Dave Barry - Claw Your Way To The Top

Here’s an interesting Ethical Question you might care to think about: if you go to a meeting of executives, and just by chance it happens that not a single one of you is a middle-aged white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, do you still have to talk about sports? Or could you, in that one meeting, without telling anybody else, switch over to another topic, such as the theater? (“I can’t believe some of the reviews they got!”)

My personal feeling about this is, it’s not worth the risk. Somebody might report you.

At some point, if you really want to make it to the top, you have to join a club. Actually, you have to join two clubs: one should be in the city, and it should be very old and have big dark drafty rooms where deceased members sit and read the paper all day. It should also have really bad food. The idea is, when you want to make a deal with an important client, you take him to your club for lunch, and eventually he realizes that unless the two of you reach an agreement, you’ll take him to your club again, so he gives you whatever you want.

The other club is your country club. This is a place where during the day you can relax by putting on ugly pants and golfing with other executives, and at night you can hold social affairs where you give each other golf trophies and, if everybody is in a really funky mood, dance the fox-trot. This is called “networking,” and it is very valuable because in the business world, a golf trophy creates a lifelong bond between two people.

Of course most clubs have certain requirements regarding who they will allow to become a member. I don’t mean to suggest here that they don’t admit minority groups. Ha ha! Don’t be ridiculous! After all, these are the eighties! Today’s clubs are more than happy to admit any minority person whatsoever, provided this person is also a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. But even if you don’t fall into this category, you should apply for membership. What’s the worst they can do? Laugh at you? Blow their noses on your application? Foreclose your mortgage? Have you fired and see to it that you’ll never again get a job, anywhere in the country, better than Urinal Cake Replacer? Don’t be intimidated! Go before the Membership Committee and explain to them that you really, sincerely want to join, and that you will work hard to be the best darned member they have ever had, and that you have photographs of them entering and leaving rooms at the Out-O’-Town Motor Lodge and Motel in various interesting groups of up to six people and two mature female caribou. They’ll welcome you with open arms. Don’t let them kiss you on the lips.

You won’t last long in the modern business world if you’re not comfortable with computers. Computers are involved in every aspect of business from doing the payroll to running the elevators, and if they don’t like you, they can make your elevator drop like a stone for 20 floors, then yank it up and drop it again until your skeletal system looks like oatmeal. So you damn well better read this chapter and get comfortable with them and become their friend.

BUG: A cute little humorous term used to explain why the computer had your Shipping Department send 150 highly sophisticated jet-fighter servo motors, worth over $26,000 apiece, to fishermen in the Ryuku Islands, who are using them as anchors. DATA BASE: The information you lose when your memory crashes. GRAPHICS: The ability to make pie charts and bar graphs, which are the universal business method for making abstract concepts, such as “three,” comprehensible to morons like your boss. HARDWARE: Where the people in your company’s software section will tell you the problem is. SOFTWARE: Where the people in your company’s hardware section will tell you the problem is. SPREADSHEET: A kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat “what if ?” questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working. USER: The word that computer professionals use when they mean “idiot.”

The first computers were big clumsy machines that used vacuum tubes. By today’s standards, they were extremely primitive. For example, they believed the sun was carried across the sky on the back of a giant turtle.

But the modern computer is much more sophisticated, and far smaller, thanks to a device called the “micro—chip,” which, although it is less than one-thousandth the size of a moderate zit, is capable of answering, in a matter of seconds, mathematical questions that would take millions of years for a human being to answer (even longer if he stopped for lunch).

How does the computer do this? Simple. It makes everything up. It knows full well you’re not going to waste millions of years checking up on it. So you should never use computers for anything really important, such as balancing your personal checkbook. But they’re fine for corporate use.

Let’s say you have to write a Safety Report. The old-fashioned, pre-computer way to do this would be something like this:

In March, we had two people who got sick because they forgot and drank coffee from the vending machine. Also, Ed Sparge set fire to his desk again. Ed has promised that from now on he will put his cigar out before he dozes off.

But now, using the graphics capability on your computer, you can produce a visually arresting and easy-to-understand report.

No modern corporation can survive unless its employees communicate with each other. For example, let’s say that Stan, who works in Building Administration, notices that the safety valve on the main steam boiler is broken. If he doesn’t communicate this information to Arnie, over in Maintenance, you are going to have little bits and pieces of the corporation spread out over three, maybe four area codes. So communication is very, very important. It should not, however, be confused with memos.

Ask any business school professor, and he’ll tell you a good memo is clear, concise, and well organized.

Now ask him what his annual salary is. It’s probably less than most top executives spend in a month on shoe maintenance. What you can learn from this is that in your business correspondence, you should avoid being clear, concise, and well organized. Remember the Cardinal Rule of Business Writing (invented by Cardinal Anthony Rule, 1898-1957): “The primary function of almost all corporate correspondence is to enable the writer to avoid personal responsibility for the many major bonehead blunders that constantly occur when you have a bunch of people sitting around all day drinking coffee and wearing uncomfortable clothing.”

There are big balloons of blame in every corporation, drifting gently from person to person. The purpose of your memos is to keep these balloons aloft, to bat them gently on their way. This requires soft, meaningless phrases, such as “less than optimal.” If you write a direct memo, a memo that uses sharp words such as “bad” to make an actual point, you could burst a balloon and wind up with blame all over your cubicle.

1. ALWAYS START BY SAYING THAT YOU HAVE RECEIVED SOMETHING, AND ARE ENCLOSING SOMETHING. These can be the same thing. For example, you could say: “I have received your memo of the 14th, and am enclosing it.” Or they can be two different things: “I have received a letter from my mother, and am enclosing a photograph of the largest-known domestically grown sugar beet.” As you can see, these things need have nothing to do with each other, or with the point of the memorandum. They are in your memo solely to honor an ancient business tradition, the Tradition of Receiving and Enclosing, which would be a shame to lose.