image I’ve been trying to think of other things I hate about work. It’s tough, because it’s hard to lump the things into categories. I’ve been trying to think clearly about it, but I can’t. I can’t because they’ve washed my brain into a permanent stupor with a little thing us white collar white folks like to call “corporate value training”.

Leadership training is the process by which completely useless one-sports-coat-removed-from-cave-people become excited about more work, low wages, and poor planning; To the thoroughly “trained” these things are known as challenges, achievement-based incentives, and opportunities for innovation. The language of company values corrode my frontal lobe into a useless globule with the processing power of an un-cased Apple II after thirty consecutive trips on the log ride at California Adventure. I suffer from such a corporate-induced novocaine hangover every weekend that I no longer have the capacity for metaphors that don’t turn into barely comprehensible run-on sentences, and one of the heaviest contributors to my creeping insanity is the downright soulless mind-screw of spin.

Before I burst into flames with pent-up hatred for this one phrase in particular, let me just type it and hopefully that will lock its evil spirit inside the computer, and later tonight I can consider beating my computer into microchips with a hockey stick.

“Think outside the box.”

I want to say right now that I will cram a toaster up the ass of any person who says this phrase to me. Sure, I may not be permitted to do this while still employed, but some day in the near future when I am fired or I quit, several people will discover that not even strawberry jam will help the searing pain of two to four hot slices of bread popping into their colon.

That phrase is Satan, and I’m sure there’s some numerology thing that can prove it, but I think if I dwell on it too long my face will melt like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The only people who say, or should I say, repeat that awful phrase are the most unoriginal, uninteresting, unimportant, and utterly useless fucks on the face of the planet. And I wouldn’t trust any of them to think, let alone do anything productive with any side of a box, and I’m sure whatever they’d do with it better be outside, preferably in the middle of the freeway.

image Another annoying instance of doublespeak is the whole “be here now” mantra they like shoving down our throats. It seems businesses want you to have a convenient level of duality, where you can go to work and be an amazingly taxed multitasker, and when you inevitably do a not-so-hot job at one specific task or show a distaste for one specific project, management can make you feel guilty because you were not “being here now” and giving that one thing your full attention. And I’ve been schooled several times by people who tell me that the point is more about the split between your personal lives and your working lives; a sort of check your baggage at the door thing. However, if I have to be responsible not to bring my personal life to work, then my work needs to take a little bit more responsibility over how it turns me into drooling mental pudding cake who can’t function on the weekends.

The “be here now” mantra and several other phrases are pressed upon us on a daily basis to alleviate management and interdependent business relationships from the burden of actual conversations with personalized interaction. Praise is given out to the individuals who can best cram these phrases into their working lives by pointing out other people’s actions and ascribing the latest business quotation of day.

image The books, the theories, the seminars, the diagrams, the phrases, and the lingering effects on all the mechanized people make me feel like I’m sitting in the slack-jawed, stupefied studio audience of an infomercial for the RonCo Food-O-Matic. Every day, I feel like I’m being talked to like a high school graduate being shammed into an exciting business opportunity selling knives door to door. I feel dirty and worse, I feel like a sweaty piglet running from the islanders every time someone at work drops a tidbit of witticism he copied into his day planner from Who Moved My Cheese?

Here are the reasons I think these seminars and books and mantras are all a load of diseased horse poop.

They make people who do not have any skill, except the ability to repeat things other people have said, look like they are somehow intelligent and worthy of running a business even though they possess little to no industry-specific knowledge or experience.

In fact, these things are a wealth of non-specific information, and that fact is what makes them so devilishly powerful. You can’t just KNOW the information. That’s not enough. You have to LIVE it, in order to see results. If you are told repeatedly that the only way to be successful is to live the values, then you’ll start to wonder how. Of course, the people who are already successful must be living the values, and the people who aren’t better figure it out. And what if you are successful, but want to be more successful? What if you’re not living the values enough? What if someone finds out? I’ve actually seen managers in these seminars bordering on tears having a self-glorifying soul-search so they could attempt to display genuine fear that they weren’t LIVING the company values.

