By: Einsteinlite

Bonjour Laziness is a funny little book. It’s a laugh out loud book really, at least for the nonconformists out there who have ever had the pleasure of working for a megalithic Corporation. If you’re a guy who jumps up and salutes during the pledge of allegiance or has never missed Church or at forty still wears his high school jacket, this book probably isn’t for you. If you’re like the guy in Office Space who wears all his pins and delights in torturing others, you too will miss the point. For those with an inkling toward rebellion, who skipped their high school prom, got caught smoking in the boys room or delight in impersonations of their pea brained manager, this pamphlet will have you howling. I will stick with my recent strategy of giving a 21st-century version of Cliff’s Notes followed by a bit of commentary. If you don’t want to read this book after browsing the outline, then you should start your education with the film “Rebel Without a Cause” and report back to me later.

I. Introduction: Business is not Humanistic

A) Am I making fun of Business – yes!
B) Corporate World shrouded in mystery
C) Collapse of Vivendi, Enron, Lucent, Global Crossing etc…
D) Layoffs at AT&T, Lucent, Daimler, Chrysler, Oracle
E) “Darlings, please promise never, ever, to work in business when you grow up. Daddy and Mommy would be so disappointed!”
F) Go for the Arts, Sciences, Teaching
G) Undermine the system from within
H) A New Way of Reading Tea Leaves
1) Reverse the signs
2) Follow a circular reasoning
3) Detect the idiocy of lies
4) Do a reality check
5) Put things in perspective

I) Warning: If You Are An Individualist Walk On By

II. Business Speaks an Incomprehensible No-Man’s-Language

A) Hello Gibberish
B) Michel Houellebecq quote
C) Make the simple sound complicated
D) Choose vocabulary that sounds important
E) Joseph Goebbels quote
F) Jargonism in management blood
G) Acronyms: A Thicket, A Wilderness, Nay, a Veritable Labyrinth
H) Speak in contractions for a sense of belonging
I) Show importance is vital to the firm without generating work
J) Adopt American buzzwords
K) Platitudes Aplenty
L) Empty phrases and nonsense

III. The Dice Are Loaded

A) Say that you love your work
B) They Tell You to Succeed
C) Acquire status symbols and gadgets
D) Clothes are very important
E) Power Struggles: Watch Your Back
1) Circumvent employee rights at every turn
2) Psychological harassment
3) Quotes philosopher Rene Girard
4) Off with the heads of Chief Executives
F) Degrees and Diplomas: Or, How To Make Paper Airplanes
1) Corporations grant privilege of working
2) Hannah Arendt quote
3) Middle management performs only mindless routines
4) Quote from Laurent Laurent Book
G) Employment and Employability: Knowing How To Brand And Sell Oneself
1) Only downward mobility now
2) Unemployment your own fault
3) Work – what for?
4) Not what you know, but what you are
5) Makes fun of pompous guru Tom Peters
6) Marketing – convince people to buy useless stuff they don’t want
7) Make bogus look authentic
8) The Defeat of the Word
H) Business communication a one way street
I) Words are inconsequential
J) Unions irrelevant
K) The Planned Obsolescence of the Worker
L) Use naïve youth
M) Fifty year olds – Out!
N) Eliminate opposition of older workers
O) Aging society a powder keg

IV. The Biggest Rip-offs

A) Mobility: Journey to the End of Your Career
B) Francois Salvaing quote
C) Human Capital bought and sold
D) Mobility essential
E) Corporate Culture: Culture, My Ass!
1) Business disdains culture
2) Crystallization of stupidity
3) Create the lie of a Big Family
F) Ethics, Schmethics
1) Clean consciences without scrubbing
2) The less one has the more one flaunts
3) The word manage infects everything
G) The Strategy: The Art of Appearing Smarter Than You Are
1) Strategy an empty term
2) Scott Adams reference
3) CEO’s idiotic decisions
H) New Information and Communications Technologies Are the Wave of the Future
1) Enrich only the computer sector
2) Abstrusive language of geeks

V. The Idiots You Rub Shoulders With

A) The Average Manager: Presentable and Preferably Male
1) No distinguishing features
2) Corporate world exclusive
3) No one hires a Jean Valjean
4) Minorities need not apply
5) No homos please
6) Women unrepresented
B) The Hollow Man(ager)
1) Title not a function
2) The more important the less work
3) At the top like Politicians
4) Quotes Rene-Victor Pilhes The Provocateur
5) Strip decisions of emotional components
C) Culture and the Manager: The Marriage of the Carp and the Hare
1) Read a few magazines and spew buzzwords
2) Examine nothing in depth
3) Managers completely uncultured
D) Engineers and Salesman: A Stalemate
1) Engineers funny unintentionally
2) Distrust of ‘literary’ daydreamers
3) Create problems to solve
4) Salesman pretentious idiots
E) The Consultant: It’s Always Insulting To Be Taken for a Jerk
1) Create useless graphs telling management what it wants to hear
2) Advisers serve no purpose except to standardize behavior
F) The Useless, the Submissive, and the Goof-Offs
1) Three types – sheep, pest, loafers
2) Sheep – no initiative weak inoffensive
3) Pests – wreak havoc cause nervous breakdowns
4) Loafers – avoid first two and do as little as possible
5) Lacan’s typology – the bastards, the cynics and the weaklings
6) The bastard exploits, the cynic makes others do his work, weaklings passive servile
G) People You’ll Never See
1) Dreams of Bernard Tapie and Jean-Marie Messier
2) Synergies a consultants wet dream
3) French consistently dazzled by charlatans

