I am totally confused when it came to giving a title to this post since I have an option of choosing ‘dude! where is my period?’. But the post will then be subjected to unintended verbal connotations about the sexuality of the author and thus ends up creating more confusion and problems than what it is trying to solve. Hence …
Today we are going to talk about one of the several insane and stupid diseases that affect most managers around including you and me. People always have an inner urge pushing them to complicate things which are simple, especially if they belong to a technically-challenged breed called managers. If you look at it holisitically (I badly wanted to use this word since I started to blog, and there I go) the whole concept of ‘management’ originated out of this urge to complicate only. How? you might question. Initially there were people. People who are happily carpentering, teaching, repairing, ploughing, preaching and policing. Then the urge came in. Somebody thought ‘Hey, its not fun carpentering like this. Let there be a supervisor who makes decisions on how much glue and how many screws these carpenters need.’ Fast forward a couple of decades and we have people who ‘design strategies on how to manage people’, ‘formulate marketing vision’, ‘write mission statements’. But the insanity never stopped there. And that is when I said, “Dude! where is my fullstop?”
Since there is nothing much left to complicate in the management structures we started complicating our communication. The latest height scaled is usage of really long sentences to convey something. The sentences will be so long that you start waiting for the fullstop, your brain stops functioning and you want to run away to the land of articulately challenged. The end result of this madness is predictable. Something simple like ‘lets do it together‘ becomes,
“We need to understand the strategic importance and financial significance of this particular mundane fragment of work in our hands as rightly pointed out by John Galt who incidentally also said, ‘…the importance of strategic vision and mission are very poorly realized in the todays management world and this is leading to chaos in problem solving and messenger installations and thus leading to negative growth in return on investment and time allocated to lunch-breaks, hence I recommend all the new age companies and its management…‘ and focus our energies, resources, time on the same to make this a collaborative success and hence I request you all that we should put aside all other non-organizational commitments and tea-breaks for an indefinite period of time to work together on this particular task.“
and I always thought the longest sentence that I would ever say is, “My name is Raja Raja Surya Chandra Parijata Padmaleela Venkata Gayathri Purna Chandra Rao Sharma.” Duh!
