How to Wear Slacks
Dear New Employee (insert new employee name here):
Hello and welcome to your first day at (insert your company name here)! As you’ll notice on your meeting calendar, you’ve been invited to a New Employee Success Forum, an annual gathering of new employees where you will get to hear from several of our senior thought-leaders from across the organization. Each of the presenters will offer their unique perspectives and advice, but this email summarizes the underlying, essential themes that underpin our company’s culture. Please study this document so that you are ready to participate at peak-capacity during the interactive meeting.
We look forward to seeing you on (insert meeting date here)!
Essential themes that underpin our company’s culture:
1. Take yourself very seriously and aspire to a role of senior management. Doing good work is nice and fine, but at the end of the day, senior managers at publicly held companies earn ten to twenty times what a regular employee doing “good work” is earning. By signing up to a corporate career, you will in one way or another — physically, emotionally, familially — ruin your life. You might as well make serious bank while doing so.
2. As much as you can, try to be tall. Doesn’t matter male or female, but you must be tall. Kindergartners look up to 5th graders as wise and all-knowing, possessors of hermetic knowledge that one can only dream of. Same here.
3. Never forget that it’s a performance. And performances have both a start time and a costume department. So, show up early, and dress the part. Men: wear expensive shirts, white T-shirt underneath, dress slacks. No tie unless you’re meeting with a customer, and no jeans — jeans mean you work, slacks are for leaders. Women: dress like you’re sixty years old and running for the U.S. Senate. Men: at most, one piece of jewelry: a wedding band. Nothing else ever. Okay, maybe a frickin’ awesome watch, one of those Tag Heuer things. Women: only ever wear diamond stud earrings, diamond solitaire pendant, diamond engagement ring, and/or wedding band. Nothing loopy or dangley ever.
4. Rely on the meaningless phrases that others rely on, like “keeping the funnel full”, and “engage the industry as partners for growth”. If you take daily notes, your notes should contain only these useful phrases that you’ve harvested from your peers. That way, if your notes should ever become public as part of — hypothetically — the document-discovery process of a class-action lawsuit, you will be revealed as the forward-thinking leader that we’ve trained you to be.
5. Ideas inherit the job title that birthed them, so be quick to judge the merits of an idea based on the job level of the person who came up with it. To continuously foster this environment, always dismiss the speculation of low-level co-workers as mere speculation, but celebrate as enlightened wisdom the speculation of those above you.
6. Regarding those above you, try to report to someone with a job level at least two above you: they will be compelled to promote you simply to advance their own political capital. What kind of senior VP doesn’t have at least two regular VP’s reporting into them? Exactly.
7. Always be ready to present technology content, but don’t say too much. People who have to explain an idea are trying to convince you of something, and leaders don’t need to convince, they just need to aim. So pretend you have secret knowledge; say exactly enough so that the other pretenders nod and agree, then stop. Try to avoid technology presentations to anyone below your job grade, as there’s a chance they’ll know how wrong you are, and may ask difficult questions. Your management peers will not do this, because they know how unimportant being correct about technology actually is. Notice how well a VP’s discussion of technology is received by the other VP’s, even if the presentation is fantastically incorrect, outdated and infeasible. The accuracy doesn’t matter; what matters is who’s presenting it and what their job grade is (see #5 above).
8. Never ask questions at large all-hands meetings when the presenter is a peer or above. That’s for troublemakers. Save your most challenging, difficult questions for those beneath you in the hierarchy. Here’s a handy mnemonic: softballs up, hardballs down.
9. And when asking questions during the presentations of those beneath you (organizationally), your question should always include financial concepts. You want to be taken seriously, and nothing is more serious than finance. Pivot aptly between cost and price, TAM and SAM, operating margin and profit. Are those earnings GAAP, EBITA or pro-forma? What kind of useless shithead doesn’t know that?
10. Visit potential customers, and when you return to discuss your adventures, refer cryptically to something you were told in confidence, ideally over drinks, in a quiet dark corner of a private supper club. Anyone can learn the necessary elements of a business obligation during the regularly-scheduled meeting, but your co-workers happen to believe that secret insights are shared only over a good scotch and a well-cooked steak. Play on that belief, and please file your expense receipts with accounts payable in a timely manner.
11. Don’t be a sap regarding our customers. There is zero merit to the concept of “fairness” in a business relationship. In exchange for their money, your customer will get absolutely nothing more than what they negotiate and codify into contract. Nothing else matters. Feel free to use terms such as “value”, “partnership” and “collaboration” to confuse your customers, but don’t become seduced by those concepts yourself. Never forget: everyone you do business with is at some level your competitor who would kill you dead if it somehow benefited them. So when putting that contact together, imagine what a sociopath intent on world-domination would want, then ask for that. It is your customer’s obligation to deny you these insane requests, but you must allow for the possibility that their incompetence will cause them to miss something. This process is commonly referred to as “negotiating in good faith”.
