Cubicle: Business Models

Your cubicle, your own tiny real estate in the office land is home to a huge amount of unused resources. Phone, computer, Internet, paper, printer and you. You can get the max out of your cubicle if you can adopt a business model for it.

1. Trading Stocks

Use company resources like Internet and email distribution lists to trade into stock market. That way, you hedge your bets of a low pay with huge returns from stock market. You don't have to know everything about the stock market except that it can be used for making massive amounts of legitimate money minus the perils of being labeled as a criminal.

For coworkers to regard you as a stock market specialist, randomly shout out phrases like: “it's going up, it's going up.”, “correction is imminent”, “low PE, just buy it”. Form groups of interested coworkers for exchanging tips to make each other billionaires. If you can get your boss into believing that you are some sort of stock market genius, you own him.

2. Real Estate

Needs no explanation. Use your phone, Internet, company bulletin boards to rent or trade real estate. With time, build up your image to local real estate tycoon. That'll help you convince your gullible coworkers convince that property prices are going up and get rid of your deadwood property. I recommend using desktop wallpapers of Donald Trump for marketing purposes.

3. Referrals

Of late, I see a lot of money in it. Most companies offer fantastic rewards for winning referrals. To be a successful referrer, you have to maximize your chances by contacting as many people as possible. Use company phone, email and Internet to dig out as many people as possible. Don't be restricted by your company only. Liaise with friends from other companies to trade people between companies and make large amount of cash. Don't worry about the attrition rate.

4. Retail Outlet

Sell anything from hair oil to car to your coworkers. The best part of selling to your coworkers is that you can sell crap and get away with it because coworkers are too timid to mess with each other.

A cubicle offers the best RoI; there is nothing to spend, but a lot to earn besides your salary. Every cubicle is a privately held company in its own right. With such an astounding RoI, I wonder why Warren Buffet isn't acquiring them yet. May be he never sat in a cubicle.

Documentation

What you are reading right now is not documentation. Documentation is something that we write about the stuff we don’t know and which is read by the people who don’t want to know it anyway. I agree. It’s a tough job. That’s why ISO 9000 consultants get paid so much.

There are multiple phases any person goes through while reading any kind of documentation in the office.

1. Excitement – You’ve got something new on your hands. Usually, this excitement turns into apathy soon. The time taken for this transformation to happen has been observed to be inversely proportional to the number of pages in the document.

2. Curiosity – What kind of idiot wrote this? He hasn’t even put a name on it. If your boss made this document, this phase is skipped automatically.

3. A Quick Scan – You quickly go through the TOC to get the feel of it. The feel usually ranges from ignorance to “a sudden rage to kill the author”.

4. Read – This is where you actually read the document. This is the shortest phase and lasts one paragraph or 5 minutes, whichever is shorter.

5. Pretending to read – You slip into a sort of semiconscious state in which you are only vaguely aware of what is in front of you. It’s the longest phase.

6. Sleep (mostly applies to post lunch scenario) – No explanation necessary.

7. Hallucinations – Reality fades away. You understand everything that is written in the document. You enter the maximum productivity zone.

8. Back to reality – You accept your fate and run for some more coffee.

Sometimes, you are at the other end of this documentation spectrum. That is, you are the author. Here’s what you do:

1. Remember, you are not writing any book here.

2. Content is not important. Insert some good looking diagrams to the document. If the diagrams look good enough, it wouldn’t matter if they are irrelevant. Consider adding pictures of people with sincere and happy faces. That way, you can trick the user into believing that somehow reading this document is related to his/her own happiness.

3. Nobody seriously reads more than 2-3 pages of any document. Make sure all your good stuff is packed into it.

4. Do not ever write your name on the document. If possible, write someone else’s name. In the short run, people know who actually wrote it and ignore this mistake. In the long run, it has really great benefits. People won’t call you, out of the blue, to ask about things you don’t know.

5. Add links to other documents or web pages. It makes it look like you did some research. Make sure that the links don’t work. You don’t want to be accused of adding content that has no relevance.

Final thought: bad work can be completely obscured by good documentation.

Variable Pay

It’s the pay day. Yes. This is the day when sweet sweet salary finds its way out from your employer and lands in your bank account. It is for this day that the life seems worth living.

It was fine until the day I got a job which offered variable pay. By some crazy twist of fate, I work in a place where a lot of smart people work. They can solve most complex engineering or business problems with ease. But, these people exhibit expressions; ranging from dumbfounded to dead when asked about their salary structure. I urge the government world over to initiate effort on the scale of Human Genome Project to decipher the variable pay.