VI. Extra, Extra: Big Business is Doomed!

A) Flexibility is theft
B) Decentralized temporary workers
C) Boss paid to reorg
D) Change a chimera
E) Jettison factories fire employees
F) The more companies lose the more bosses gain
G) Two Modes of Discourse, Zero Brains
1) Obedience and freedom incompatible
2) A large company becomes a wooly mammoth
3) Paternalism and Amorality are the teats
4) Communist propaganda versus free market cool – both idiocies
5) The Spirit of Capitalism: Where Is It?
H) Meaningful job fallen by the wayside
I) Just consume mindlessly
J) Quotes Alexandre Kojeve
K) Meaninglessness as a Newly Discovered Universal Law
1) Business a universe of the absurd
2) Riot of useless paperwork
3) Quadruplicate duplication

VII. The New Economy: The Latest Flash in the Pan

A) Dot con generation
B) Enron WorldCom bankrupt
C) Whippersnappers got whippersnapped
D) Dream of easy money
E) Globalization: The Worm in the Apple
1) Sameness of everything
2) George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz defect from ranks

VIII. Why There’s No Risk in Disengaging Yourself

A) Passivity without risks
B) Work: No More Professions
1) Managers don’t know what they’re paid for
2) Superfluous tasks abound
3) Everyone sorts, classifies and produces paper
4) Customer service all do it yourself
C) No More Authority: Take Advantage of It
1) Consensus rules
2) Everyone agrees with boss’s lame opinion
3) Unanimity crystallized
4) Have meetings, meetings, meetings
5) Jeremy Bentham quote
6) Everyone fall in line
7) No More Work: A Godsend
8) France a country where nobody works
9) CEO of Air France doesn’t do a damn thing
10) The Art of Doing Nothing
11) Overworked laying it on thick
12) Stay late but do nothing
13) Always carry paper to appear busy
14) Manager averages 85 emails per day – most useless
15) Analogy from Albert Cohen’s classic novel

IX. Conclusion: Begin Your Sabotage Tomorrow

A) Become a parasite
B) Disengage
C) The Ten Commandments Imposed on the Middle Manager
D) My Ten Counterproposals

C.M. is a French woman and has obviously worked in a corporation from her beloved nation, but the modern conglomerate is the same whether in Rio, Berlin or Paris. The U.S. has spread its diseased hierarchy throughout the globe and anyone who has worked in such an institution instantly recognizes the boilerplate personality of the middle manager which Corinne loves to delineate. She pays particular attention to this uber-conformist. White, bland, unwilling to stir the pot even if to feed the masses, willing to step on anyone to save himself; this type must fall in line, knows nothing else, has been doing it since he tattled on the bad boys on the playground and gets his sense of belonging by puffing up his chest and saying Manager. The difference between a fascist blackguard and a corporate cad is only one of degree. You’ll instantly recognize these sellouts by their pressed shirts and dress slacks. They must separate themselves from the techies – who usually dress like they’re going to a cock fight – and the cheesy salesmen – who dress like politicians – all polish no substance. Like the gorilla on the savannah, they must show their position in the pecking order.

After spending quite a bit of time hammering middle management, Ms. Maier laughingly trudges through absurdity after absurdity in the bland buzzword filled non-culture of Big Business. Fitting in and not stirring the pot are the most important things. Attending a lot of meetings, carrying useless paper, talking the talk and walking the walk are very important. Very few people actually do anything (especially managers) so it’s essential that you appear as if you are busy so that when the layoffs come your head won’t meet the chopping block. The mantra is to keep the paycheck flowing with your head in the sand. Don’t make waves, don’t think outside the box, spew a lot of buzzwords like “thinking outside the box”, attend as many meetings as possible, carry lots of paper, notebooks and laptops and always be seen rushing down the hall. If you have a blackberry stay on it at all times especially when in the hallway to keep people from talking to you and also to appear very busy. Blackberries are an essential tool of uselessness. I wish I could tell you something in this book was wrong or hopelessly exaggerated or deliberately skewering something or someone without provocation, but I can’t; it’s all as true as Galileo’s observations. It’s just the facts Jack. I know, I worked twenty years in a corporation and this read instantly brought back visions of my old mannequin faced friends. I so love it when someone escapes the asylum and reveals to the world the true nut cases in all their delusional glory. If Franz Kafka were plucked from the grave, he would go apoplectic in fits of laughing hysteria at the absurdities institutionalized in the modern corp to the point of a stroke due to the short circuiting of his cock roach addled brain.

We could argue for a year whether the 20th-century corporation was a boon or a bust for society. The free market Republicans will laud the wonders of a Starbucks on every corner and a Walmart where you can buy a car battery and a loaf of bread on the same trip, not to mention a great AT&T which gives you cell phones where you can text your girlfriend while risking lives on the freeway. The loopy leftists will decry the pollution, global warming and increasing separation of rich and poor in a desperate global world. Of course, as in most things, the truth lies somewhere in the center. They’re both right; but even as I type, the corporations laid to waste in this book is crumbling like the portfolios of middle class Americans right before our bulging eyes. This book will soon be revered for nostalgia – for that wonderful time when four out of five thousand people employed in a Corporate Headquarters could literally be well compensated for doing nothing – just playing the game, strolling the stroll and miming management. Now cutthroat globalization is underway to the delight of the super rich as jobs are given to cheap, third-world desperados and all work is temporary and un-benefitted.

The soulless absurdities of the recent past seem positively idyllic in comparison. Some megaliths will take longer than others to adjust to this new world order, but those who hesitate will be lost. Corinne Maier will no doubt take some delight as middle managers are kicked to the curb and forced to find useful work and no doubt these n’eer-do-wells deserve it, but as ridiculous and fat as the corporate world had become at least paychecks were flowing and kids got fed (fat)– the future will offer neither of these. If you like Scott Adams and Dilbert or Beavis and Butthead or Office Space and Mike Judge or any of the old Monty Python skits, then this book is for you. Get it grab it love it.