Saturday, February 17, 2007

Exceeding expectations

A lot has happened in the past month...new baby, lots of excitement on the home front, and plenty to do at work. Not much time to haiku, but I've got a couple more by way of New York:

Corporate slave chains
are not our destiny, friend.
Stick it to the man!

and:

Doughnuts here are free
But not, I'm afraid, are we.
Don't touch my glazed!

Yesterday, a colleague (let's call him Michelangelo) and I were talking about a planning meeting we'd had that just had ended a few minutes before. In the meeting were my immediate boss (Gerald Ford) and his boss, (Condaleeza Rice), plus a handful of other top-level managers such as myself. Let's call them a cabinet. So Gerald Ford starts the meeting by asking managers to do a run-down of projects and timelines. Everything goes well until Condy hears that some projects might not happen because it's the weekend and we don't have enough staff to cover. Several of us get dressed down in the meeting, and told by her that "I can't believe what I'm hearing. These are employees. They don't get a choice. You can order them to work." At this point, a fellow manager drew a picture of a doghouse, and put the intitials of each of us inside it to illustrate her point.

Later, after the meeting, Michelangelo tells me his secret for survival in a capricious environment such as ours. "I keep out of the doghouse," he tells me, "by never exceeding expectations." Then, he walked away, not even a trace of a smile on his lips.

I can't really add much to that. So simple, so profound. Now I'm learning. If I can just deaden myself to the point that nothing bothers me, me and Condy'll get along just fine.