Cisco Fatty - epic Twitter cock-up

A young graduate Twitters the following:

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work."

The CFO of Cisco twitters back:

"Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web."

This has become a trending topic on Twitter and covered all over the web - a great example of an epic cock-up in play here.

How to avoid this kind of thing?

1. Be careful with company names

2. Be careful with your own name - this goes for Facebook as well as Twitter!

3. Don't use a public forum for a private purpose

This should cover your bases. No word yet on what happened to her fatty job - but no news is probably not good news.

Sometimes, you have to buy a new suit

We are currently recruiting graduates, at my FTSE 100 workplace, and as a part of this we are running assessment days. We see 10 candidates and they go through various interviews and exercises – it seems to be a good way for us to mitigate the risk of hiring an unskilled graduate by getting the maximum possible number of views on them in varying situations.

One of our ten candidates showed up fifteen minutes late, slunk into her seat without an apology or explanation and proceeded to have a muttered conversation with the guy sitting next to her. Not impressive.

During the introductions, the candidate next to her was asked to tell the group something about himself. He said that while he was travelling down to the assessment day the previous evening around 9pm, someone had stolen his suit on the train.

The guy looked immaculate, had arrived on time and seemed calm and gregarious, although he’d obviously had a truly nightmarish WCS pre-interview experience. His attitude was, when you’re going to an interview and something goes wrong, sometimes you have to buy a new suit. If the girl next to him had the same approach, she would have been the one we hired. Sometimes a new suit isn’t just a suit – it’s an indication of how you cope under pressure.

Epic Capgemini Cock-Up

Sometimes, it's better to be authentic. Capgemini is a great and well-established technology consultancy. It is not a cool brand. But people don't hire technology consultants on the basis of how cool they are. Their brand is about quality.

However, it looks like no-one told corp comms about this. Here they are on Youtube - being down with da yoof.



Nice.

Bullshit bingo - things corporate whores say, and why

Most of us will work, at some point, with some version of the Corporate Whore. Not to be confused with the Office Bike (everyone gets a ride) - the Corporate Whore takes things far more seriously. The job is everything to them, and as a result, they come out with some ridiculous corporate-speak which becomes more acronym-infested the longer they've been in their role.

Dan and I have worked in lots of offices where this drivel gradually infects everyone in middle management, until underlings are driven so crazy by it that meetings become a subversive opportunity for Bullshit Bingo. The rules are simple: participants are allocated 10 corporate phrases at random, and the first person to complete a full-house wins.

Here are some choice morsels:

Environment = office/team

Can you action that? = do it

Action that urgently = do it now

Add value = do useful stuff

The process = the stuff we're working on/ the way we work on stuff

Just to give you a heads up= I'm about to tell you something juicy

The journey has been amazing = doing the stuff we did was hard

Can you cascade that = tell those guys this stuff

Feed it back to the team = tell them it was shit

No need to reinvent the wheel= your new idea is shit

Bottom line/basically/at the end of the day = our whole meeting is about to be summed up by my next 5 words. Aren't you pleased it's taken us an hour and a half to get here?

I heard you say = you said (I'm being non-confrontational because I'm a consultant)


So why do the CWs feel the need to communicate this way? And does it make them any better at their jobs? The short answer: it depends what kind of CW you're dealing with.

1. The Sloping Shoulders - this CW uses jargon and corporate speak to avoid responsibility. Tasks are "out of her project's scope" - she's "maxed right now" and she will write without ever using a personal pronoun: "The FIGP will be actioned and reviewed on a bi-monthly basis". (The Nazis did this, too.) She'll spend a lot of time on "social media research" (Facebook.)

2. The Seagull - swoops in, makes a lot of noise, craps all over everything, and flies out again. A keen proponent of "actioning", "feeding back", "top down approaches", "best in breed projects" - all ways of slagging you off and dumping work on you in so breathtakingly passive-aggressive a way that you won't know what's hit you until it's too late.

3. The Consultant - quite the best user of jargon. Consultants do it to justify their fees (they are cleverer than you, and this is their way of showing you). They also do it to avoid offending volatile characters - you should add this to your arsenal. Why demand something be done, when you can request action? Why challenge someone's idea, when you can repeat it back to them so they can hear their own stupidity and correct themselves? We can learn a lot about the language of office politics from the Consultant.

4. The Utter Tosser - you know if you're dealing with this one. Can be combined with other types. Watch your back - and always plan for the Worst Case Scenario around them. Especially if they're your boss.

Dealing with laziness fall-out

I used to work with a lovely guy who was congenitally lazy. My colleague M was a lovable, funny personality, too bright for his own good and unwilling to do the hard graft that comes with a successful start in sales.

