About two months into the MBA program, I have finally completed my research about the origins of management and related subjects! Intensive research (based on primary and secondary data) has revealed to me the source and the underlying philosophy behind management subjects. Here is my analysis for you all (before I send it to the Harvard Business Review for publishing).
Seven Facts about Management, Uncovered!
- In 1945 when the Nazi regime was about to come to an end, a decision was taken by the Nazis to keep their propaganda alive in the form of Management Education. Management education was designed by them to promote hatred. “With every lecture they should hate their teachers, with every assignment they should hate their group mates, and with every result declaration they should hate themselves!” These were the words of the Fuehrer himself. The underlying mission was to create an army of hateful drones to massacre all art and creativity on the planet. Their legacy lives on.
- In 1963 a bunch of nerds with zero social acceptance, decided to become ‘cool’ by developing an alien language. However when development began, they realised that none of them had an ounce of creativity in them to carry out such a feat. They therefore decided to incorporate what they understood rather well, into the language: numbers! The resulting ‘alien language with numbers’ became an instant hit all across the world and is now globally recognized as ‘Finance’.
- In 1965 an Arab-American boy who was a descendent of a long line of Persian Alchemists from the medieval age, was challenged by his American friends to bring them a fragment of the ‘Philosopher’s stone’. They threw cow excreta at him and asked him to make gold out of it. Enraged, the boy returned to his motherland to find the stone. Within two years the boy returned to America with the stone which could convert bullshit into gold. However, to maintain anonymity and for his own safety he renamed the stone as ‘Marketing’.
- The average number of brain cells used by a management student during a lecture is 35. This number is slightly higher than the number of brain cells used by a coma patient in a minute. This is also 2 more than the number of members of All India Tusshar Kapoor Fan Club.
- ‘Deception 101’ is a subject secretly taught to all management faculties as an integral part of their job training. “The idea is to see how well the students deal with deception” A renowned education expert says. “The faculty would ask the students not to cram and then judge them only on cramming skills. The students would be asked not to attend the lectures if they aren’t interested, but if they skip a lecture they are ******! It’s a part of their training for the corporate world.”
- Around 1990s Neo Nazi organizations over the world realised that in spite of the effectiveness of the Nazi propaganda, people still appeared to be satisfied with work. Detailed marketing research revealed that this was due to ‘Hope’ that people had. In order to make their Pandora’s box full proof by destroying all hope, they created a sophisticated hope squishing instrument called ‘Human Resources Management’
- The greatest management research company in the world is ‘The Carlsberg Group’ which empowers and enables young and inexperienced researchers like yours truly to accomplish great tasks of uncovering some of the deadliest secrets in history.
Some professors make you believe in magic. Every word they utter sounds like a sleeping curse. You keep trying to fight that overwhelming urge to sleep. If you fail, you’re promptly kicked out of the class. This blog is an account of the brave souls who fight off these spells for as long as three hours at a time, without a splash of water or a trace of fresh air. This blog is a tutorial and an inspiration for the others.
Seven Things People Do to Stay Awake in a Lecture
- Write frantically: Keep pushing that pen without a pause. Use the pen like it’s a lifeline keeping you alive. Write everything on the board, the projector and every syllable the faculty speaks. Here is an excerpt from my notes in a lecture. ( ..This determines the need for HR policies...now....can anyone tell me how the awareness of these is important? Anyone? You there? Can you answer? I’m talking to you....stop writing and answer me you idiot!)
- Resort to art: People start sketching subconsciously in their notebooks. Women end up decorating their alphabets with twisty, curly tails, drawing sketches of leaves and veiled village girls. Guys usually draw living beings out of basic geometric shapes (two circles for eyes, triangle for a nose and circles and rectangles for a variety of other human body parts) the more artistic ones draw Wagon-Rs that look like bat-mobiles and Mickey Mouse flying an F-16 with a cockpit smaller than his head.
- Eye jack: People strain very hard to keep their eyes open and in the process end up looking super interested. If you’re a teacher and if your class has their eyes popping out, you’ve either had a wardrobe malfunction or you’ve just bored them into a coma.
