

Rewards: ‘Performance based executive pay awards’ or bonuses can double a managers pay packet. Restructuring and redundancies deliver quick profits.

And we see that bosses of two of our most ‘successful’ companies are following the Institute of Mediocre Management’s advice to follow the 3Rs to personal riches:

CENTRICA

New Boss:
Iain Conn started as chief executive at the start of this year.

Restructure:
He has been conducting a ‘strategic review’ of the business over the past five months, which has concluded Centrica should concentrate on the British Gas side of the business (short term rewards)  and reduce its activities in actual energy production (long term rewards).

Redundancies:
Energy firm Centrica is cutting 6,000 jobs

Rewards:
Centrica saw a doubling of profits at its British Gas business in the first six months of the year.

BARCLAYS BANK

New Boss:
John McFarlane

Reorganise:
Mr McFarlane announced the bank would speed up the process of mothballing or selling the bank’s non-core divisions, to reduce them to a value of £20bn by 2017. He then said: “There is more that can be done to deliver better returns for shareholders, faster, and that work has begun.”

Redundancies:
The bank has announced 19,000 job cuts.

Rewards: 
Barclays bank has reported a 25% rise in statutory pre-tax profits to £3.1bn for the six months to the end of June. Profits last year were £2.55bn.

New Amazon Prime Time Service delivers even faster

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Top Gear Team will head up new faster delivery service available only to Tory voting, white males or ladies with big boobies.

UK parcels will be delivered by super cars or if going abroad by an old jalopy. Exclusions apply,  including clothing thats currently in vogue or any BBC DVDs.

Jason Calacanis – Angel Investor or Man with a Mediocre Mission

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Although one’s management style here at Amalgamated Industries is a little dated, for example I like my people to wear jackets and ties in the office and drink tea from cups not mugs there is a young whippersnapper from across the pond who has some interesting points. I should mention that he often wears a baseball chapeaux reversed but that does not necessarily make him a hardened criminal.

Jason off to a Union meeting

Jason off to a Union meeting

He is Jason Calacanis, I wonder if he is related to the Suffolk Calacanises, lovely people one used to hunt with his Lordship. Anyway, apologies, I digress, Mr Calacanis has some pointed advice for young people who are just starting their careers:

In your career you will find that life is a zero sum game: the winners get the prime positions and the person who comes in second place for that position is the first loser—not the second winner.”

He then advises young people to take on every project the CEO asks, because:

How the f@#k do you think she got the CEO slot, by waiting in line? By random luck? No, she f@#king took that slot.”

Awful language but then he is an entrepeneur you know.

Some other feisty tips: “never leave work before the CEO does,” and “don’t worry about your salary, just get enough money to live in a closet close to work.”

And then I rather liked this next tableau. A sort of hunting analogy, and the Lannisters used to hunt Tigers back in the day when it was a proper sport. Nowadays apparently its frowned upon.

There are two types of people in this world: killers and the killed. The people who are killed, the deer, tend to huddle around the kitchen or go on cigarette breaks and bitch and complain about everyone and everything at the company. The tigers are too busy killing it to be bothered with such things. If you see people crying and pouting walk away. Go back to work. Here’s the language:

Deer: “Bitch bitch, moan moan, blame blame, cry cry.”

Tiger: “Hmmm…that’s an interesting take on things. I gotta get shit done, good luck with that.”

Finally … solve the problems your peers are too stupid and cynical to own. 

Marvellous sentiments – I will be posting these words of wisdom in the staff canteen. He has all the makings of a magnificent mediocre manager

And by the way my Nephew has just pointed out he ‘wraps’ on Twatter or something – anyway here’s the link  YOU ARE L

http://bit.ly/1CQhIN9

10 Things Workers hate about work (apart from work)

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A new poll has revealed some quite pronounced differences between genders when it comes to finding things annoying in an office.

messy-desk

While messy desks, lateness and eating smelly food annoyed men and women, 56 per cent of respondents said they wouldn’t bring up their gripes with colleagues, with most citing “not wanting to upset team dynamics” as their main reason.

