Dave Barry: Claw Your Way To The Top

How To Become the Head of a Major Corporation In Roughly a Week

This book is dedicated to Burton R. Legume, inventor, who in 1907 dreamed up the concept of the hold button, without which the modern industrial economy would not be possible.

Maybe you’re a young graduate looking for his or her first job. Or maybe you’re a veteran employee who’d like to advance up the corporate ladder. Or maybe you’re a Labrador retriever who nosed this book off the coffee table, and it fell open to this page.

It makes no difference who you are: the important thing is, this book can show you how to ACHIEVE YOUR CAREER GOALS and WIN THE REWARDS OF SUCCESS such as CARS and HOUSES and GREAT BIG BOATS where, any time you feel like it, you press a little button and UNIFORMED SERVANTS FROM SOME DISEASE-RIDDEN FOREIGN NATION WHERE EVERYBODY IS WRETCHEDLY POOR WHICH IS WHY THEY CAME OVER HERE bring you PLATES OF LITTLE CRACKERS WITH TOASTED CHEESE ON TOP or, if you prefer, FALSTON-PURINA DOG TREATS.

Today’s business climate is partly cloudy with highs in the mid-70’s.

Ha ha! That is just a sampler of the kind of snappy humor you will find throughout this book, along with a lot of words printed in capital letters to keep you from falling asleep. Actually, today’s business climate is perfect. It is a reaction against the violently antibusiness mood that swept the nation back in the sixties, when the young people of America, except for julie and David Eisenhower, decided to reject money as a life objective and became “hippies.” They scorned the corporate world, with its sterility, its greed, its exploitation, its conformity, its Xerox machines that were forever breaking down. They embarked instead upon a quest for a transcendent universal consciousness imbued with peace and love, which they sought to achieve by saying “dude” to members of minority groups and smoking reefers the size of marine flares.

But gradually these young people realized they were paying a subtle price for their counterculture lifestyle, in the sense that they were always waking up in Volkswagen Microbuses with lice in their hair. So they decided that, hey, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to become a sterile conforming greedy exploiter after all, so they went to work for large corporations. Soon they developed children and houses and Volvos, and within a few years they had reached the point of central airconditioning, from which there is no turning back. Most of them can no longer locate their Grateful Dead albums.

So now everybody except Ralph Nader is strongly pro-business. People who, only a few years back, would have hurled pig blood at Lee Iacocca for some symbolic protest reason or another now think he should run for president. What this means for you is: This is a GREAT TIME for you to get into business. And don’t worry about qualifications: ANYBODY can make it in the business world. All you really need is a little gumption, a willingness to work, some common sense, and a brother-in-law who is Vice-President in Charge of Personnel.

Ha ha! Another business-related joke! This is gonna be some fun, getting you a job, all right!

The first step toward your successful business career is to determine your Career Objectives. To do these things, you’ll need a nice sharp number-two pencil and some three-by-five cards. I’ll wait right here while you go get them, okay? I’ll meet you underneath the asterisks on the next page! Hurry back! This is going to be exciting!

(Brief pause.)

The point of the preceding paragraph, obviously, was to get rid of the totally hopeless dweebs who actually think they need three-by-five cards to determine their Career Objectives. These are the same people who you just know are going to write down things like:

1. I would like to work with people.

Which of course is a joke, because it is a proven fact that the more you work with people, the more you hate them. Look at the clerks at any big-city Bureau of Motor Vehicles: They work with people all day long, and their basic approach to human interaction is to make you wait in line as long as possible and then tell you you’re in the wrong line, in hopes that you’ll have a very painful and ultimately fatal seizure, and they’ll get to watch.

So you savvy persons have ruled out “working with people” as a Career Objective. What you want, from your career, is a SENSE OF FULFILLMENT AS A HUMAN BEING and MAXIMUM PERSONAL SATISFACTION as measured in U.S. DOLLARS. You want a Rolex watch and numerous fast cars. You want employees so desperate for your approval that you could put your cigar out on their foreheads and they’d thank you. You want to be able to leave Supreme Court justices on “hold” for upwards of an hour. And you know that you do not get these things by diddling around with three-by-five cards.

Welcome back! Got your cards? Great! Now first, I’d like you to write down, on each card, a Career Objective, such as “working with people.” Okay? I want you to do this until you have listed 800 Career Objectives—you might have to go get some more cards!—and then I want you to arrange them in order according to which objective contains the most vowels, okay? Great! We’re on our way! Call me when you’re done!

1. You are the world’s largest manufacturer of carbonated beverages, and you have a product that is famous worldwide, that is virtually synonymous with the term “soft drink,” and that has had the same formula for 99

years. It has a very loyal following. You are making millions and millions of dollars selling it. You should:

(a) just keep it the way it is.

(b) Change the formula.

(c) Set fire to your own hair.

2. You are a major defense contractor, and you are building a gun for the Army that is supposed to be able to shoot down enemy planes. So far the taxpayers have paid you nearly $2 billion for it, and all your tests indicate that the only way it would have any negative effect on an enemy plane is if you could somehow sneak into the cockpit and manually whack the pilot over the head with it. How should you deal with this problem?

(a) You should try really hard to do a better job.

(b) You should tell the Defense Department that they probably should get another contractor.

(c) You should refund at least some of the taxpayers’ money.

3. You are a major automobile manufacturer. You have been losing sales to cars from other nations, particularly Japan, because their cars tend to be fuel efficient, technologically advanced, and extremely well made, whereas the most innovative concept you have come up with in the past two decades is the opera window. You should:

(a) Have Congress pass a law restricting Japanese imports, so consumers will have no choice but to buy your cars.

(b) Have Congress pass a law making it legal for you to kidnap consumers’ children and not return them until the consumers buy your cars.

(c) Have Congress pass a law ordering the United States Army to barge directly into consumers’ homes and take their money at gunpoint and give it to you.

(d) Remind everybody a lot about Pearl Harbor.

4. You are in charge of a large department, and you have an opening for a supervisor. The two obviously best-qualified candidates are women who have worked in the department for the same amount of time. Both are intelligent, highly competent, and respected by the other employees. In every way they seem equally qualified, although it happens that one of them is black. What decision do you make?