12. Be an outspoken advocate for pushing decision making downwards in the organization, but rely heavily on corporate process to derail initiatives you disagree with. For example, if there is a product-approval committee, get on that committee; if the product-approval committee doesn’t have enough financial analysis (and, honestly, can it ever?), propose to run a product-finance review committee that filters the recommendations of the product-approval committee. On the other hand, if you’ve an initiative that’s going to be held up by pesky questions during a review process, speak to a senior VP first, point out the “market window adoption risk”, and scare them into approving your initiative despite what the review committee might say. Once secured in approval, present your idea to the review-committee anyway, being sure to point out that the idea is pre-approved by senior management and your presentation is just for their benefit, to keep them apprised. They will appreciate your communicativeness, admire your pluck, and this experience will fortify your reputation as a person who knows how to get shit done around here.
13. Be unpredictable. Turn on people quickly. Very quickly. You should turn so quickly that nearby dimes would say “well that seemed abrupt.” Try this: tell a joke, where you both compliment yourself and laugh at your own expense. For example: “Did you read that analyst report? Some sharp insights there. Only took me eight years of college to figure out what he said in five minutes.” This will encourage others around you to participate in a similar manner. The instant they slip up and cross the boundary into genuine self-deprecation, adopt a sudden posture of disdainful corporate rigor: “I don’t feel that shareholder value is something to joke about.”
14. If you’re the only person who heard a critical piece of information from a key customer that will soon affect your company in a long-lasting way, you are sitting on a pot of gold. Don’t waste this opportunity! And if by bad luck someone asks you for details before you’re able to adjust all of your strategic initiatives to this inevitable happening, lie. Comport. Obfuscate. Mislead. And should someone ask you about the situation, and their question reveals that they are in possession of data you didn’t know they knew, wink knowingly as if they’re one-layer deep in the ruse, then tell them a new lie. If they point out another data point whose access surprises you again, smile appreciatively to welcome them to the second-circle. Conspiratorially lean in, and in a quiet voice, preceded with a disclaimer that “I don’t share this insight with most people”, lie again. This is called “playing your cards close to your chest”, and as any serious poker player will tell you, bluffing is a fundamentally important part of the game.
15. Learn all about poker. Know all the terminology and draw relentlessly from the game for metaphors for your actions: “I’m all in on the corporate quarterly MBOs”, or “that analyst report is my ace in the hole”. People respect poker because (a) there’s always money involved (b) it makes good people do crazy things. I think even Kenny Rogers was in a movie once where he shot a guy over a poker dispute. Think about that: Kenny fucking Rogers.
16. The only excuse for not knowing everything about poker is if you know everything about the “Jerry McGuire” film, the first two “Godfather” films, and “Glengarry Glen Ross”. There are exactly six-hundred and seventeen minutes of runtime to those four films, and you should know all of them.
17. When an underling tells you the truth about some business endeavor within the company, express your appreciation in terms of the lack of deceitful hierarchy in your organization. Try this: “Usually people treat management like mushrooms: feed them shit and keep them in the dark. I like that you don’t do that.” Of course, be sure to do exactly that to them in return. The flow of honesty cannot be symmetric; like how gravity defines which direction is considered “up”, the flow of honesty is how corporate altitude is determined.
18. Always carry something to your meetings: papers, a binder, or a laptop. Always check email during meetings with your subordinates. When staring down at your phone while doing this, it is important to maintain a facial expression such as one you’d carry if disappointed in the translation of a Russian novel. Never walk the building slowly or empty-handed, even to the bathroom. Bring your laptop home every night, ideally in a laptop briefcase, never a backpack — backpacks are for camping, and camping isn’t serious. Once a week, send an email at a ridiculous hour to foster the illusion that when you can’t sleep (or choose not to), you work.
19. If promoted to head an organization, fire the first person who resists your leadership. This is especially effective if that person is senior, entrenched, but somewhat disliked. “I can’t believe she fired him, but I’m glad to see him go” is the response you’re going for. If you ever discontinue a speculative, new product line or cutting-edge technology endeavor, be sure that almost everyone involved is let go. Allow the key-contributors to interview elsewhere in the company, of course, but by-and-large you want everyone to notice that people involved with failed moon shots don’t work here anymore.
20. When something shocking happens to the business that’s never happened before — for example, a senior executive is extradited to face currency manipulation charges in an eastern-european war zone — act like this shit is old-hat for you: seen it a bunch of times. Surprise is for the weak. Immediately integrate the once-in-a-lifetime experience so quickly that you feel like you’ve gone back in time and have relived the experience over and over to the point of banality. Shake your head in mock pity for those around you who are mentally incapable of time-travelling like you can.
