[guide.chat] story pigs
- From: vanessa <qwerty1234567a@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "GUIDE CHAT" <guide.chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2012 10:33:56 -0000
A Chorus of Pigs.
A management consultant firm tries to peddle their process to a seasoned and
cynical staff, but finds that it is like trying to teach pigs to sing. This
consulting firm, however, has a secret and sinister agenda, and has gained a
toe-hold in the business world.
Thoughts often pop up unexpectedly. This was of those - it flashed up on the
screen, stark and sudden, then streaked naked across my mental stage shouting
something about singing pigs. The thought was really a memory; a recollection
of a famous homily imparted to me by a friend back in Texas, about the futility
of teaching pigs to sing. You don't do it, he said, for two reasons: it
frustrates you, and it annoys the pig. The thought distracted me during the
introduction. I tuned back in just as Howard, the facilitator, was wrapping up
his personal bio.
"Then I worked for ten years as an HR manager at a large architectural
engineering firm before taking a three year sabbatical to run a non-profit. Two
years ago, on a flight to Denver, I met Jeremiah Charles, the founder and
president of THRUST. I had signed on by the time the plane landed."
Howard's seminar was the kick-off for yet another new corporate initiative - a
revolutionary management model certain to change the culture of our workforce.
It had been almost a year since the last one, so we were overdue. All the
middle management ladder climbers sat up front and so did many of the new
employees, like Tray. He sat up on the edge of his seat waving an arm for
attention and chirping like a hungry chick.
I nudged the guy next to me and pointed to Tray. Ben looked at me over his
bifocals and followed my own "over-the-bifocals" gaze down to Tray. He smiled
and shook his head.
"Oh, he's okay" Ben said around a mouthful of donut. "I actually have high
hopes for him. It's fun to watch those eager and ambitious ones finally turn
cynical." He looked up wistfully. "Sure, it's a cheap pleasure, but it sustains
me."
The main conference room is the only one large enough for these all employee
sessions. It is of the lecture hall design, semi-circular and tiered. Howard
looked up from his speaker's podium at the point down in front.
"We have some empty seats in the front if anyone wants to come down closer", he
said.
No one stirred. Ben glanced my way, and then back at the tables lined up
against the rear wall loaded with coffee, donuts, and pastries. He looked back
to me and shook his gray head solemnly. I checked around. None of the veterans
in the rear seats stirred. Back here we could fortify ourselves with caffeine
and sugar, or just doze off unnoticed. We'd weathered dozens of these fads and
knew the ropes. Yet here we were again - annoyed pigs suffering another singing
lesson, and trying to make the most of it.
Bart, a manager in the front row, rose and turned.
"Come on guys ... let's fill the seats down here."
A silent battle of wills ensued. Bart folded his arms and faced a sea of
receding hairlines, gray heads, and blank stares, dotted with a few younger
faces. He picked out a couple of new hires in back and fixed a hairy eyebrow on
them. They mostly looked down or away, or checked for text messages. The
oldsters just smiled back down at Bart. A couple of new guys finally broke and
skulked down to end the impasse.
THRUST emerged on the management consultant scene only recently, but struck
quick gold with their very own copyrighted method. They called the model
Focused Custodians, and sold it to several large corporate clients early on.
Then the snowball effect took over. Our senior leaders saw the thing taking off
and, frightened of missing the boat, quickly jumped aboard.
Howard concluded the introduction with an explanation of how their model was
turning the business world upside down.
"Your company will soon join dozens of others that will see efficiency and
profitability take a step change. Teamwork and accountability will flourish,
walls will come down, and employee morale will skyrocket. Now, let's take a
five minutes bio break and then we'll dive right into a team building exercise."
I headed for the snack table, but Josh and Ben beat me there. Josh balanced a
teetering pastry monument on a six-inch paper plate.
"Whoa Josh. I know you farmers love a hand-out, but that plate won't take much
more."
Josh farms three hundred acres of river-bottom land in his free time.
"Yeah, yeah. Very funny. I'll tell you one thing, Steve. If I ran my farm like
they run this place, I'd be out of business in a season. I can't believe they
are paying good money for all this pasture pudding, and paying us to sit here
and listen to it on top of that. Get right down to it, all this crap, it's
nothing' but hanging' another crank on the do-nothing machine."
Ben chuckled around a mouthful of donut.
"Josh, I always say there are two kinds of people in the world: those that
believe in nothing, and those that believe in crap."
Josh snapped his fingers. "Wait a minute. That's not what you said last week.
Didn't you say that the two kinds of people were, uh ... oh, what was it now?"
Ben nodded and said, "Fools and liars - with a lot of overlap, but that was a
different aphorism, an alternate bifurcation of our silly species."
Josh frowned and turned to me. "Did you get any of that"
"No but I'm sure it was profound."
Ben continued, "Anyway, if we weren't solidly in the fool camp, we'd come up
with our own formula to peddle to the business world. Looks pretty simple.
