There was an enquiry into yesterday’s mailshot incident, but it was the usual cover-up. Mike Slattery was mainly to blame for the fiasco, but he is always very clever at evading any direct responsibility – he does this by speaking extremely fast and repeating things endlessly. At the end of a conversation with him you have heard him say the same thing ten or fifteen times over, and you are so exhausted by this that you haven’t the energy to point out he has just spoken a load of garbage.
Marion Conway (Human Resources) also got involved, and it was obvious she just wanted to blame everybody for everything. The cheeky staff on the Sales Desk seem to have escaped without a rebuke of any kind.
In retrospect the whole thing seems like a storm in a teacup. At the end of the day, it’s not really a problem if the mailshot goes out a day late. It’s the lies and the cover-up that make it all stressful.
Anyway it is the start of Lent and for the next six weeks I have given up drinking alcohol, buying books (which is probably my biggest addiction) and staying up after 11 o’clock on a weekday (except for Tuesday 14th February, which I know will have to be a late night).
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2 comments:
You've got the right idea: keep your perspective clear, don't get upset, and have a sense of humor about the foibles of office politics.
If you're not familiar with Baltasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom (the Shambhala edition) or Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, you might want to read them to get some tips on interoffice/court intrigue and how to survive. Gracian was a 17th century Jesuit priest observing the corrupt Spanish court and wrote his book of aphorisms in response to Machiavelli's The Prince, which Gracian considered shallow and crude. Greene takes Gracian's aphoristic style and ideas and condenses and updates them with historical examples. With such nuggets as "Never Outshine Your Boss", and "Conceal Your Intentions", I think he gives a realistic analysis of the interdynamics of group behavior. Not for the overly idealistic.
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