New year, new rules

By Mary Helen Gillespie, 1/18/2005

Well, it's a new year, so time for some new rules. Here's your free guide to better management in 2005:

1. Effective immediately, the word "transparency" is banned from all communications because no one knows what the hell it means. Plus most users are pretending they went to Wharton when in fact these bombastic bozos couldn't find Philadelphia on a map. Are we clear on this? Be honest.

2. No more Blackberry-ing in the bathroom. Ever.

3. To that point, cease all multitasking. High-performance leadership is not rated by how many limbs and other body parts you can twirl around at the same time in different directions. You look like that guy with the plates and the sticks on the Ed Sullivan show. And your colleagues are sick of hearing thou whinest "Excuse me, what did you say?" every 10 minutes during conference calls and meetings because of the self-induced distractions of typing, talking, or tweezing in tandem with other tasks like, oh, say, eating or driving or both.

4. If you are ill, stay home. And stay quiet. The gurgling of phlegm through cube farms, headsets and speaker phones has now reached epidemic proportions. Ahem. Don't spew your cooties on the rest of us trying to stay healthy. Get under the covers and watch QVC until healed.

5. Whatever it is, yours is not the biggest. Quit the political mind games and just get the work done. Basically, this is addressed to those who cannot make a decision, create a policy, mitigate a risk or achieve a goal without plotting how many colleagues get knifed in the back during the process. Bonus points awarded for every vice president or higher on the org chart who gets whacked! Listen, every move you make does not have to come with an action plan and its own cost center. This is not being strategic. It is being stupid. Here's what happens: The really smart people get to drive the bus while the really dumb ones throw themselves underneath it. You may work for a Mickey Mouse company but you are not Michael Eisner. Please, stop the madness. Just do it.

6. Everybody knows that charges of anti-competitive business practices are code for "Our bid was rejected."

7. Anyone who admits to wearing Trump the Fragrance in the workplace gets fired.

8. Let's all agree to stop the big black hole of suck-up networking. Staring into the bloodshot eyes of a stranger trailing bad breath mixed with the cozy scent of mothballs is painful enough without realizing there are 20 more clones in the room that you have to pretend to like in the next hour. Just stick out your hand, give the 20-second elevator speech even though you are standing in the ballroom, offer a business card, ask for the other party to do the same and move on. No small talk. No cheesy remarks about the weather. Just get the basic contact information that needed to assess the value of this resource to your professional or personal value chain, and get back to work.

9. Lawyers are cool again. Let them back into the room. We could get away with it for awhile but until this Eliot Spitzer-rama thing shakes out, your attorney is now your best friend.

10. We must continue to pride ourselves on respecting the diversity of peers. Remember, there are many colors in that rainbow poster hanging on the HR wall. For instance, there's a fair amount of us out here who hate golf. It's a stupid game with a ball and a stick. And if you bore us to tears with tee talk, we can, we will and we do take our business somewhere else. Fairway is the new F word, ok?