Aggressive young men sometimes think that, with strength and intelligence, they can bludgeon their way through bureaucracy. They fail every time, and over time, they become frail, bitter, pensionless old men. Don’t let this happen to you. To achieve a secure retirement, you need to learn how to survive in the corporate world. Start by listening carefully to a helpful Noverian bureaucrat.
Ponder also the sage words of Richard Skinner, lighting designer for the Sackler Gallery’s Falnama exhibition. He declares, “If my work is done properly, it should get no recognition whatsoever.” To survive in the corporate world, you should strive to get as little recognition as possible. A basement office is superior to a top-floor office, because the former tends to be darker and in the opposite direction of most building office traffic. If you don’t have any windows in your office, that’s excellent. Having a windowless office makes it more difficult for others to catch a glimpse of you.
On those evenings and weekends when you’re not maintaining your position in your office, you should spend some time studying and memorizing the lives and writings of famous corporate leaders. Recently I’ve been studying the career of Saddam Hussein. He served as President of Iraq nearly long enough to have received a twenty-five-year service pin! Saddam developed a highly influential strategy for choosing middle-and-upper-level managers:
Saddam lived in fear of a coup mounted by the Republican Guard. His solution was to create the Special Republican Guard, whose main remit was to protect him against coups particularly from the Republican Guard. You would think that the head of this outfit would be a fearsome figure who would terrify any budding coup plotters. Woods asked other leading figures if this was indeed the case and the answer was a resounding NO! Why? Saddam was well aware of the “who monitors the monitor problem” – what if the head of the Special Guard mounted a coup himself? Saddam’s solution was not original: appoint a relative. Make sure the appointee is a coward so he would not dream of mounting a coup. Just in case he is tougher than you might think, choose someone stupid so he cannot mount a successful coup and is too stupid to recognize someone else’s good ideas for a coup.
If Saddam had managed to get a patent on this business process, the royalties from its huge number of corporate users around the world would have been so large he could have just bought Kuwait instead of invading it.
We are pleased to learn that the European Commission has adopted a five-year plan for adopting a reform of English. Once again, the U.S. is lagging behind Europe.
Bureaucrats in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry recently repelled an attack by journalists working for a major German magazine. Information warfare is a crucial concern for forward-looking defense ministries. Bureaucrats are a country’s first line of defense.
The Center for College Affordability and Productivity warns of a possible reduction in college bureaucracies. A reduction in college bureaucracies will leave students less prepared for life in the workplace.
The Thinking Policeman reviews efforts to reduce the bureaucracy that police officers have to navigate. These efforts are unlikely to succeed. A more auspicious approach would be to organize criminals into corporations. The more criminals that are promoted to middle management, the less crime that will occur.
That’s all for this month’s Carnival of Bureaucrats. For readers observing the Gregorian calendar, we wish that this coming new year will successfully pass as the past year has. For those readers observing different fiscal calendars, we simply offer our best wishes for time to pass regularly. As always, nominations of posts to be considered for inclusion in next month’s carnival should be submitted using Form 376: Application for Bureaucratic Recognition.