I hope by now I'm succeeding in using my "Little World" experiences to amplify my thoughts on the "Big World" problems we are all facing together. That's the plan, anyway.
As fate and the gods of workday drudgery would have it, this is an opportune time to slip back to the micro level after a couple of more theoretical blog entries.
I work in the creative department of Harrah's Corporate in Las Vegas. It's called Studio One. We produce countless posters, billboard designs, slot toppers, ads, radio bites and on and on for our various casinos all in the name of converting more people to gambling and making sure the ones already sucked in stay for a long ride. This is not the noblest vocation to which I've applied my writing skills. But I think I've made that clear before.
Putting aside, for one moment, the ends to which our work is applied, Studio One (or, simply, The Studio) produces some fine stuff. We're also asked to do a lot of cheesy, crass and exploitive stuff.
For most of us, it's just a job and we dream of using our creative skills in more rewarding pursuits. However, Harrah's, like most big corporations, seems hell bent (yes, that would definitely be the phrase!), on turning The Studio into some kind of production line/sweatshop.
Why do I say this? Because, just as in the cult comedy "Office Space," Harrah's has "brought in the Bobs" (see movie still above). "The Bobs," for those of you who haven't seen the movie, (I insist that you do! :-), is slang for consultants.
Now, every place I have worked where consultants have been brought in, two things have happened as a result: 1/ There were staff cuts; 2/ People mysteriously ended up working harder. (Oh, and there's usually some musical chairs between positions accompanied by a bunch of meaningless title changes.) Why has Harrah's brought in consultants (some nasty outfit called Kaizen)? Well, in the name of "efficiency" of course.
"Efficiency" is corporatespeak for cutting costs to the bone and working people like mules. For squeezing the blood out of everyone. For placing unreasonable demands on folks. For jackhammering the profit margin just a little bit wider.
So these wizards came in and lassoed our sorry group of supervisors (mostly yes men/women) and brainwashed them with wonderful tales of "hard data" and enticed them to play serious executive development games with blocks (no kidding) and all that good stuff. The usual quasi-psychobabble these quarterwits come up with. (Incidentally I know what went on because, surprise surprise, there are very few secrets in Office Land. People always spill their guts sooner or later.)
Next, The Studio's fearless leader (we'll call him Tom -- not his real name. His real name is Chris) reported back from one his serious sessions with The Bobs, dragging behind him the largest, most incomprehensible (that's never an accident!), pair of workflow charts I have ever seen. Santa Loveman's elves had been busy indeed. I'll spare you the details of the nonsense explanations that went on when these Picasso-vomit nightmares were presented to the whole Studio.
More at the nut of all this is the "hard data" thing. You see, consultants deal in numbers: dollars, seconds, widgets churned out, "excess" personnel. They're like mathematician wannabes with a perverse fascist streak. Most of them are dorks -- but their vocation is actually very dangerous for the average worker and they should not be dismissed out of hand. They are dorks who can make a mess of people's lives.
The Kaizen dorks' pursuit of numbers, of "hard data," led to them having some of our people follow their colleagues around with stopwatches and clipboards, noting down everything they did. I won't say "Hey, you can't make this stuff up" because you could: if you were twisted and boring enough. But this, to many of us, was an inappropriate, insulting, and rather dehumanizing state of affairs. Nobody has come near me with a stopwatch yet and if they do it may be their last act on this mortal coil.
So the question presents itself: Where is the acknowledgment of the "soft" data? The human factor? The stress? The mental wear and tear? For the message I'm inferring from "The Bobs" is loud and clear: We will work out the formula by which you work hardest, produce the most (what about quality? Oops, not quantifiable), and get the big boys the max dollars. It's already started: People are disappearing and our hours are lengthening -- and the hardcore Bob Plan isn't even in place yet.
Clearly this will all lead to low morale and burnout. (That's happening already too.) But in an employers' market (technically, it's virtually always an employers' market) it's easy to push us hard, burn us out, let us go, and replace us with some college grads who will work for peanuts.
As thinking and creative beings, we, like so many others in so many places, are being shoveled into the furnace of devolution. And the fundamental notion of respect for one's fellow humans gets tossed right in there with it.
Unions are almost extinct and the 40-hour week has gone with them. Workers in the Information Age are becoming regarded less as people, arguably, than any time since the Industrial Revolution. (Okay, that would take some explaining but I think there's a very good case to be made.)
It reminds me of that well-known line from the film "Network," when Peter Finch, playing the mad newscaster who comes clean, screams out: "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Of course that was only a movie. But something in my skull tells me that the day when the "average person" is fed up, en masse, is fast approaching. And they will not love Big Brother.
Gone over my limit. Apologies, apologies.
Adrian Zupp
PS: A quote I once saw: "A consultant is someone you pay for their opinion." 'Nuff said.
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