21. Never challenge the leadership of someone above you. Treat them everyday like you would want to be treated on your one-hundredth birthday. Be supportive, be impressed, comment on their insight, perceptiveness, savvy, thoughtfulness. Obsequiousness is hardly ever detected or uncalled for around here. Go on, try it: feigning naivete, ask one of the many middle-aged, mid-level managers around here for some career advice someday. Just be sure to have a lot of free time and a big appetite when you do, because asking that is worth at least a week of free lunches.
22. When dismissing those beneath you, use gentle but coded phrasings. Refer to Bob as “young Bob”, and his ideas as “not all the way thought through”. The fact that nothing can ever be all the way thought through is unimportant, what you’re implying is his lack of capacity for doing so.
23. Treat academic degrees as evidence of commitment and rigor. People do not get PhDs because they just didn’t know what else to do with their lives at twenty-five, they got PhDs because of their super-human commitment to their craft. In general, anyone with lesser pedigree than you can be defeated in the rock-paper-scissors of the corporate ladder race.
24. Nothing is more important than the upper-echelon meetings with your peers at other companies or with your major investors. No one below your job level should ever know exactly what occurs at these meetings, and any suggestions they have for the meeting should be dismissed as lacking in the precise nuances demanded by the situation. Think of the meeting as occurring in low-earth orbit, with you the pilot a one-hundred-million dollar jet fighter, with super-sonic stealth capabilities and a host of death-delivery weapon systems at your disposal. And only you have been trained to fly that plane, at that altitude, at that meeting. Be that guy, with your hair on fire.
25. Embrace business travel. Spend at least a thousand dollars on the most serious, overly-engineered piece of carry-on-luggage on the planet, and sign up for all of the airline club lounges and airport security fast-pass screening services. Because you can and you should move through the system like a pampered ninja. Memorize the rail map of Tokyo’s Yamanote line — including the kanji for all station names — even if you’ve never been there. Travel to Hawaii for that every-other-year semiconductor conference, but avoid the beaches and make sure on your return that everyone hears how you were “too busy to waste any time with the ocean”. Know how long a flight to Seoul Korea would be from wherever you are, as well as what the local time is there right now. Expressing confusion about the international dateline is as respectable as being confused about subtraction. Master this. Know the approximate currency-conversion rate for the Euro, the Japanese yen, the Chinese renminbi, the Singapore Brunei, and the Indian whatever-it-is.
26. Belong to a gym, but not the local one provided for the regular employees. If you choose either CrossFit or SoulCycle, be sure to refer to these places — as I believe is required by their respective membership agreements — by their proper name and not as “the gym”. While membership is not optional, actual attendance is if your body mass index is within 50% of nominal. Most importantly, at least once a year, regrettably decline to participate in an after-work event because you have to go workout.
27. If you have hierarchy of staff below you, have two regular meetings: a quarterly one with everyone, and a monthly one with just your direct reports. Nothing instills the sense of authority throughout the ranks better than knowing there are meetings where your employee’s work product is being discussed that they’re not invited to. For this second meeting, reinforce your authority by scheduling it at eight o’clock in the morning, the first Monday of every month.
28. Don’t forget to redecorate. Did you just get transferred to a different area of the building? Then spread out. Take the window cube near the collaboration area, and then cut the collaboration area in half. It’d be more functional with some half-cubicle work-spaces than it was with couches and whiteboards, and the people that sit nearby who previously collaborated there are likely overdo for a reminder about that. Plant your flag, push people around. Think of yourself as Columbus and your new neighbors as the natives of Hispaniola, then act accordingly.
29. Fuck humility. Any implication that you are winging it as much as we’re all winging it should be rained down upon with a storm of hammers. Unless it’s implied by a peer, then a quiet chuckle over the shared secret is more appropriate. And if implied by someone above you hierarchically, be sure to appreciate their wisdom. As Amanda Palmer said it, the biggest difference between professionals and amateurs is that the professionals know they’re winging it. Wink, nod, but for the love of God, don’t say it out loud; that’d ruin everything.
30. Finally, and most importantly, subscribe wholeheartedly to the mirage. It’s all false and everyone knows it. A company, a corporation: they aren’t real, they’re just groups of people clubbing up their collective weight because they can earn more money that way. One person alone cannot build the miracle of the next-generation smartphone; a corporation, however, can not only do that, it can reduce the experience to the thinnest flavor of ordinary. It’s all just people, competing against other people, similarly organized. If everyone associated with a particular corporation simply decided one morning “fuck it, I’m done” and walked away, the company would evaporate and disappear overnight. Embrace this illusion, don’t bother trying to look through it. No one cares.
Good luck with your new career at (insert your company’s name here), and we look forward to seeing you at the meeting!
PS: Lunch will be provided.
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