Claw Your Way To The Top Read online

  Claw Your Way To The Top

  Dave Barry

  Dave Barry.

  Claw Your Way To The Top

  How To Become the Head of a Major Corporation In Roughly a Week

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Burton R. Legume, inventor, who in 1907 dreamed up the concept of the hold button, without which the modern industrial economy would not be possible.

  Introduction

  You And This Book

  Maybe you’re a young graduate looking for his or her first job. Or maybe you’re a veteran employee who’d like to advance up the corporate ladder. Or maybe you’re a Labrador retriever who nosed this book off the coffee table, and it fell open to this page.

  It makes no difference who you are: the important thing is, this book can show you how to ACHIEVE YOUR CAREER GOALS and WIN THE REWARDS OF SUCCESS such as CARS and HOUSES and GREAT BIG BOATS where, any time you feel like it, you press a little button and UNIFORMED SERVANTS FROM SOME DISEASE-RIDDEN FOREIGN NATION WHERE EVERYBODY IS WRETCHEDLY POOR WHICH IS WHY THEY CAME OVER HERE bring you PLATES OF LITTLE CRACKERS WITH TOASTED CHEESE ON TOP or, if you prefer, FALSTON-PURINA DOG TREATS.

  Today’s Business Climate

  Today’s business climate is partly cloudy with highs in the mid-70’s.

  Ha ha! That is just a sampler of the kind of snappy humor you will find throughout this book, along with a lot of words printed in capital letters to keep you from falling asleep. Actually, today’s business climate is perfect. It is a reaction against the violently antibusiness mood that swept the nation back in the sixties, when the young people of America, except for julie and David Eisenhower, decided to reject money as a life objective and became “hippies.” They scorned the corporate world, with its sterility, its greed, its exploitation, its conformity, its Xerox machines that were forever breaking down. They embarked instead upon a quest for a transcendent universal consciousness imbued with peace and love, which they sought to achieve by saying “dude” to members of minority groups and smoking reefers the size of marine flares.

  But gradually these young people realized they were paying a subtle price for their counterculture lifestyle, in the sense that they were always waking up in Volkswagen Microbuses with lice in their hair. So they decided that, hey, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to become a sterile conforming greedy exploiter after all, so they went to work for large corporations. Soon they developed children and houses and Volvos, and within a few years they had reached the point of central airconditioning, from which there is no turning back. Most of them can no longer locate their Grateful Dead albums.

  So now everybody except Ralph Nader is strongly pro-business. People who, only a few years back, would have hurled pig blood at Lee Iacocca for some symbolic protest reason or another now think he should run for president. What this means for you is: This is a GREAT TIME for you to get into business. And don’t worry about qualifications: ANYBODY can make it in the business world. All you really need is a little gumption, a willingness to work, some common sense, and a brother-in-law who is Vice-President in Charge of Personnel.

  Ha ha! Another business-related joke! This is gonna be some fun, getting you a job, all right!

  Step One: Setting Your Goals

  The first step toward your successful business career is to determine your Career Objectives. To do these things, you’ll need a nice sharp number-two pencil and some three-by-five cards. I’ll wait right here while you go get them, okay? I’ll meet you underneath the asterisks on the next page! Hurry back! This is going to be exciting!

  (Brief pause.)

  The point of the preceding paragraph, obviously, was to get rid of the totally hopeless dweebs who actually think they need three-by-five cards to determine their Career Objectives. These are the same people who you just know are going to write down things like:

  1. I would like to work with people.

  Which of course is a joke, because it is a proven fact that the more you work with people, the more you hate them. Look at the clerks at any big-city Bureau of Motor Vehicles: They work with people all day long, and their basic approach to human interaction is to make you wait in line as long as possible and then tell you you’re in the wrong line, in hopes that you’ll have a very painful and ultimately fatal seizure, and they’ll get to watch.

  So you savvy persons have ruled out “working with people” as a Career Objective. What you want, from your career, is a SENSE OF FULFILLMENT AS A HUMAN BEING and MAXIMUM PERSONAL SATISFACTION as measured in U.S. DOLLARS. You want a Rolex watch and numerous fast cars. You want employees so desperate for your approval that you could put your cigar out on their foreheads and they’d thank you. You want to be able to leave Supreme Court justices on “hold” for upwards of an hour. And you know that you do not get these things by diddling around with three-by-five cards.

  Welcome back! Got your cards? Great! Now first, I’d like you to write down, on each card, a Career Objective, such as “working with people.” Okay? I want you to do this until you have listed 800 Career Objectives—you might have to go get some more cards!—and then I want you to arrange them in order according to which objective contains the most vowels, okay? Great! We’re on our way! Call me when you’re done!

  Test Your Business I.Q.

  1. You are the world’s largest manufacturer of carbonated beverages, and you have a product that is famous worldwide, that is virtually synonymous with the term “soft drink,” and that has had the same formula for 99

  years. It has a very loyal following. You are making millions and millions of dollars selling it. You should:

  (a) just keep it the way it is.

