What None Of Our Current Leaders Will Ever Say Or Do …

Jon, I think you will find this relevant:

I suspect there’s still more behind the “face time” issue besides the reasons we’ve already addressed, though. Besides being a reflection of the irrationality that comes with large size, it also probably has something to do with contract feudalism. The workplace atmosphere of the past thirty years is one of production-worker downsizing, speedups, stagnant real wages, and increasing stress; as a result, the average job is also the scene of increasing disgruntlement, and all sorts of expanding profiling and monitoring systems to keep the disgruntled work-force under internal surveillance.

Here’s the rest.

If I understand correctly, this is about increasing control, and this is about increasing disgruntlement, anger and despair at the other pole.

A couple of years ago, for a couple of reasons … ego, little or no cash flow, and a certain unhealthy degree of self-questioning, i returned to management consulting .. to a very high-end, great-reputation boutique firm in Vancouver which specialised in leadership and management development and assessments .. I only lasted four months, and for 3.5 of those 4 i had 3 stiff gin and tionics as soon as I got home, not to mention other palliatives I couldn’t do it any more .. all beliefs about aiding corporate performance or individual performance in support of corporate goals without some equivalent social responsibility or conscience has left me. I have no heart whatsoever for it any longer. It was a mighty struggle to quit, mainly as the president kept insisting I couldn’t .. for 3 weeks … but I did, and immediately stopped drinking excessively.

On another more positive note, I just got back from a party/rave at the SAT in Montreal .. there is clearly a deep resistance building amongst aware youth, and very little if any taste for the corporate world … but Montreal may very well be an anomaly … which is one of the reasons I love it so much.

*have* left me .. that’s what partying does to one’s command of grammar

Yes, it is about increasing control, and the concomitant dismay of the controlled. It’s serendipitous that you mentioned palliatives in the context of work frustration. et alia and I were just talking about how some of them serve to make things worse. The most deadly in terms of obedience to the boss is marijuana. It’s impossible to take anal compulsive bosses seriously when you’re a little high. It’s too tempting to get into some creative job actions to “help” them get over their control needs.

So? The kids are alright They usually are until their late twenties. Then the reality that they face forty more years of this crap, whatever crap they’re working in, begins to embitter them.

yeah … it’s tough to generalize, though, imo. Maybe because it’s Montreal … there’s less and less of a traditional economy here in many ways … lots of small entrepreneurial multimedia companies, video game stuff, a whole micro-economy of television (which is a long long story, but suffice it to say that with another language comes another view on the world. Franco-Quebec television, sitcoms, etc. I find much much more intelligent than the standard North American fare, and much more relevant to the culture here in Quebec .. but then again here in Canada we have the CBC and, as Klaus pointed out over at WB, The Kids in the Hall, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Trailer Park Boys).

Plus, in Montreal/Quebec the younger generations have the confidence of having grown up in a culture that has had to define itself by threatening very seriously to secede (as well as living through martial law under Trudeau back when the front Liberation de Quebec (FLQ) carried out some bombings and kidnapped and killed Mark Cross)… Americans would not understand it, but the referendum vote in 1994 only kept Quebec in canada by something like 0.1% or 0.2% of the vote.

These young people are almost all bi-lingual, many are tri-lingual, extremely multi-cultural, many are highly educated (university education here is generally quite a bit less expensive than in the USA, as a significant portion is still publicly funded), and very cosmopolitan, worldly and confident but not in athat overly hormonal blustery way .. rarther the quietly go about your business way.

These are my generalizations .. but then again, I keep repeating how much I love it here, and so I am an enthusiastic cheerleader.

Speaking of Mary jane .. please don’t tell anyone (he says as he is about to publish it to the Web for the whole world to see .. but the first 6 years of my grown-up adult life I worked as a banker, and for about 2 years of that time I walked to work (about two miles) every morning and puffed on a spliff while i was walking to the bank branch ;-). Given that banking is definitively NOT rocket science, it didn’t seem to be a hindrance in my job performance .. and at that time I was indeed one of those eager little beavers … however, I did get disillusioned reasonably quickly (for the first time ;-), at around age 28 if I remember correctly.

Geez you guys left the terrorism track pretty quick. Very interesting link Harry, and not unrelated.

I wish I had more time to respond.

Maybe later.