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"Your new Pet: his care and feeding"
2

"Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

"Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

(OP)
In a thread on Morale in the "How to improve myself" forum, STLG says:

Quote:


My previous mentor told me that " you have to manage you boss", don't let him get into your head.

This is the one thing they don't seem to teach.

There ought to be a handbook entitled "How to manage your Manager." with the subtitle "How to protect yourself on a daily basis." just like those handbooks from the pet store; "Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

I call on all engineers to contribute their survival rules so we can create our own "Survival Handbook".

I'll start with the following:
Summary
A basic survival rule is to protect yourself in writing.

Managers have a fascination with the written word. They can't seem to get enough of memos, reports and e-mails. They love to enumerate just how many of each they get through every day.

Management like to promote the view that they are busy important people and that time is not something they are overburdened with (a mis-representation on their part since they have too much time on their hands and too little brain to do anything with it) which is why they like a short summary.
This is all the reading they are capable of.

There are no recorded instances of managers reading all of any document.
This makes the written word a very powerful tool for you to use.

Actually, the truth is that management have the attention span of goldfish. They cannot read more than part of one page in 12pt double space, with very short simple sentences and they may retain 10% for a very short time.

Circulation:
Handle   Initial    Date



Rules for the management of managers


Rule one:
Keep well below the Bill Gates 60 word sentence limit. (I must look and see if he has a grammar checker setting for management reports and what the word count is)

Rule two:
For safety: make the body of the report/email etc. dull and boring just in case he happens to turn over from page 1.

Rule three:
The summary is the working part of any document.
3(i) If you want your manager to do something, keep your expectations low and fill the summary with management speak words and phrases that he can parrot at the next management meeting, and chose emotive words like "profitability", "efficiency" etc.. Use important sounding words where possible e.g. "Methodology" instead of "Method".

3(ii) Conversely, if you don't want action, don't make the mistake of using long sentences with complex ideas in them and or grandiose technical words. He may just decide this will make him look really "on-top" of his department.
Keep it simple but above all: dull.
Purge any emotive words and use only simple words: "Method" not "Methodology". Avoid any use of "management speak" whatsoever.

Rule four:
Promote closure: beloved of trauma therapists, this concept is vital when dealing with a manager and his stresses. He needs to be able to obtain closure with each piece of work. He likes to count the jobs he has done each day. Give him lots of items and make closure easy.
Rule five defines one way to promote closure .

Rule five:
Managers love to "scent-mark" or, in their case, to mark everything with their initials.
 
So put a circulation list in a table on the front page (which also reduces the space for meaningful text) with a column labeled "Read by" and another with "Date" and chances are he will initial and date with a flourish. It helps to include a column with his full name and title in it. It helps him know where to put his mark.

Don't put this on another page.
It belongs on the front page, it fills the space and you really don't want him to read elsewhere.

This also signals the completion of an exercise.
This has two values: he is not going to read the report and then come back to the front page to initial it as this is inefficient. So he will initial the front page while he is there. Because it signifies completion, the chances are they will go no further.
It also is a valuable tool to promote "closure" as described in rule four.

Rule six:
Bury the bad news.
If you want the protection of a report and it contains an unpalatable truth, make it a long report and bury the bad news somewhere deep inside the middle section. Never refer to the bad news in the summary directly.

Managers usually only read the "Executive Summary" and if you don't want them to read even that, drop the word "executive".

For those that might want to jump to the end to see what's in the report, be sure the end pages are an index and a bibliography. He will not search deeper into the heart of your report.

Occasionally you may find a rogue manager who will read everything. He will not last long so this is a short term damage limitation exercise. He may not be equipped to understand it but his ethic or compulsion will defeat the "Executive Summary" ploy.

For this type, make the reports as long and as complex as possible. Unreadable would be a good description; something engineers are good at.

use single line space and no extra lines for paragraphs in the body of the report.

Rule seven:
Feed well and regularly.

Managers have there own managers, "upon their backs to bite 'em" (Kipling) and they too love reports so the rest of your managers busy day will be writing his own reports or presentations.

Incapable of original thought or of research, they create their reports on the "cut'n'paste" principal. Plagiarism is a concept with which they are intimate.
They need a plentiful diet of meaningless reports full of useful and complex graphics and colourful management speak phrases.

Your reports are their mother load.

Managers are more than familiar with the phrase "a picture speaks a thousand words".

Store graphics on the server "where anyone can get them" i.e. him. This is also a useful way to fill the index and bibliography at the back of the report. If you e-mail him the report he can use the hyperlinks.

Equations are risky. Your manager won't understand them, he dare not parrot them. Any manager can bluff or waffle with a graphic but equations can be sudden death.

Ensure that equations, or anything else controversial, when used, have an end-note. End notes break up the bad news, not into manageable bites, but into indigestible parts. Many think a footnote is sufficient but the end note is doubly safe. He will never find it and there is always the chance that he will get the wrong end-note, especially if you use chapters: even if he gets the right end note number he is sure to get it from the wrong chapter. This way the truth and the whole truth is there but never to be understood.

End Notes:

Note one:
Remember "The Devil makes work for idle hands" so send in lots of reports, e-mails etc which will keep him out of mischief and persuade him that you are "a team player" and a "communicator".  Each set of initials he makes brings him closer to happiness.

Note two:
Rule eight (supplementary)
When burying bad news avoid graphics, except as a distraction, on any page closer than two pages away from bad news.)
Some managers like to flip through a report and graphics will catch their eye and hold them there.

Equations can be safely placed on pages with bad news.

Note three:
Inevitably your manager will screw up, especially if helped.
You have lots of nice documentation to protect you, all initialed by him.
You can be sure that his show-off manner at management meetings with his fancy graphics, incomprehensible equations and his mastery of management speak will have won him no friends.
In the arena of simple math his managers will recognize that they can save more money sacking him than sacking one of his direct reports.
Armed with the evidence buried in all those reports he initialed (made visible by now being placed in the "executive summary" of the post mortem reports you now send out, carefully including the CEO in the CC field) your CEO now knows his duty and you are safe.

Note four:
Before anybody complains about unnecessary cruelty to managers, I will concede there are good managers. I know. In 25 years I have met two and they didn't last long. Actually, I exaggerate. I have met one and one for whom the jury is still out. A friend of a friend told me of another.

Recomendations:
Eng-Tips members to add additional rules as appropriate.

0

JMW
www.viscoanalyser.com
Eng-Tips: Pro bono publico, by engineers, for engineers.

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

RE: "Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

2
(OP)
An addendum taken from this evenings re-run of "Yes Minister" on BBC TV:
The Four Word rule used by civil servants when putting plans before Government Monisters:
"when presenting plans for a Government Minister to approve it is important to get these four words into the plan that you want him to approve: "Quick," "Simple," "Easy" & "Popular."
Conversely, the four words to put into the plans he shouldn't approve are "Time-consuming", "Expensive," "Complex" & "Contraversial."
It is explained "Contraversial" means vote losing. The alternative word is "courageous" which means election losing.

JMW
www.viscoanalyser.com
Eng-Tips: Pro bono publico, by engineers, for engineers.

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips Fora.

RE: "Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

JBM  6/9/04

(Hmmm, that was a really long post. I wonder what it was about?)

RE: "Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

digger,
What it is all about is not nearly as important as the fact that jmw got it off his chest.  Whew!!
Of course we can all empathize.

Jesus is THE life,
Leonard

RE: "Your new Pet: his care and feeding"

Let us praise Sir Humphrys -Huzza, Huzza, Huzza!!  He is a truly fine role model for any engineer to follow.

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