From a very high level, the system works like this: When your company grows profits by 50%, your variable pay increases by 10%. And if your company loses profits by 10%, your variable pay decreases by 50%. (The second case is more likely if you are reading this on your company time.) The system is designed to rip you off anyway.

But, don’t be disheartened. Nobody dies of low salary. You can make it interesting. I recommend forming betting pools to predict your next salary. With some luck and worst performance at work you can hit a fortune.

Office E-mail

Honestly, there are only two things that keep me going through the office hours, coffee and e-mail.

The importance of e-mail in office can only be compared to the importance of alcohol in life. Here’s how:

1. For e-mail and alcohol, the line between use and abuse is very thin.

2. Just like a beer sets the things right at the end of a frantic day, a naughty forward from someone sets the mood right after a call with a customer.

3. Huge amounts of alcohol lead to a real bad hangover. E-mails with extra large attachments choke the already crippled office network.

4. Without both, this article would have been impossible to publish.

Here are some guidelines on how to use the office e-mail to the fullest:

1. Distribute your office e-mail address to all your friends, relatives, anybody and everybody you know. It shows that your office considered you worthy of assigning an e-mail address and that you can use a computer. Also, please feel free to use this e-mail address while registering on different websites.

2. E-mail is an amazing communication system; unlike telephone. When on phone, you are supposed to answer immediately. No matter whom you are talking to. E-mail beats it. You can delay responding to e-mails from a couple of minutes to infinity. The more you delay, lesser is the importance of other party. Use this time delay method judiciously to let people know their worth.

3. Do not ignore spam. Open every spam e-mail and read it. It gives so much information. It’s almost like a parallel education system. Where else would you find information on topics as diverse as cheap mortgages, free games, risk free investment, 100% effective medicine and tax free income?

4. Open every attachment. Ignore the stupid concerns expressed by your e-mail program. If you are lucky, it’ll be a virus. It’ll turn your computer into a zombie. Then you can spend rest of the week without working while IS guys try and destroy the remaining of your data.

5. Include a 50 line long signature on every outgoing e-mail such that it looks like an inspiring message to the untrained eye, but is actually your resume in disguise. It’s difficult, but trust me, it increases your chances of receiving job offers via e-mail.

6. Finally, please send me your e-mail address so that I can add it to my ever expanding list of forward lists. I’ll bombard your inbox with ultra huge attachments and make your boss’s e-mails bounce. I love helping people.

Training

If it doesn’t hurt the non-proliferation treaty, I would love to attend the training on how to devise a boss seeking nuclear warhead disguised as a ball pen in the office supplies. Unfortunately, no one knows how to do that. I blame the education system.

IMHO, this whole training thing is overrated. I never got any smarter by attending any training. But, it feels really cool to say that you are attending some sort of training. Also, if you get kicks scaring the shit out of your boss, training helps. Let your boss know that you’re on some sort of mission of improving your skills. That’ll keep your boss worried that you are going to change jobs.

Once you have enrolled into some kind of training, don’t waste your time by actually attending it. That can do no good. The trick is to leave the training as soon as you have signed the attendance sheet. Never attend a training session for more that half of its designated time. Slap the instructor if you have to.

You might also want to impart training to others. Contrary to the popular beliefs, it is easier than attending the training. Also, it helps to impress your boss during performance reviews.

You don’t need much preparation for conducting training sessions. Make up a PowerPoint with a huge number of slides. 100 or more is recommended. Don’t worry about the content. Focus only on first 10 slides. After about 10 slides, the audience will enter a semiconscious state and anything you say after that misses their brain by a huge margin.

Remember one thing, trainings can be very fulfilling when there is nothing to learn.

Coworker Category #1: The Process Guy

Definition

This person is the champion of all sorts of processes, certifications and standards. He typically boasts of CMM Level 5, ISO 9000, SOX, Six Sigma and some of the company’s home grown standards.

How to spot this person?

1. Actual productive work is never expected out of this person.

2. Has a lot of free time on his hands. How can you expect a busy person to follow processes when there is work to do?

3. Extreme cases get carried away a bit further. They follow processes while speaking, eating, sleeping, drinking; everything except for work.

4. Usually, get promoted to managerial positions faster.

How to tackle these people?

