The Diary of a Reluctant Management Consultant

No, really, just stop

It has come to my attention that this month is interim performance appraisal month. I became aware of it when I received an invitation to my interim performance appraisal meeting. We all know your rating was already decided weeks ago, after you finished some random task or said something irrelevant in a meeting that either made your boss think you’re the company champion or the fifth floor’s village idiot.

But of course, just deciding on an employee’s rating would be terribly unfair. More efficient and perhaps more honest, but supposedly very unfair. So it’s important to gather subjective, immaterial and uncorrelated supporting evidence in order to justify the manager’s off-the-cuff evaluation of your performance. And this week I came across a rather novel way of doing that. It’s rather obviously called “Stop, Start and Continue”

Now, “Stop, Start and Continue” could easily be mistaken for the name of Alfa Romeo’s Motorplan (it runs for the first 10,000km or three months, whichever comes first or unless the gearbox falls off, in which case the motorplan is invalidated – hey, it’s your fault for buying an Alfa), but it also happens to be a very quick and easy way of evaluating employee performance. Why send out links to expensive performance management web sites, complicated Excel spreadsheets for capturing 360 degree feedback or asking people to complete a self-evaluation (an entertaining way to see just how deluded some colleagues can be)? All you need to do is send out a brief e-mail to superiors, peers and minions of the person being evaluated and ask them to list what the person should stop doing, start doing and continue doing, all for the purpose of learning, growth and weeding out the idiots.

To save you some time and attention, I’ve listed a few choice selections of what to answer if you’re lucky enough to be asked to participate in a friendly game of “Stop, Start and Continue”.

Stop

• Asking what Jack Welch would do.
• Pressing ‘Alt’ and ‘Tab’ every time someone passes your desk; we know you’re surfing the net and the fake budget spreadsheet from 2007 isn’t fooling anyone.
• Please.

Start

• Practicing higher standards of personal hygiene; there’s a reason why no one’s inviting you meetings and it’s not because “we’ve run out of chairs again”.
• Subscribing to those online recruitment web sites… I’m not saying anything but they might come in handy after we replace you with a macro in Excel.
• Working – a novel way to earn a salary and perhaps even a bonus as opposed to whining every year that you’re underpaid and the only bonus you got was an accidental extra helping of bolognaise at the canteen!

Continue

• Coming to work earlier and earlier and leaving later and later till you eventually leave before you arrive. We will interpret this as commitment, but will mark you down for having poor work/life balance
• Falling asleep at your desk. We all have a good laugh when you deny it, even though we can see the impression your keyboard has made on your cheeks. Also, it’s a mousepad, not a droolpad.
• Bringing donuts to Monday’s weekly progress meeting in a vain attempt to curry favour, when we all know you haven’t done anything since last week’s progress meeting you work-shy lazy bastard

Wanted for facepainting

I’m finding it very difficult to get anything useful done at the office. And seeing that I bill by the hour, this is proving to be as annoying as a VIP convoy bludgeoning its way through peak hour traffic (being late for a soccer game isn’t an emergency). Team members are taking leave every second day to watch soccer games, attendance at my meetings is falling as people leave work early, despite me offering to brand only three people per meeting as work-shy lazy bastards (WLBs) and those that do make it to the meetings arrive late, offering flimsy excuses like “We were stuck in traffic”. Apparently, while stuck in traffic this group of WLBs were attacked by a gang of Argentineans fans who mercilessly painted the Argentinean flag on their faces. Given this complete abandonment of responsibility, I’ve decided to exact my own revenge as only a reluctant management consultant can. So, here are my Top Ten Ways to Annoy Soccer Fans at Work:

The vuvuzela - the reason why I'll be taking a pair of ear plugs and a taser to the World Cup games

I have no doubt that many of you dear readers are serious-minded, rational, focused businessmen and women that are finding this whole World Cup thing to be a distraction at best and an immense productivity drain at worst. If you went to the bank at 15:00 last Friday afternoon, I doubt you would have found anyone to greet you, let alone help you. Now, I know that this is very similar to your usual Friday afternoon banking experience, but look on the bright side, at least the queues were shorter. FIFA and the South African government assure us that the World Cup isn’t just some frivolous soccer tournament meant to fill the coffers of FIFA and the South African government, but rather it will be a boon to the local economy. So far all the economic benefits that I’ve seen are the following:

• If there is one thing overseas visitors are going to remember about South Africa is that innocuous looking plastic horn called the vuvuzela. They will remember it because it will be the cause of their inevitable deafness. The urge to support your team with a monotone vuvuzela drone will have certainly put some money in the pockets of horn manufacturers, traffic light vendors and ear specialists.
• An unintended consequence of the vuvuzela is the rocketing demand for ear plugs. My local chemist is sold out, but fortunately my armed cousin tells me a little known secret: gun shops and shooting ranges still have stock. Another unintended, but fortunate consequence of our high crime rate.
• Face paint manufacturers from China are smiling simply because there are six different colours in the South African flag. That’s a lot of face paint. Don’t forget, for large surfaces, use a roller. The global supply of orange face paint is also finished as the Dutch have bought it all.
• I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the enormous benefit that the five, spectacular new stadiums will bring to the country. We’ve already managed to squeeze out a couple of National Geographic “Megastructures” programs. And let’s not forget the hundreds of Rands to be made from the cable car going over the Moses Mabhida Stadium. It remains to be seen if Africa’s Big Five will now include a few white elephants.
• Vast improvements have been made to our roads. Some of these improvements include fixing them, as opposed to just putting up a sign that warns of pot holes. Previously the average Joburger would be frustrated in just three lanes of stagnant traffic. But thanks to the upgrading of the highways we can now be frustrated in four lanes of stagnant traffic.
• Tourism dollars are pouring in! We fully expect the number of tourists to be attacked by wildlife to increase. Just because you saw the Lion King doesn’t mean real lions are as wise and as well spoken as Mufasa. They’ll still eat you… as they did the Taiwanese tourist from a couple of years back, who stepped out of his vehicle to give his wife a biscuit!
• 20,000 people at the Sandton fan park – that’s a lot of portable toilets! Turns out there’s money to be made in poo!
• Thanks to World Cup, economists are being kept busy, desperately trying to calculate the economic benefits of the World Cup.

South Africa, found rather cunningly at the southern end of Africa

With only four sleeps to go until the start of the Soccer World Cup, tourists from all over the world are making their way to South Africa, eager to follow their teams through this beautiful country of ours. But South Africa is not your regular, run-of-the-mill-we-have-public-transport-and-electricity countries. So, as a service to all the visitors arriving this week, here are my top tips for the month ahead:

• The name of our country, South Africa, is quite a clever little clue indicating exactly where you can find us, i.e. the southern bit of Africa. This tip is particularly for the American I met on the plane in February who, when I said I was from South Africa wanted to know “so, where in Africa would I find that?” The southern part, I believe.
• South Africa is a big country, roughly about three times the size of Germany. We have game parks the size of England. Thus, our cities aren’t all within an hour’s driving distance. In fact, with the traffic, even the cities that are within an hour’s driving distance aren’t an hour apart!
• It’s winter in South Africa. Most photographs or short, promotional videos of South Africa always have us basking in the African sunshine, frolicking in oceans and barbecuing with people of different races. This is true for most of the year, but winter here can actually be quite cold. It snows in certain parts and the mercury drops to below freezing in several places, particularly overnight. So, if you’re going to an evening game in Johannesburg or even worse, Bloemfontein, you may want to wear something warm, unless you’re from Yorkshire, in which case a t-shirt will suffice.
• As private vehicles will be prevented from accessing the stadia (or ‘stadiums’ if you went to a government school), you will need to take a “park ‘n ride” bus or a minibus taxi to get to the game. Public transport here is not quite as organised as you might find it in your home country, so please do not be perturbed if your bus is late or if your taxi drives up a one way, hooting annoyingly at all the cars driving in the opposite, but correct, direction. Rather conveniently though, taxis will stop to pick you up on the side of a five lane highway.
• When South Africans tell you we have robots at every major intersection, it’s not that we’ve automated everything, it’s because we call traffic lights ‘robots’. We don’t know why either. They don’t normally work.
• ‘Now’, ‘just now’ and ‘now now’ are all used interchangeably, and contrary to what you might think, none of them mean ‘immediately’ but rather refer to some arbitrary time in the future, anywhere between now and next Thursday.
• Beware soccer hooligans: the South African Police does not have a reputation for having a kind and caring approach for dealing with unruly behaviour. They have guns and use them regularly, sometimes even for police-related matters.
• South Africa’s real treasure is that great man Nelson Mandela. If you’d like to take in some of Nelson Mandela’s “Madiba Magic”, please feel free to take Nelson Mandela Drive, go across the Nelson Mandela Bridge, shop at Nelson Mandela Square, visit Nelson Mandela Bay and catch a show at the Nelson Mandela Theatre.
• We use the metric system, so please beware. When the speed limit on highway says 120, that’s kilometres per hour rather than miles per hour. We also drive on the right side of the road, i.e. the left, unless of course you’re in the aforementioned minibus taxi in which case you might find yourself going at 120 miles per hour on the wrong side of the road. Welcome to South Africa. Please enjoy your stay!