Bulldozer00's Blog

1) Walk around all day looking worried. Make sure lots of underlings see you looking very concerned so that they know how important you are to the survival of all mankind.

2) Ignore the concerns of your people. Ensure that your whole day is filled with “important” meetings so that the concerns of your people don’t have a chance of reaching your ears.

3) Ignore the work of your people. Don’t show interest in it, don’t review it, don’t ask others for their evaluation of it. Treat all work output equally so that the mediocracy is maintained.

4) Ensure that no meeting minutes or action items are written down when you meet with your fellow Bozo peer managers. Ensure that the problems/issues that you debated (but didn’t do anything about) at the previous meeting are forgotten for the next N meetings. At the Nth + 1 meeting, recycle the old issues  so that you’ll always have something interesting to talk about.

5) When asked for tools, training, or help, say “I’m sorry but I don’t have the budget for it this year.” However, make sure that you go to training. Expensive Covey, Carnegie, Senge, etc, courses will do nicely.

6) Ensure that you go to all the industry trade shows and that none of your employees do. That way they won’t have a clue as to what your competitors are doing and you will minimize the chances that they will come up with good ideas on how to improve your products.

7) Always have an answer for everything. Never say “I don’t know, but I’ll look into it and get back to you”.

8 ) Present an air of infallible omnipotence, saying that you “already know about that problem” whenever an employee brings up a front-line problem that you couldn’t possibly know exists.

9) Hold periodic employee surveys to show that you care, fabricate some vague and superficial and unmeasurable  “initiatives” to address employee concerns, and then don’t change a thing.

10) Never say “How can I help you do your job better?”.

11) Never ask questions, only make statements.

12) Demand a full, 40 page Harvard-style business case analysis when an employee proposes a simple idea that may improve the mediocracy’s performance.

13) Don’t invest in expensive technology refreshes for your highest revenue generating products. Let maintenance costs skyrocket from the continuous accrual of technical debt and then blame your employees for taking too long to add new features to your products.

14) When you need new skill-sets, hire them in from the outside rather than investing in your existing employees.

15) Ensure that the salaries you pay to your employees stay within a narrow range of +/- 20% even though productivity  ratios between some employees can be as high as 10 to 1.

16) Ensure that you praise and revere your R&D group even though they never come up with new products or new functionality that can be seamlessly integrated into your existing product set.

17) Ensure that you keep adding procedures and rules to the corpo playbook while never deleting any old and useless ones. Ensure that the rulebook is fragmented, incoherent, and inaccessible.

18) Enact a policy of peer reviews for your employees but don’t read them when you allocate raises. Give raises based on how much you like the employee.

19) Handsomely reward those who respond to crises but ignore those who prevent crises.

20) Treat all estimates as firm personal commitments and don’t allow any re-estimation as a project progress and new knowledge is acquired.

21) Whenever there is a problem between a manager you appointed and an employee, always side with the manager.

22) If you do make a decision, never change it, regardless of new information that proves it was the wrong one.

23) Extol the virtues and superiority of your products over your competitor’s without having a clue of the design and architecture behind your competitor’s products.