Start with a couple of blatantly obvious truths and dress them up in clever
metaphors so they look profound. Then you package it all as a way for CEOs to
drive their companies to the front - without the bother of having to think or
work hard. The fat boys can retire to their country clubs, and the business
guides itself."
Josh and I nodded our agreement. I explained to Ben how we were just pigs that
couldn't even sing along, much less compose our own tune. He laughed hard and
almost choked.
Howard rapped a spoon on a drinking glass. "Okay everybody, if you'll return to
your seats now we can get started." He allowed a moment for people to settle
and conversations to die before continuing.
"We will start this session with an exercise to demonstrate the principles of
teamwork and custodianship. We are going to build a mission statement for a
hypothetical company, a shipping company, and we'll do it as a team."
Before this seminar, you would have had a hard time convincing me that there
was anything more empty and bogus than a corporate mission statement. Howard
intended to take up that challenge with the production of a faux mission
statement - one created just for training purposes.
Howard fingered a remote and a powerpoint slide flashed up on the big screen
behind him.
"Let's start by dissecting a mission statement. What is it made of - what are
the essential elements?"
I was never involved in producing one but, judging from context, I would have
guessed it to be a three-part process. Stuff as many cliches as possible into a
single paragraph, polish to a sheen, and, finally, trim it with spiritual and
solemn words to evoke a sense of reverence. Words like "quest, "crusade" and
"destiny" often turn up in mission statements. The idea is to obscure the real
mission, the one common to all businesses: Make More Money.
We spent the first half of the day constructing our mission statement, engaged
in heated debates over utterly meaningless words and phrases. By mid-morning,
the coffee and pastries started to wear off and the oldsters in the back began
to grunt and grumble, as bored pigs are prone to do. The facilitator saw the
crisis brewing and countered with the tried-and-true technique of engaging the
audience with questions.
He looked up and squinted to read a name placard. "So, Ben, what do we need to
add?"
Ben has been around forever. Some say they dug him up when they started
excavating the site back during construction. He is one of our brightest and
most cynical engineers, with a quick wit and razor-sharp mind. Clearly, that
mind had left the room this morning. Howard caught Ben off guard.
"Uh... what ... I mean, could you repeat the question?"
Howard flashed a smug little grin. He pointed to the mission statement written
on the dry erase board. "What's missing, what do we need to add?"
"Ben thought a moment and said flatly to the dead air, "And the skies are not
cloudy all day?"
The burst of laughter was spontaneous. Up front, Howard doused it quickly with
a stern and offended look. The rear didn't hold back - we all had a good belly
laugh. Josh got caught being the last one laughing, but not because he was
being intentionally rebellious. Just the opposite, he is normally quiet enough,
and in a way that warns others to let him be. No, once again, he was simply a
half step out of synch with the moment.
Howard laced his fingers in front of his chest and tilted his head to address
Josh.
"On a serious note, just so that we can get something useful out of this
session, Mr. Ruffner, what would you suggest we do to wrap up this mission
statement?"
I looked over and saw Josh's nostrils flare and his face turn red.
"Well how about we all just cut the crap and get back to work."
Howard was ready. He donned a mask of indignation, glanced at Bart, and
addressed a question to Josh.
"Then you think that all the corporate leaders that have decided to institute
this process are just wasting everyone's time?"
Those of us that knew Josh settled back for the ranting tantrum that was
certain to follow.
"Yeah, and meanwhile all the jobs are shipping out overseas. The rest of the
world has already figured out that they don't need us to make things anymore,
and pretty soon they won't even need us to consume. Hell, we won't even be able
to. Instead of innovating, our business leaders sit around pleasuring
themselves with mission statements, expectations, and every damn gimmick that
comes down the pike. Hell, look around right now -you gotta be blind not to see
it. The wheels are comin' off. We all know where this thing is going'. One way
or another, we're gonna have to dump all this bunk and get back to work. I've
heard all this manure about a service economy for over two decades. Well, they
got that part right - we've just been sitting around over here servicing
ourselves."
Josh blew a fine spray of spittle when he said, "...servicing ourselves." It
scintillated, hung in the air for an instant, and then vanished.
Howard lifted his brows and made a silent appeal to the managers in the first
row. They exchanged uneasy glances until finally, Fred Helgrom, the manager of
Josh's department, turned around in his seat to speak.
"Let's all just stay on track and see what we can take away from this class."
He turned back to Howard and nodded for him to continue.
When we broke for lunch, I made my way over to Ben. He was near the front of a
line forming at the tables, where stainless steel chafing dishes had replaced
coffee urns and pastry platters.
"Hey, that "Home on the Range" line was pretty good, but you might want to be a
little more careful. I think these clowns are in tight with the V.P.s" I said.
Ben shrugged. "I know, but it's like some kind of demonic possession. The words
come out, and it sounds like my voice, but before I can do anything, it's
already too late."
The speaker came up and joined us in line. He was about to engage Ben, so I
tossed him a question to set a block.