  (b) Change the formula.

  (c) Set fire to your own hair.

  2. You are a major defense contractor, and you are building a gun for the Army that is supposed to be able to shoot down enemy planes. So far the taxpayers have paid you nearly $2 billion for it, and all your tests indicate that the only way it would have any negative effect on an enemy plane is if you could somehow sneak into the cockpit and manually whack the pilot over the head with it. How should you deal with this problem?

  (a) You should try really hard to do a better job.

  (b) You should tell the Defense Department that they probably should get another contractor.

  (c) You should refund at least some of the taxpayers’ money.

  3. You are a major automobile manufacturer. You have been losing sales to cars from other nations, particularly Japan, because their cars tend to be fuel efficient, technologically advanced, and extremely well made, whereas the most innovative concept you have come up with in the past two decades is the opera window. You should:

  (a) Have Congress pass a law restricting Japanese imports, so consumers will have no choice but to buy your cars.

  (b) Have Congress pass a law making it legal for you to kidnap consumers’ children and not return them until the consumers buy your cars.

  (c) Have Congress pass a law ordering the United States Army to barge directly into consumers’ homes and take their money at gunpoint and give it to you.

  (d) Remind everybody a lot about Pearl Harbor.

  4. You are in charge of a large department, and you have an opening for a supervisor. The two obviously best-qualified candidates are women who have worked in the department for the same amount of time. Both are intelligent, highly competent, and respected by the other employees. In every way they seem equally qualified, although it happens that one of them is black. What decision do you make?

  (a) You promote the black woman, on the theory that it will help compensate for past injustices.

  (b) You promote the white woman, on the theory that if you promote the black woman, peo
ple will say it was just because she’s black.

  (c) You flip a coin.

  HOW TO SCORE

  Give yourself one point for each close friend you have in the Personnel Department.

  Chapter One. The History Of Business

  When we look around us at the modern world, we see businesses everywhere, unless of course we happen to be, for example, in the bathroom. But even there, we see EVIDENCE of a thriving industrial economy, such as the Ty-D-Bowl automatic commode freshener. Sitting there and thinking about it, you have to marvel at the incredible creativity and diversity of the business world. Where did all of this come from? How did the human race get from the point of being primitive and stupid to the point where it could automatically, without lifting a finger, turn its toilet water blue? Let’s see if we can answer some of these questions. My guess is we can’t.

  The Very First Businesses

  Many, many years ago, there was no business on Earth. This is because the Earth was primarily molten lava, which is not a good economic climate. Office furniture would melt in a matter of seconds.

  Then the Earth started to cool, and tiny one-celled animals—the amigo, the paramedic, the rotarian—began to form. Over the course of several million years, these animals learned to join together to form primitive corporations, called “jellyfish,” which were capable of only the most basic business activities, such as emitting waste and eating lunch. By today’s standards, these corporations were very unsophisticated: if, for example, you mentioned the phrase “Dow Jones Industrial Average” to them, they would have no idea what you were talking about. They would probably sting you.

  Did Dinosaurs Have Businesses?

  Nobody can really say for sure, because the Ice Age destroyed all their records. But paleontologists now believe that, yes, dinosaurs probably did have businesses. Not the Brontosaurus, of course. That would be ridiculous. How would he hold his briefcase?

  But the Tyrannosaurus Rex has those funny little arms, which would have been perfect. Paleontologists think he was probably in Sales.

  Primitive Human Businesses

  When primitive humans first came along, they did not engage in business as we now think of it. They engaged in squatting around in caves naked. This went on for, I would say, roughly two or three million years, when all of a sudden a primitive person, named Oog, came up with an idea. “Why not,” he said, “pile thousands of humongous stones on top of each other in the desert to form great big geometric shapes?” Well, everybody thought this was an absolutely terrific idea, and soon they were hard at work. It wasn’t until several thousand years later that they realized they had been suckered into a classic “pyramid” scheme, and of course by that time, Oog was in the Bahamas.

  Business During The Middle Ages

  Business during the Middle Ages was slow. The main job opportunity available was serf, which involved whacking at the soil with a stick. It was not the kind of work where you had a lot of room for advancement. The best a serf could hope for, if he was really good at it, was that he would be rewarded by not having one of his arms sliced off by a passing knight.

  If you wanted to be a knight you had to know somebody, and it really wasn’t that much better than being a serf. You were always being sent off to try to get the Holy Land back from the Turks. This was no fun at all, because of course the Holy Land is very sunny, meaning your armor would get hot enough to fry an egg on. In fact the Turks, who dressed in light, casual, 100

  percent cotton garments, would often do this. They’d sneak up behind a knight and crack an egg on his armor, then race away, laughing in Turkish, before he could turn around. So as you can imagine, knights would come back in a pretty bad mood, and often would have to slice off several serf arms before they even wanted to talk about it.

