‘Just Stop F***ing Moaning’ Say Heartless Bosses

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The Institute of Mediocre Management are happy to forward this important survey which now has even more relevance since that very nice man Mr George Osborne is now i/c the economy.

Editor's avatarThe Beezly Street Gazette

In an anonymous survey of over 2000 company directors, “Employees just fucking moaning about their needs and pathetic little lives,” was top of the shit list.

I hate my boss

“People needing their hand holding by their colleagues when they have a major operation really get on my tits,” said one anonymous responder. “If you’re working for me, I hired you AND all of your internal organs. Sitting in the office sobbing on work time is taking the piss,”

“Don’t go crying to HR all the time you bloody mard-arses,” and “A problem shared is a problem doubled” were the overall sentiments in the detailed study, designed to streamline HR departments. The adjustments that the report recommends could save up to eighty million pounds in the next five years.

“The trouble is, everybody wants to moan face to face now, and it wastes a lot of time & creates a huge paper trail. What…

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US Senator Paul Rand to advise Jeremy Hunt NHS think tank?

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Senator Rand to advise Health Secretary Hunt on £12 Billion savings plan

Senator Rand to help Health Secretary Hunt save £113 billion ‘wasted’ on NHS

Here at the I.M.M. we are always looking at ways to reduce the top rate of tax for our members. Paul Rand or ‘Plonker’ Rand to his friends has demonstrated his thought leadership qualities by revealing a strategically compelling proposition.

Paul Rand is a Republican Senator who wants to gain the Republican nomination to run for President and has told a Senate Health, Education, and Labour Committee meeting that the right to health care is actually a form of slavery. He said:

With regard to the idea of whether or not you have a right to health care, you have to realise what that implies. It is not an abstraction. I am a physician, that means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me.

It means you believe in slavery. It means that you are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

If you have a right to their services basically once you imply a belief and a right to someone’s services, do you have a right to plumbing, do you have a right to water, do you have a right to food, you are basically saying that you believe in slavery. You are saying you believe in taking and extracting from another person.

We will be asking the the Rt Honourable Jeremy Hunt M.P. T.W.A.T to consider shelving the whole NHS malarkey in favour of private health care. Anyone that matters has got this care in place so it won’t be an imposition at all. Top rate of tax would now fall to the square root of bugger all so its win-win.

I’m off now to hunt peasants or pheasants, can’t tell the difference after a few G&T’s, so have a wonderful weekend.

How to Get To The Top…….in Wall Street

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A pack of

A pack of “wolves” invade Wall Street as a promotion for the Blu-Ray release of The Wolf of Wall Street.
IMAGE: DIANE BONDAREFF/INVISION FOR PARAMOUNT PICTURES/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A new report suggests that instilling ethics in Wall Street may be as hard as teaching an old dog new tricks.

Years after a worldwide financial crisis battered the industry, bankers continue to engage in much of the same unethical conduct that helped trigger the meltdown, a survey of financial professionals in the United States and the United Kingdom finds.

In the wake of the collapse, Congress passed the Dodd Frank Act in 2010, a bundle of sweeping financial reforms billed as the biggest overhaul of banking rules since the Great Depression. Firms committed to rein in the industry’s Wild West culture, and regulatory agencies vowed to double down on fraud.

But the latest survey, conducted by Notre Dame and Labaton Sucharow, a New York law firm known for protecting financial whistleblowers, indicates that the financial sector may be increasingly reverting to old habits.

Nearly a quarter of the 1,200 financial workers surveyed said they suspected their colleagues had engaged in unethical or illegal activity Nearly a quarter of the 1,200 financial workers surveyed said they suspected their colleagues had engaged in unethical or illegal activity in order to get an edge in the market. That’s nearly double the number that a similar survey reported in 2012.

Additionally, nearly 50% said their rivals had likely cheated to get ahead, and about one in five said that breaking the rules is necessary for success in the hyper-competitive industry. Both figures represent a significant jump from three years ago.

Each of these stats is slightly higher among those with salaries of half a million dollars or more, implying that wrongdoing may proliferate as Wall Street’s workers gain more pay and experience.

What’s more is that workers who speak out about ethical breaches may face consequences, according to the survey. One fifth of those polled said that they would fear retaliation from their firms if they reported issues to regulators.

“When corporate whistleblowers are prohibited, discouraged or retaliated against for reporting crime to cops, we should all be scared—very scared,” Jordan Thomas, a Labatan partner who co-authored the report said in a statement.