Here are the 10 things men hate the most at work:

1. Messy desk (74%)

2. Colleagues spraying perfume/aftershave (66%)

3. Talking on the phone too loud (47%)

4. Being late (40%)

5. Taking too long at lunch (35%)

6. Eating smelly food (29%)

7. Too many cigarette breaks (28%)

8. Colleagues talking too much (22%)

9. Not being organised (11%)

10. Rudeness (9%)

Here are the 10 things women hate the most at work:

1. Eating smelly food (82%)

2. Being late (67%)

3. Too many cigarette breaks (51%)

4. Bad hygiene (34%)

5. Not being organised (33%)

6. Messy desk (29%)

7. Colleagues borrowing stationery and not returning it (25%)

8. Talking on the phone too loud (23%)

9. Taking too long at lunch (17%)

10. Dressing inappropriately (10%)

Source: Nicoccin

Tube Striker’s Champion, James O’Brien blackballed from Henley, Wimbledon and Lords

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Tube

James O’Brien (LBC Radio) a rampant socialist, card carrying communist, lefty leaning, work shirking malcontent has come out in favour of  the striking London Underground  Tube drivers.

O’Brien criticised hard working, upstanding, better spoken and much better educated managers for trying to force through changes to hours and pay ahead of the 24 hour Tube launch in September without consulting workers. What is the problem? They are workers! Do what your superiors tell you to do!

O’Brien opined:

You’ve got a job, you’ve got terms and conditions – your boss turns around and says ‘oh no you don’t, you’ll do what you’re told or you can jog on’… If that was you, I’d be furious, and I’d be furious on your behalf – and lots of people would be furious on your behalf, and they’d all be completely ignored by the mainstream media and called ‘communists’ by the usual suspects.

What I really don’t know is how we have ended up hating people who can still take a swing back at their boss. We’ve been reduced to craven, forelock-tugging peasants who have to do what we’re told because if we don’t, well, there’s someone else who’ll take the job, or you can get something else to do, or you’re indulging in the politics of envy, or you’re a champagne socialist.

We have created a society in which employers now enjoy more control over our lives than at any point since the Second World War… We have created a country where when the boss says ‘jump’ you can’t say no, you can’t say yes, you can only say ‘how high?’ unless you’re a member of a half-decent union, like the teachers are, and the firefighters are, and the Tube drivers are.

Unbelievable twaddle! The man should should be frogmarched to North Korea! And the radio station should have its valves torn from its transmitter immediately! Pah!

Now I’ve never been on a Tube train in my life. Too many working class people and foreigners so this disruption of services doesn’t bother me, but my workers are coming into my factories late! And that is very irritating, and then they spend the day whining about how hard it was getting into work. For God’s sake, I say get a chauffeur or at least a Hansom Carriage. Get your priorities right, save money by cutting down your food bill, your kids are probably obese so it will do then good.

Also we need all the Night Tube so I can get my lot to work later. I need the profits, have you seen the price of a bottle of Bolly at Wimbledon?

Prime Minister-in-waiting George Osborne puts the Proles back in their rightful place

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‘Good old George’ was the cry at Wimbledon as we clinked our glasses with other Captains of Industry taking respite from our onerous roles as Masters of the Universe and Thought Leaders. It was clear that Cameron was getting a little lily-livered and starting to bleat about social equality (he’s married you know, with a Mem Saab who wears the trousers). So the I.M.M. fired off a little ‘guidance’ note advising that if he wanted to move next door with our support he’d better get himself a hairier chest than our dear departed Maggie. Seems to have done the trick as the report below shows.

George Osborne’s “one-nation” Budget will leave the poorest households in Britain “unequivocally” worse off, according to Paul Johnson, director of IFS, a respected think-tank.

In his speech on Wednesday, the Chancellor suggested that the boost to incomes from his new national Living Wage would leave ordinary families with a higher standard of living.

But the Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the Budget would actually make the poorest 10 per cent of families about £800 a year worse off by 2019.

The changes overall are regressive: taking much more from poorer households than richer ones.

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The next-poorest 10 per cent would experience an even bigger loss as their annual incomes were slashed by £1,100, it added.

Meanwhile, the richest 10 per cent of families will see their incomes fall by only £350 a year, while the second-richest 10 per cent will lose virtually nothing.

Child poverty is expected to shoot up and the majority of losers from the squeeze on tax credits will be people in work.

Paul Johnson, director of IFS, also shot down the Chancellor’s suggestion that his introduction of a £9-per-hour Living Wage by 2020 would compensate working families for his assault on the tax-credit regime.

It is absolutely clear that increases in the minimum wage will not make up for cuts in tax credits.