"Howard, what was the non-profit you worked with?"
He cut a quick glance around and dropped his voice. " The F.P.G.C."
"Never heard of it - what does that stand for?" I said.
He leaned closer and kept his voice low, like he was excited about telling me,
but cautious too.
"It's the Foundation for Personal and Global Cooperation."
"Oh," I said, "some kind of political group?"
He grew circumspect. "No, they focus on community outreach and education."
I could tell from his change in tone that he had decided not to go any further.
Remarkably, the lunch was quite tasty: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, dinner
salad, rolls and two desserts. Everyone took a plate and returned to their
seats for a working lunch. In the back, we had easy access to seconds and took
full advantage.
Howard spent the last half of the session describing in tedious detail how
organizations should rank their priorities and commit resources to the most
important ones. This is one of the basic THRUST principles - identify the key
priorities, then hit them hard and fast with a lot of resources. Such insight,
what genius! Often these management fads employ some elementary mathematical
formulation to lend credibility. THRUST used a simple scheme to rank
priorities, assign weighting factors, and distribute resources accordingly.
Naps and reading glasses are inevitable consequences of the late forties and
beyond. After lunch, a silent, invisible cloud of sleeping gas settled over the
back rows. Heads bobbed and eyelids fluttered. The big meal strained our
ability to fend off sleep and the monkey math sealed the deal. Many of us slept
soundly through the next two hours. Howard must have noticed, but probably
relished a reprieve from the cynicism and decided to just let us slumber.
At home that evening, I went on line and spotted a headline that reminded me of
Howard's non-profit. I googled F.P.C.G, got something completely unrelated,
then caught my mistake and tried F.P.G.C. It was a largely uninformative and
sanitized site, centered on a theme of connecting with your personal core
values and changing the world. One page talked about the organization's
history, and sure enough, old Howard had been the director right until two
years ago.
I returned to the query results page, tried another link, and found a story
about some religious cult, The Defenders of the Faith, out in an eastern
Arizona desert. About four hundred people living communally on a compound ran
into conflict with local authorities over rustling livestock from the locals
for ritualistic sacrifices. There were earlier disputes over taxes, firearms,
and scattered accusations of child abuse and polygamy. At first, it wasn't
obvious why this story came up, but then I found a single line about Howard's
foundation arranging legal support for the group.
I was into it now, and searched for information on the cult. Their newsletter,
The Conclusion, came up and I read a couple of recent issues. They believe that
the end of days is here already, and the Beast is out there now and gathering
the troops. The catch is that he is not just one guy, he is a system, and the
system is global corporate capitalism. The mission of the Defenders is to
expose and destroy the system.
I made one last query and found the THRUST Website. The president and founder,
Jeremiah Charles, had his face plastered all over the front-page and
watermarked on the others. The site linked to another NPO that, in turn, linked
to the F.P.G.C. Something about Terry's face clicked, and I went back to The
Conclusion. The February issue reported on a big gathering held at the compound
over the holidays. The celebration featured music, feasts, and inspirational
speeches. On one of the grainy images, standing next to the bearded cult
leader, I spotted a man that I am certain was Jeremiah Charles.
Before class the next morning a group of us veterans met in the hallway to talk
about work rumors, politics, and last night's game. Josh excused himself and
ducked into the restroom.
Darryl, a controls engineer, watched him go and remarked, "I bet he's in for an
attitude adjustment - after that tirade yesterday."
Ben added, "Yeah, the managers will get him in an office, close the door, and
gang coach him. We've all been there - not a pretty sight."
We all nodded solemnly. When the others left I told Ben about my investigation
the night before.
"Seriously, THRUST is a front for the Defenders and secretly funds them", I
said.
Ben grinned and answered, "Why Steve, I had no idea you were into conspiracy
theories".
"No, no, really. Remember how ol' Howard acted when I asked him about the
F.P.G.C.?"
A bemused far-away look settled on Ben's face.
"Now wouldn't that be choice. An anti-establishment group, bent on destroying
capitalism, launches an attack on the system from the inside." He laughed once
and added, "No surprise they've gained a toe-hold. After all, it's a cult
selling a culture - they're bound to be good at it."
The second day passed without much excitement. The site vice president showed
up for the last half-hour and sat in the back with us. Howard closed and the VP
went up front to thank him. Then he turned to the students.
"Now that you've all been introduced to the Focused Accountability model, I
have an announcement. Howard will be taking a temporary position in our
organization as manager of a new department, Organizational Accountability. In
that role, he will facilitate all departments as they incorporate the THRUST
model and develop strategies to attack their priorities."
Ben looked over and flashed me a broad smile, gave the thumbs up, and mouthed a
silent message. My blackberry vibrated silently a moment later and I checked my
messages. A new one from Ben popped up that read:
Good news: The Beast is here to free us from the pig farm.
Bad news: He has a taste for pork.
from
Vanessa The Google Girl.
my skype name is rainbowstar123
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