- Survival games: Try to hold your breath till your teacher utters 50 words. If your face turns red and sweaty, you may even be excused from the class. Count your yawns per minute (My record is 5) count your friends’ yawns per minute. Count the number of yawns you can squeeze in between your friend’s yawns.
- Manual goading: Do the following in the ascending order of desperation. Rub your eyes, break your knuckles, stretch your back, scratch the back of your head, drill your nostrils, pinch your cheeks, bite your thumbs, slap yourself hard on the cheek, slam your head against the desk, stab your pen into your thigh, choke yourself.
- Bend Physical Rules: Go quantum mechanical. Try and bend time and space. Tilt your head at weird angles to see new dimensions and planes. Keep trying to fold time and space and glance at the watch every three seconds to see if has clocked an extra second. Experience Doppler Effect (periodic intensification and numbing of sound) in spite of the source and the listener both remaining stationary. If your teacher is really good, you’ll even be able to see subatomic particles being flushed out of your brain and flowing out of the window.
- Write a blog about staying awake in class.
It takes about a month of working, on an average, to realise the fact that ‘managerial motivation’ is an oxymoron. I would however give full marks to managers (and bosses in general) for persistence. They never stop motivating you to work harder. A manager, who stops motivating, is like a shark that stops swimming; both are bound to drown. It takes some time however to figure that a manager is the devil’s messenger and the sweet message he has for you is nothing but a curse, gift wrapped in jargon by demons. Here are some of the most inspirational quotes (at face value) from managers. Most of them are original and authentic.
Seven Most Inspirational Quotes by Managers
- “As human-resources, we must focus less on our humanness and more on our resourcefulness.”
- “There is tremendous growth possible in the project. There are huge opportunities. It’s just that you won’t see them.”
- “You are unhappy because you are unable to align your personal aspirations with your company’s objectives. Alignment is the key to happiness.” (If this makes sense to you, think about it for a while. You’ll get the cruel joke.)
- Encouraging a programmer to document the beautiful piece of code he’s written: “I gave you good work and you did it well. Now I’m giving you horrible work and dare you do it horribly!” ( Drocumint virgeon 1.0 usar giude.....)
- “Under me you’ll have a lot of freedom, provided we have a good understanding of each other. You can do whatever you want. Heck, if we share a good rapport, I’ll even let you resign!”
- “You have been doing so exceptionally well that I can’t evaluate your performance just on the basis of the work you’ve done, anymore.” (True story!)
- The most inspirational managerial quote however, to this day, remains a gem from Scott Adams. Pointy Haired Boss shows his subordinates a picture of his breakfast, bacon and eggs, and tells them “While the chicken contributed, it was the pig that was truly committed.”
Blogs usually bore me to death. Most blogs are a display of ‘grandiloquence’ starting right from their titles (Incoherent Confluence, Myriad Musings etc. ...all of which could easily be replaced by: Yawn!), and are usually too long or uninteresting to hold one’s attention. However, realising the social need for having one’s own blog, I have decided to give it a shot anyway. Now since most blogs have only one reader, the blogger himself, I have decided to lower the standards of this blog to suit that reader. I shall keep it short and say not more than seven things at a time.
Seven Reasons Why I Started This Blog
- My marketing professor likened me to P.G. Wodehouse after I wrote a 43 words long sentence for his report which didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
- I have found a collection of old MAD magazines from where I can lift jokes for this blog.
- To demonstrate my creativity. (Please notice the seven exclamation marks after ‘Seven Things’)
- To recycle my old jokes and ideas into a new format. (Be patient! The six-pack-abs jokes will come in a few days)
- To replace ‘Blood Donation’ from my hobbies, on my resume, with ‘Writing’. (I just realised that blood donation is a little painful and a little stupid to write off as a hobby.)
- To have something to do online other than ‘liking’ people’s Farmville stories on Facebook.
- I actually wanted to make it 10 things, but can’t think of 3 more reasons.
