I've finally figured out how I'm going to make my fortune: I'm going to write one of those "management" books. You know, X ways to Y - x being any multiple of five that's less than 20 (because management types have to take off their pants to get to 21, and I wouldn't want to be responsible for that kind of thing), and Y being any cluster of words and acronyms that mean nothing to anyone who understands what they really mean: transfuse your ROI, plummetize your marketing QED, expiate the superordinate PFM, whatever. Anything that juxtaposes a number of polysyllabic words that have a tone that's important enough to get executive types to think it's worth buying ...

... and refuse to admit they don't understand.

If you promise a five percent increase in this nonsense or a five percent reduction in that, you can get management types to do anything. Wear rubber pants, buy time management notebooks, or tuck their ankles behind their necks and fart into their own navels. It's not like the various formulas that are used to indicate "effective management" actually pertain to anything remotely measurable. (If there's greater quality awareness or a better reductive quotient in my corn flakes this week, I surely haven't noticed.) And even if it were, five percent is totally insignificant. (I got a five percent raise last year, and I'm still eating the same damned corn flakes.) The bottom line is that very few people - if any - in "executive" positions that do anything that has any concrete result, and there's really nothing that can be done to help them do nothing any more effectively ...

... and that scares the crap out of them.

Their days are spend listening to the ideas of their subordinates - ideas, mind you, about things they really can't understand - and giving people permission to do what they just said they were going to do, albeit with a few inconsequential alterations just to put their piss-stain on the thing so they can take the credit if it happens to work out for the better. Then it's off to the office, to sit behind an empty desk and try to stay awake while reading X ways to Y in a desperate attempt to figure out how to do what they do with a higher quality awareness and a significant improvement in the reductive quotient, until their time management system tells them it's time to put on their rubber pants, their ankles behind their necks, and ...