  So the bottom line is that the Middle Ages were hardly the kind of ages where anybody wanted to make any long-term business commitments. All the really smart investors were waiting for the Renaissance.

  The Birth Of The Helicopter: The Renaissance

  The Renaissance was caused by Leonardo da Vinci, who drew the first primitive sketches of what would eventually become the helicopter. Of course, nobody really understood the significance of this at the time. But people did realize that, whatever this new invention was, it was going to require a tremendous amount of insurance. Thus a major business was born.

  This was followed by trade with the Orient. The way this worked was, Europeans would gather up some gold, and they would tromp across Asia to the Orient, where they would trade their gold for spices. They didn’t really want spices, you understand, but the Orientals claimed that spice was all they had, and the Europeans, having tromped all that way, wanted to take home something.

  After some years of this, the Europeans were starting to run out of gold. Also their food was so heavily spiced that it glowed in the dark. They probably would have all died of heartburn if Columbus had not discovered the New World.

  The New World

  Every schoolchild is familiar with the story of how Columbus set off in three tiny ships (the Pinto, the Cordoba, and the Coupe de Ville), and right away his crew started getting very nauseous and asking why for God’s sake he had decided on three tiny ships instead of one medium ship. Nevertheless Columbus pressed on, ignoring popular fears that he would sail off the edge of the Earth, and finally he and his hardy band made it to the New World, except for the Pinto, which mysteriously exploded, and the Cordoba, which due to a navigational error actually did sail off the edge of the Earth.

  The New World had an extremely good business climate. For one thing, there was plenty of land, and nobody owned it, unless you counted the people who had been living there for several thousand years. For another thing, it had an abundance of the two crucial factors you need for economic development: Water Power, in the form of rivers, and Raw Materials, in the form of ore. So soon millions of Europeans flocked over to the New World to make their fortunes. They stood around all day, sunup to sundown, throwing handfuls of ore into the rivers and waiting for economic development to take place. They would have starved to death if a friendly Indian named Squanto (which is Indian for “Native American”) hadn’t come along and shown them how to plant corn. “You put the seeds in the ground,” explained Squanto. He couldn’t believe what kind of morons he was dealing with.

  Soon the corn came up, and the Europeans decided to celebrate by inviting all the Indians over for a big Thanksgiving dinner, then sending them off to live on reservations in North Dakota.

  The Rise Of The Modern Corporation

  At the beginning of the modern corporate era, many businesses actually made things. Typically, they’d get hold of a Raw Material, which they’d smelt and pour into a mold, where it would cool and form a product, which they’d sell for a profit, which the owner would use to buy his family a nice house on Long Island.

  The problem was that when the owner died, the family members were darned if they’d come in off Long Island and engage in anything as filthy as smelting, so they’d hire a professional manager to run the business. Often, however, the professional manager was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and consequently he wasn’t exactly dying to smelt either. So he’d dream up other corporate activities for himself to engage in, such as Marketing, Long-Range Planning, Management by Objectives, and Lunch, and he’d hire additional managers, who of course would turn right around and hire managers of their own, and so on.

  This is how we arrived at the modern corporation, where at the very top you have a chief executive who spends his entire day posing for Annual Report photographs and testifying before Congress; and beneath him you have several thousand executives engaged in “middle management,” which is the corporate term for “management activities in which there is no possible way for anybody to tell whether you’re screwing up”; and beneath them you have tens of thousands of secretarial, clerical, and reception personnel; and beneath them somewhere in a factory nobody ever goes to because there is n
o decent place around it where you can have lunch, you have the actual production work force, which consists of a grizzled old veteran employee named “Bud.”

  This modern corporate system offers something for everybody:

  THE EXECUTIVES get enormous salaries and bonuses and stock options and offices big enough to play jai alai in.

  THE SECRETARIAL, CLERICAL, AND RECEPTION PERSONNEL get medical plans, dental plans, pension plans, savings plans, go-to-college plans, stop-smoking plans, lose-weight plans, softball plans, and bulletin boards it takes upwards of two working days to read.

  THE STOCKHOLDERS get regular annual reports printed on top-quality paper informing them that despite less-than-projected earnings caused by impossible-to-foresee foreign-currency fluctuations exacerbated by a short-term restructuring of the long-term capitalized debenturization of the infrastructure and the discovery that certain moths may mate for life, the future continues to look very bright inasmuch as the corporation quite frankly has the best darned management team the human mind can conceive of. BUD gets regular five-minute breaks.

  And So ...

  ... and so we have come to the present day, to the incredibly sophisticated world of the modern corporation—a world that YOU, thanks to this book, are about to become part of! In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how you can land that all-important entry-level job, so you’ll want to study it very carefully! Unless your dad owns the company, in which case you can head on out to the golf course.