VALUES!?!?!?

Our company, apparently has VALUES, now. It’s not just a business, it’s a damned fundamentalist church. And if you think the values are bullshit, then you obvious haven’t been LIVING the values. And of course, those who devote themselves to the values have always developed the amazing skill of being able to point out when other people have not been really living the values. It’s the same freakish witch hunt that always seems to take place amongst the small-minded. By reducing goals to “values” and hard achievements to “feeling it” and “living it”, you create a society of spin-doctors, business/preachermen whose hierarchy is established by freakish depths of insanity.

If people have not learned manners by the time they reach adulthood, they probably shouldn’t have been hired to perform a job in first place.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many of these stupid books and phrases amount to simple manners and human decency. And I will agree with these crazy people on the idea that this level of decency is created by a culture of decency, and what they don’t want to focus on is the idea that those in power need to conduct themselves with a level of decency and lead by example. Instead, individuals are not held accountable for being bad examples. They are all addressed equally and urged to train each other, and coach each other to better “live the values of the company” so we can all benefit. Fuck that! Whatever happened to good old fashion snitching? Whatever happened to getting rid of someone who’s a classic fuckup? Is it my fault, because I didn’t make progress on my role as a coach? When we start looking at our co-workers like children who need to be reared by our society, we take away a level of personal accountability and enable more people be total douche bags without consequence. These attempts to create a “business culture” have become like throwing shit loads of aspirin at a brain-tumor. At some point, real goals, real expectations, and real consequences need to take the place of core values, leadership-coaching, and useless rhetoric.

Anyone who is not sold on the business book of the month from their manager’s manager’s book club is immediately forced to hide their disdain.

Thus, a dangerous and subversive attitude is further cultivated. Therefore, no matter how important or hardworking, the employee feels like they’re one smirk away from getting the shaft. And what’s more sickly twisted is that these books and seminars would have you believe that the ONLY way to be a capable contributor is to know, live, and repeat the values and phrases. And with the abundance of hook-line-and-sinker executives with nothing better to do than search for something to know about, it’s easy for hard-working underlings to feel like their contributions are worthless when faced with a personal revulsion to the cerebral hard-sell of the latest fad business book. The urge for the creative mind to resist indoctrination feeds the non-productive Us vs. Them drama that so many employees go through. Because of these stupid phrases and business “philosophies”, there are people whose very nature forces them to hate their jobs. And granted, everyone hates their job to some degree, but there’s nothing quite like a psychotic group-think ideology to really draw a line for someone whose not quite sure where to direct their cantankerous fury.

image Whether you buy this stuff or not, it creates a blur. Hatred, self-doubt, false-confidence: these are the dirty little particulars released by that multi-million dollar industry behind these business books and seminars. Look at your local bookstore and see how many people are trying to cash in on this trend. And it’s always going to be easy for the successful and the rich to impose upon others a set of values, when really behind all the “crucial” training is usually just a scared old man trying to get you to buy the line of shit he feels best justifies why he has what you don’t. It’s always a smoke-screen, which, if anyone can recall, wasn’t necessary for hundreds of years in which people invented, people created, and people made money. Who’s making money off this? The $10/hr employee taking notes during the seminar or the guy who’s name is written on the back of the book his idiot boss is making him read?

And can I offer any suggestions to stop this? Not a one. That’s what’s so frustrating. You can’t fight it, because it’s insanity. Not “living the values” might as well be called “sinning in the eyes of the church”. My only advise is learn the enemy. Learn every line, every special phrase, and use it against everybody before they use it against you. On conference calls, if you want to get noticed, accuse someone of not “being here now” and cite examples, and here’s the kicker, offer yourself as a coach, and tell everyone how willing you are to take time out to make them better at their jobs.  Hopefully, after the hundredth time you urge your bosses to think outside the box someone will tell you to stick the company values straight up your ass, which is probably the best place for them.