So I’m going to focus my energy elsewhere until I’m really bored enough to do what one has to do to be successful. For, over time, there will come the time when I can sit in bars patiently suffering the self-centered boringness of successful people (people who have a say) and when I can spend time joining in on the innocent fun of those that have chosen at a younger time the right path (and are now mad at the world, but at least they are mad as part of an in-group).

Bye bye for now.

[On the off-chance that the internet makes a miracle: contact me via mail or leave a comment.]

Disgusting!

I’m thinking about writing a King’s Tragedy only that it is about venture capitalists and trying to own the largest boat.

Should be fun. More fun at least than being a venture capitalist trying (secretively, one has to think about one’s image) to own the largest boat.

Or do that AND browse this site whilst we’re too busy to come and have a breather at the ocean surface ;-(

The obsession to make long term projections is directly proportional to one’s unease with the short term situation.

Unfair?

Certainly!

But you’ll just have to suck it up. I’m not about to do what I”m about to criticize: the annoying custom in the corporate world of saying we need to be brutally & vulnerably honest as intro to being a dishonest power-abusing brute.

It takes a large dose of lack of empathy to rob people of words like ‘open’ and ‘honest’ and use them as a way to avoid an open and honest exchange of ideas. The procedure is simple. There is something awkward to say but saying it might get you into some real trouble (if it wouldn’t have the possibility to get you into trouble it wouldn’t be awkward, now would it?). So instead of saying it you refer to it and then open a discussion in which you ask others to be brutally honest. You may go further than this and include brutal honesty in the corporate values, adequately renamed as ‘lead courageously’ – or something of that order, something empty that sounds well and allows you to claim the moral high ground without ever running the risk of engaging real everyday trouble.

The awkwardness of the topic will, after that procedure, be transferred to the silence that is bound to follow. A silence that will only be broken by the one nitwit that doesn’t understand that the appeal to honesty was merely rhetorical (or, better: that was merely a device to avoid any rhetoric). A discussion will follow where every question to the manager is defused by a reaction of her pretorian guard and where that manager draws an inconclusive conclusion along the lines of ‘good to share insights’ and ‘good points that need to be heard by decision makers and stakeholders’, and maybe even ‘we will come back to this later’.

As everybody knows: whenever anybody says that somebody will come back to that later it means that nobody should ever, at all dare to come close to that as long as the brutally dishonest manager has any authority left. Only the cartoon characters still shout ‘Respect My Authority!’ when they want somebody to respect their authority; any more evolved creature, like a manager, will take care to appeal to her authority exclusively in a non-authoritarian way.

Anyway, there is some solace in all of this as – whenever managers start to say these things – they are about to receive a next promotion that everybody knows isn’t quite a promotion but that everybody feels should be labeled a promotion for reasons of propriety (and maintaining the terrorist threat of the authority of the managerial body) as well as for the somewhat gratuitous comic effect of naming something as the opposite of what it really is (a comic effect that has as its most fortuitous side effect that people will ridicule the promovendus instead of ridiculing themselves for receiving less pay than the person that was promoted into oblivion).

[No, this was not a good week.]

My way, and all that shit. “Not original.”, you say? Well you are not original either then and if you have let yourself to be convinced by the powerful motherfuckers of ‘Be normal, don’t even try because people will find you laughable.’ leave us the fuck alone coz’ we are just doing our thing and we couldn’t care less whether it is original or bombastic or cliché or ridiculous. We couldn’t care less when we turn out to be average and stuff. There’s nothing wrong as far as we see with people, certainly not on the average. As long as we don’t have to settle for being average (worse: for being better than average in an average kind of way) it is OK. So many motherfuckers get praise, so much beauty is left undiscovered – we are fine with it … as long as you don’t want us to become a motherfucker because you believe praise is a sign of beauty.

No more Mr. Nice Guys. We know we will get there. So shut the fuck up and click the bloody links below the fold …

Book 0:        Disclaimer: A Message to all Peter’s 

Book 1:          Prerequisites

Chapter 1:                   Getting promoted
Chapter 2:                   Looking down on others
Chapter 3:                   Free your mind & your a*** will follow
Chapter 4:                   ‘The Exercises’

Book 2:          The 8 steps to underpromotion

Step 1:                            (let everybody believe you) Aspire to more
Step 2:                            Dare to underperform (on tasks you don’t like)
Step 3:                            Overperform unexpectedly (but also: casually!)

