Savage Chickens by Doug Savage for March 01, 2016
February 29, 2016
March 02, 2016
Transcript:
I want you to start a committee to plan the development of proposals for potential efficiency improvement initiatives.
Ahh. Administrative obfuscation at its finest. You have three options in this case:
1) Meet and generate verbiage that is equally as muddled as the purpose statement of the committee. This won’t take long and you might be able to write off a free lunch for it. Use this option in the event that the boss simply wants to say he’s doing something about some imaginary problem he’s been tasked to look into.
2) Meet once and generate muddled verbiage that sounds like you are working on it. Then don’t meet anymore. Do this in the event that the assignment was actually just a wild hair that the boss will probably forget about tomorrow. If he never says anything more about it, this strategy paid off. If he says something later about it in following up, then hand him the verbiage you generated from the one meeting that you had and tell him that you are getting together soon to firm up your ideas.
3) If you actually want to accomplish something, then take it upon yourself to clarify what the boss wants you to do, and accomplish what you want to with it. If what you end up doing is agreeable to your boss, odds are that the boss will be so impressed with what you did with “his idea” even though it was completely different than what he originally wanted that you might be able to get some career0enhancing leverage out of it. If what you do isn’t agreeable to your boss, then it’s probably agreeable to his boss, and you can probably still get some kind of win out of it.