1. A good thing about this category is that there are standard sets of processes, yeah, processes to handle this bunch.

2. If such a person approaches you to get some information or to get some work done, you have an edge thwarting him. Point him to some obscure document located somewhere on your corporate intranet which defines the process to get it done. Don’t worry if such a document doesn’t exist. No “process guy” is actually going to try and dig out that document since these people are inherently lazy and incompetent.

3. If your boss happens to be such a person, pretending to work never got easier. In your monthly / weekly / daily status, say that you complied with SOX and CMM Level 5 without actually doing anything. No one is going to question you, since no one really knows. Not even your boss.

How to become one?

No special training is necessary.

Just practice using these words while speaking:

paradigm, data points, process improvement, initiative, framework, quality, process model, opportunities, services, solutions, deliverables, catalysts for change, resources, methods of empowerment, leadership skills, meta-services, intellectual capital, professional, timely, effective, proactive management, cost effective, virtual, scalable, economically sound, value-added, business, quality, diverse, high-quality, competitive, collaboratively, synergistically, process adherence.

Actual takes from my company

Take 1:

“Process improvement suggestions are collected over a period of time. Sources typically include:
feedback from process users through various means,
findings from Customer Satisfaction Surveys,
proactive scanning of industry standards in our journey to comply with the highest capability levels.

These are then prioritized and process improvement projects kicked off. This is done with support from process Council, which includes strategic players.”

Take 2:

“A process-capability baseline defines the performance of the processes in quantitative terms, specifying mean value and ranges. The performance of a process is essentially the outcomes a project following the process can expect. These limits are used for controlling the performance of the process on individual projects.”

Some insights (valuable)

If you see too many of these guys around, it’s a clear indication that your organization is doomed.

Managers

I have to admit. Managers exist only because the law prevents us from killing people. Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics of this species in which somehow most of the brain is dysfunctional. (This can also double up as a guide to becoming a manager.)

1. Managers are stupid.

That’s the basic criteria for being a manager. If not stupid, the person might be better-off doing job as an engineer, an artist, a garbage collector; anything but being a manager.

2. Meetings, conference calls, blah, blah …

Managers think attending meetings or conference calls counts as productive work. It does not. If you want to know why, please refer to the previous article titled “Meetings”. Nevertheless, managers derive great pleasures by looking at their calendars and telling people that it’s full for the next 2 months.

3. PowerPoint prevails.

All managers believe that a couple of PowerPoint decks can represent all the information in the world. The managers are immensely impressed by any kind of PowerPoint presentation even if it doesn’t mean anything.

4. Excel also prevails.

Basically, all the problems in a manager’s world boil down to manipulating some numbers in an Excel sheet. Excel is also the weapon of choice. When faced with any subordinate creating any kind of problems at work, managers make sure the poor subordinate spends the rest of his life filling up Excel sheets.

5. The work they do.

The best part is that the managers draw their fat salaries for commenting on other people’s work. Full stop.

Meetings

The written record of the meeting is aptly named "minutes of the meeting". Go back in time. Think about the last meeting you had. Its hard not to notice that no meeting has content more than a few minutes. Yet, some of them stretch for hours. Here, we discuss the science and the art of the meetings.

1. Always, be late.

Never enter a meeting before time. Always enter the meeting after all the important people like your boss have turned up. While entering, take care that you have loose papers in your hand and pretend that you are in a hurry. People, who are present on time, obviously are people with ample time and nothing productive to do.

2. Do not try to speak first.

Typically, first half an hour will be spent in finding out what this meeting is all about. You don’t want to waste your time in useless activities, do you? Instead, keep writing something on the papers you brought in step 1.

3. In case of an argument, if you paraphrase everyone, you get to be the good guy.

Most meetings, sooner or later turn into a battlefield. The crowd gets divided into groups arguing with each other. Keep quiet. Pretend to listen and also pretend to think. It’s easy. Soon, other members will get tired and that’s where you step in. Coolly, repeat, briefly what each of the arguing groups said. Since, now, people just want to be done with the meeting, your opinion will be unanimously accepted.

4. Use incomprehensible jargon.

Say, “I did the QA in the WTI phase of LLC project. But, it seems, L1 module failed.” Always, be ready with the latest jargon to shoot whenever you get an opportunity. There is one in a million chance that some poor soul might actually want to know what that shorthand means. No problem. Just direct him to some reference document and scribble the path to the document on a piece of paper in the worst handwriting possible.

5. Meeting’s over.

Run. Don’t stop. Exit first. Make sure everyone notices that you have important things to do. That way, the job of writing “minutes of the meeting” won’t land on you.