Copyright © 1994 and beyond, Ethan A. Winning, All Rights Reserved
While y'all are attending another personnel convention at company expense, I've spent the day actually the whole week mulling over this personnel consultant's career since the last convention I went to...ASPA's conference in St. Louis in 1976!
It's been a week of random thoughts... my three-dot musings.
So, I've written down some of my haphazard thoughts like, why is abbreviation such a long word? And, why do assets have to equal liabilities? Does double-entry bookkeeping mean keeping two sets of books?
I just spoke with my daughter who is an advertising manager in the entertainment industry. I told her that her mother and I had gone to see the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Francisco, and she asked, "Is that a band?" (When did I lose her? Is she the only one I lost? Should I use smaller words? If it is as it seems that some of us are indeed doomed to repeat history, is there any particular part we can skip over?)
Are there any offramps on the information highway or just dips? If so, if I get off one ramp too soon, will I miss anything? Will I know that I missed it? I am, at this very moment, sitting at a desk with more than a dozen computer software catalogues which came in this week's mail. Can I get into heaven if I don't understand what a buss terminal is? (I figure that anything called a terminal must be the end of the line, so why bother?) I don't do Windows, still stuck in DOS, and the only CDs I understand have elevator music and jazz on them. If CD ROMS are so popular why are encyclopedias and other reference books still best sellers?
Why, when a client asks a question about firing an individual, and I give him an answer that saves him $10,000, I can only charge him for the two minutes it took to answer rather than the twenty years it took to find that answer?
Why is cultural diversity so hot in HR today? We've been diverse for a hundred years, and we're just beginning to notice? Why are most of the experts in cultural diversity WASPS? What matters at work is what people bring to the work from the neck up that is relevant to the job. Recommending a lunch in the company cafeteria of a corned beef sandwich with mayonnaise, black-eyed peas, a pickle, and sorbet - now, that's culturally diverse! It's also enough to put you off your feed for a month.
It seems that everyone wants to be empowered, and there are even a few who have talked about the democratization of business. What would happen if corporate America became a democracy - other than the fact that there'd only be a 30 percent voter turnout? Walt Kelly ( Pogo ) would be proved right again: We have met the enemy and he is us. Imagine a company of 300 presidents and no employees!
Lotsa folk are also talking about flattening the organization. Whole issue of Business Week dedicated to it. Waste of time. So IBM will be down to 5,000 employees by the year 2000. Then, in 2001, someone says, I need an assistant! And, in 2002, IBM has 75,000 employees! Happens in cycles every time we go through layoffs....I mean, downsizing.
Will the year 2000 take a comma? That's the way it was printed in the Journal. Then why isn't this 1,994?
Why do the contents of the brochure from the 1994 personnel convention look just like contents of the 1976 convention? (Why does the St. Louis Gateway Arch give me half a Big Mac attack?) In The Spirit of '76 Convention (catchy, wasn't it?) we talked about managing automation. I see we're still talking about it, only this time it's about computers. I would have thought that a seminar on managing robots would now be in order.
I like the title of one session, Are You Still Rolling Stones Up the Hill? No Sisyphus, I gave up rolling stones years ago. In fact, my subscription ran out in 1980. Actually, I had my subscription taken away from me when I was caught with an unwrapped Neil Sedaka album.
Dan Rostenkowski has had to resign from the House Ways and What Do You Mean Committee and faces charges of minor corruption in the House of Representatives. Bemoans The Wall Street Journal, he will be missed since he was one of the few that could get things done in the House and would certainly be a moving force in pushing through the President's health care reform program. So, (1) howcum there's only one session on National Health Reform at the convention, (2) isn't ethics in government and business a bigger issue than this fifth attempt in forty years at health care reform, and (3) how is it that my spell checker accepts Rostenkowski, but doesn't "recognize" Clinton?
I also was intrigued by the session called, How to Survive Retirement, a three-hour discourse on 401(k)s, 403(b)s; IRAs, and that sort of stuff. What they should have had was an all-day meeting on How to Survive Until Retirement.
By the end of the week, my ruminations were turning toward the really mundane, i.e., semi-personnel personal stuff. I just got a letter from a dissatisfied reader of my book, Common Sense Employer-Employee Relations. The writer called the material, Chicken S___! Does this mean that I finally win the highest of all literary awards, The Pullet Surprise? Do I respond to that letter? Do I say that her analysis is bull, thereby taking this to a higher, heavier level? Nah... I've got better things to do...like finishing my next book, A Picture Book for Critics of My First Book.