But never me mind all that Earnestness, you have probably come here for the take-down of some popular practice – or other. I give you: the reality-creating value of bullet points on slides:

Maybe I discussed this before - but there is a wonderful process at work when teams try to get on the same powerpoint page. Just try it: take whatever topic and subdivide it in four areas. Say, areas A., B., C. and D. (it also works with words instead of letters or numbers and there can be some real poetry in it). Then talk about how many B’s you have when compared to, for instance, how many D’s it would be desirable to have. Before you know it the B’s and the D’s come alive and somebody will say “that we need to be realistic, everybody knows that D’s are the thing but that it is better to have a B than to have nothing at all … so, err, we need to find a trade-off between having as many D’s as we can without going to the extreme of alienating all of the B’s (because being stuck with A’s and C’s would be really a bummer)” and then the sayer of the quoted passage will look around the room all Napoleontic-like and conclude “as I always say we need to be optimizing this, not just being efficient but being, first and foremost, effective.”

[It is wonderful how people in actual speech are not using any noticeable interpunction but that any "correct language" freak (with beard-without-moustache and glasses that are too small for their eyes, such as to impress a sense of wisdom in line with their memories of various children fantasy shows they still consider as the pinnacle of 'coolness') will have a badly acted near nervous breakdown if you violate the immutable laws of interpunction. I confess: I often want to kill a couple of those bastards, just to make schools and review sections of newspapers less dominated by them.]

So the D’s will have it and the A’s and the C’s will get it shoved up their asses. The only thing you have to do as presenter is to categorize what people idealize as a D, what people find the next best thing as a B and this whole lot of things – and people – that you find utterly despicable as A’s and C’s. Convention will to the rest.

[A little bit like what I did above with "correct language" freaks. Only: these bloody bastards do deserve it!]

I prescribed him this. Maybe you can read our collective wisdom there before you go on to read this (all of which is, as per usual, in the kindly spirit of ‘It has to be at least 99% co-incidence to get published if you do not want to be called a whore on it.’:

We have no issue with loving either or neighbour or co-operating with our co-workers as a team. No, we don’t: far from it even: we’re open to love our co-workers and would gladly co-operate with our neighbours. The issue for us is merely one of authority. And then not because we feel that authority as an infringement of our freedom because both the love and the team spirit come quite naturally to us. No, the reason for our issue has other causes alltogether.

Our problem with authority stems from the simple fact that we laughed ourselves crazy when the small fat almost-dude screamed: “Respect my authority.” making the third word rhime with the second. Any time people tell us with a straight face we ought to love our neighbour or should ‘strive to improve co-operation with our co-workers’ we just can’t avoid cracking up.

For fuck’s sake: why would we feel compelled to do something if it does not come naturally to us? Why would we go and force ourselves into a bend just to please some fat fucker (let alone the slim fucker that gets up early to ‘get a good run in’, creepy fuck that is afraid to get old and be confronted with the fact that his existence is somwehat less than crucial for the general gist of biological and cultural evolution)? Why should we even pay attention to those shitty mechanized versions of homo sapiens without the leas little bit of funk in them?

Hmmm ….

Because else they fire us and we have to tell our children that we have to make ‘economies’ knowing full well that there’s going to be that little fat fuck of a kid of two robo-joggingly industrious people pulling their own weights and constantly complaining about everybody else’s weight accept that of their bloody moron of a child that has always the excuse of it being impaired by his higher-than-average intelligence when depressing our kids by pointing their noses in the fact that they do not seem to have the latest fucking version of a fucking iPad or whatever.

So, let us just take it as the womanly men and manly women that we really are: let’s just suck on it and be awfully nice in that next performance review. We already have a revenge of silently thinking about Cartman’s “Respect my Authority.”, there will surely be more to come because at some time or other entropy will outperform botox hands down

Lemme make it up to y’all by starting to post new sections of ‘The Book’: here is the second step to achieving the state of being overpaid whilst enjoying underpromotion. You can now also follow us on Twitter to get random stimulations of a not entirely comprehensible kind.

Some might find I am working in an arbitrary model where being overpaid and underpromoted is somehow better than being, for instance, underpaid and overpromoted. To them, I say this, O’Nestly:

The model of beng underpaid is the Christian model (at least it is the model that the heads of churches advocate as the model for all of those who are, well, not in the church management; or are in church management positions in order for the actual leaders of the church to have people to do the shopping without having to confide in people who are not fully certified as being brainwashed in the way of the church); it is the model of suffering. For dramatic effect one can indeed add the notion of being overpromoted (or overburdened, to use a medieval synonym for overpormoted) as it will have the edifying effect of underpaid people being able to find solace in the vanity that their suffering is not in vain.

So, I can grant the arbitrariness of my model as to both the terms of payment and those of promotion but I can’t grant same as to the positional terms ‘under and over’. The former demarcates the thinking of the decadence movement from organized religions (and so does the latter by the way but it would be a pity to miss an opportunity for an increased bit of contrast if I were have simply made that a main sentence and not just something between brackets). The latter does, by contrast, confirm our firm position against too unambitious forms of cultural relativism.

PoMo, pero solamente un PoCo; como lo quería Ernesto.