Stories and suggestions culled from around the world. Function of the Executive
As nearly everyone knows, an executive has practically nothing to do except to decide what is to be done; to tell somebody to do it; to listen to reasons why it shouldn’t be done, why it should be done by somebody else, or why it should be done in a different way; to follow up to see if the thing has been done; to discover that it has not; to inquire why; to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; to follow it up again to see if the thing has been done; only to discover that it has been done incorrectly; to point out how it should have been done; to conclude that as long as it has to be done, it may as well be left where it is; to wonder if it is not time to get rid of a person who cannot do anything right; to reflect that he probably has a wife and a large family, and that certainly any successor would be just as bad, and maybe worse; to consider how much simpler and better it would have been if one had done it oneself in the first place; to reflect sadly that one could have done it right in twenty minutes, and, as things turned out, one has to spend two days to find out why it has taken three weeks for somebody else to do it wrong.
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The manager of a large office noticed a new man in his office one day and told him to come into his office. “What is your name?” was the first thing the manager asked the new guy.
“John”, the new guy replied.
The manager scowled, “Look…I don’t know what kind of a mamby-pamby place you worked before, but I don’t call anyone by their first name. It breeds familiarity and that leads to a breakdown in authority. I refer to my employees by their last name only… Smith, Jones, Baker… that’s all. I am to be referred to only as Mr Robertson. Now that we got that straight, what is your last name?”
The new guy sighed, “Darling. My name is John Darling.”
“Okay John, the next thing I want to tell you is…
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Businessmen regularly have to deal with lawyers and sometimes the imbecility of the sharpest legal minds cannot be underestimated. Take this story for example.
A defending attorney was cross-examining a coroner. The attorney asked, “Before you signed the death certificate had you taken the man’s pulse?”
The coroner said, “No.”
The attorney then asked, “Did you listen for heart beat?” “No.”
“Did you check for breathing?” “No.”
“So when you signed the death certificate you had not taken any steps to make sure the man was dead, did you?”. The coroner, by now tired of the browbeating said, “Well, let me put it this way. The man’s brain was sitting in a jar on my desk, but for all I know he could be out there practicing law somewhere”. To describe a person who is totally inept, I most enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever.
Οne man explaining to another why he fired his secretary. “Two weeks ago”, he said, “it was my fifty-fifth birthday and I wasn’t feeling too hot that morning after I came h home from my long run. I went to the breakfast table knowing my wife would be pleasant and say Happy Birthday and probably have a present for me. She didn’t even say Good Morning let alone say Happy Birthday. I said, ‘Well, that’s wives for you. The children will remember’. The children, who were still living at home, came down for breakfast and didn’t say a word. When I started for the office I was feeling pretty low and despondent. As I walked into my office, Janet said, ‘Good Morning, boss. Happy Birthday’. I felt a little better now that someone had remembered. I worked until noon. About noon. Janet knocked on my door and said, ‘You know, it’s such a beautiful day outside and it’s your birthday, let’s go to lunch- just you and me’. I said, ‘By George that’s the greatest idea I’ve heard all day. Let’s go. We went to lunch. We didn’t go to the usual place. We went out to the country to a little private place on Lake Travis. We had two drinks and enjoyed lunch tremendously. On the way back to the office she said, ‘You know, it’s such a beautiful day. We don’t need to hurry back to the office, do we?’ I said, ‘I guess not. She said, ‘Let’s stop by my apartment and I will fix you another drink since it is your birthday’. We went to her apartment. We enjoyed another drink. She said, ‘Boss, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go into the bedroom and slip into something more comfortable’. I said I wouldn’t mind at all. She went into the bedroom for five or six minutes and came out carrying a big birthday cake followed by my wife and kids all singing Happy Birthday”, and I sat there with nothing on but my socks.”