The troubling backslide in attitudes towards ethics shows that more reform is still needed to achieve a real change in industry culture, according to co-author Ann Tenbrunsel, business ethics professor at the Mendoza College of Business.

“Despite significant energy and efforts, it appears we need to continue to think about how to improve the culture of ethics in the financial services industry,” Tenbrunsel said.

Source: Patrick Kulp, Mashable

CEO pay was up yet again last year

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Message to UK CEOs from the Institute of Mediocre Management. Come on get with the program (its a U.S. report so its spelled correctly) and see if we can’t deliver ourselves higher rises than this in 2015. How? Re-organise, Re-Size and Accounts massaging, you know the drill. Winner gets to sit next to Rt Hon DC at our next awards dinner!

‘The Inside Story Of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ’ is a bestseller…..

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Wrong! Wrong Wrong!

Wrong! Wrong Wrong!

From i100 independent.co.uk

A new book about the gut that has sold more than a million copies in Germany would make ideal loo reading, had it not included a chapter about the problem of sitting down to defecate.

We did not evolve to linger on porcelain thrones, you see, and in those countries where squatting remains normal, colons and their owners are demonstrably happier.

“There is a muscle that encircles the gut like a lasso when we are sitting… creating a kink in the tube,” Giulia Enders explains in Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ.

She calls the mechanism “an extra insurance policy and cites studies showing that squatters, with their unkinked guts, are less susceptible to haemorrhoids and constipation.

Enders first got noticed – and a book deal – after a self-assured turn at a science slam in Berlin three years ago. Her 10-minute lecture went viral on YouTube, and now, weeks after completing her final exams as a doctoral student, she is a publishing sensation. Her book, called Darm Mit Charme (“Charming Bowels”) in Germany, has sold more than 1.3 million copies since it came out last year. Rights have been sold to dozens of countries including the US, and her UK publisher ordered thousands more copies last week, days after the book went on sale.

The German’s way into the gut is a lightness that some reviewers have found too childish or lacking in scientific rigour to be taken seriously. But there is something compelling and refreshing about her curiosity and popular approach. “When I read the research, I think: Why don’t people know about this – why am I reading about it in some paper or specialist magazine? It’s ridiculous because everyone has to deal with it on a daily basis. I want to transport that feeling I had to more people.”

‘Gut: The Inside Story Of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ’ by Giulia Enders (Scribe, £14.99) is out now

And the point is?

If you want to be the writer of a best selling book

Sh*t sells

There’s hope for all of us then! Happy writing!

Prime Minister David Cameron to crack down on the Workers

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Cameron IMM

David Cameron is going to tell his National Security Council this as he announces plans to crack down on workers (colleagues, staff etc).

According to a briefing, Cameron is expected to say:

 For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we  will leave you alone. It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance. This Government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach.

He will say Thought Leaders believe in “certain values”, adding: “To belong to a Company is to believe in these things. And it means confronting head-on the poisonous socialist extremist ideology. Whether they are violent in their means or not, we must make it impossible for the Unions to succeed.”

It’s expected Cameron will introduce a counter-workers bill in his Queen’s Speech later in May. Planned measures include introducing new orders to ban staff councils and restrict people who seek to radicalise apprentices and interns via inductions and ‘showing them around’.

The new package is expected to include:

The introduction of banning orders for organisations who stand up for workers rights in public places, but whose activities fall short of proscription.

New Disruption Orders to restrict people who seek to restrict Thought Leaders’ pay and conditions packages;

Powers to close staff restaurants and sports clubs where left leaning staff may seek to influence others;

Strengthening the powers of the Charity Commission to root out charities who misappropriate funds towards the poor, sick and other malingerers;

Further immigration restrictions on extremists i.e people who can’t buy a house for at least a £1million;

A strengthened role for Ofcom to take action against channels which broadcast extremist content such as HIGNFY.

How Some Men Fake an 80-Hour Workweek and Why It Matters

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From an article by Neil Irwin (New York Times)

Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

(c) Peter Arkle

(c) Peter Arkle

Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.

It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring partners in a consulting firm.)

A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods.

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a study at one firm, but Ms. Reid said in an interview that since publishing a summary of her research in Harvard Business Review she has heard from people in a variety of industries describing the same dynamic.

High-octane professional service firms are that way for a reason, and no one would doubt that insane hours and lots of travel can be necessary if you’re a lawyer on the verge of a big trial, an accountant right before tax day or an investment banker advising on a huge merger.

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.