Eventually, he was pulled aside by his boss, who had some terrifying stats from IT about M's internet use - on a bad day, six hours of his eight hour day was time he spent online. M was asked to justify his full-price salary when the perception was that he was delivering only a quarter of the value.

Everyone has some days where they can't be bothered to be a high performer, and none of us really thrive in an environment that combines low challenge with low supervision. But say that like my colleague M, you've had one too many lazy days - how on earth do you get yourself out of deepest unproductivity and back on track?

1. Assess what the fall-out is. What have you let slip? The World's Best To-Do list needs a post of it's own - but make a list of tasks you haven't done, people you haven't been paying attention to, and goals you're not moving closer to, and put them in order of what's most likely to blow up in your face first.

2. Then, actually do it. Fixing neglected situations is never appealing - so if you need to get back into the swing of things, check off a couple of the "quick fixes" off your list first. Also, do not spend ages making your list, preventing you from actually Sorting Things Out. This day is about Doing, not Preparing to Do.

3. Then, do the most explode-y one. Bribe yourself if you have to. For me, it's easier to sort out terrible messes if I'm holding a cappuccino. Do not bribe yourself with a half-hour of internet surfing. Begin by acknowledging that it has taken you longer than it should have to sort out your big potentially explosive mess - a simple "Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you, everything here has been very busy" is better than "I've recently become addicted to Ebay and now the terrible fear of my boss is forcing me to pull my finger out". Then, deal with the situation professionally.

4. Repeat. Move down your list. Keep working - you can't get out from under a mountain of undone stuff without some shoveling. Do some "overt working" on active tasks that are noticeable - call your clients/agencies, and project energy and confidence when you're doing it.

5. Analyse how it happened and make changes. Accept that the consequence of too many lazy days is a huge mess and potentially career-limiting. (If you don't care about that, you're in the wrong job. ) If it's something more innocuous, like trouble getting started in the morning, you need to make a deal with your lazy side. Schedule out the first half hour of your day to go through emails in peace, for example, but be prepared to make up the time at the end of your day.

6. Get a laziness buddy. Find someone at work that you really rate. (Not someone you really like: you're looking for an uberprofessional here.) When you're procrastinating, what are they doing? If your buddy is working - you should be too.

7. Have some productive fun. It's essential to my job that I keep on top of the industry. So I spend an hour a week reading related blogs and trade press. Perfect for balancing laziness and productivity. For you, this might mean starting to Twitter to reach your customers or colleagues, attending a monthly networking lunch, or pitching a new idea to your boss. Remember, this is iceing, not cake.

Business, bad credit and bastard banks

One of the major frustrations of anyone starting their own business has to be the unpredictability of cashflow and the hassle of dealing with your chosen bank. My relatively uninformed view that all the major UK high street banks are as bad as each other, although RecruitmentNick does have an interesting post about starting a business account when your credit rating isn't up to much.

There are lots of reasons why you might struggle with your bank or your credit as an entrepreneur - the biggest one is that a lender doesn't treat your business as seperate to you as an individual when you're starting out. Here are some key things to smooth out the potential worst case scenarios:

1. Register your business as a company as soon as possible. Any accountant can do this for you, it costs about £80, and you get the small business bonus of VAT registration. Although your credit rating still comes into play, it also makes your business a distinct entity from you as an individual. Result.

2. Make someone with better credit a silent director of the business. This allows you to mitigate your poor credit. Essential to the success of this one: picking someone who will actually be silent.

3. Never, ever be an arse to your bank. Dan once spent fifteen minutes berating and shouting at at a poor teller from his bank that he couldn't buy bread and it was all her fault. It was her fault - she'd refused an advance on a cleared cheque - but I'm almost positive the incident made its way into Dan's customer record.

4. Make a simple business plan that includes a cashflow projection and show it to your bank manager when you meet to discuss your account needs. By simple, I mean a five-year old could grasp its minutiae. Particularly if your business is based on a service or a new technology, it needs to be easy to grasp. Lenders hate taking risks on things that are confusing.

5. Plan for the WCS. If it's a flatout no, what's your banking plan B? Think about going through a specialist in company formations, or about running the business through a personal account for a while, or going through your credit file with a finetooth comb to make sure it's accurate. Or do all three.

PowerPoint suicide

It’s 8.58am: in 2 minutes you’re going into the Global Marketing Director’s office to present your proposal on a huge project for the business. Your immediate boss, who is going in with you, comes over to your desk with a copy of your presentation and says, “This isn’t good enough – we can’t present this,” before picking up her notepad and heading into the Director’s office with a beaming smile. Utterly speechless, you pick up your laptop and a copy of the presentation you have spent the last 3 weeks perfecting and head into the office with your tail between your legs. Your confidence has been hit upside the head, and there’s no recovering it.

You mumble your way to slide 3 of 75, when the laptop packs in. The only thing more mortifying than this is the subsequent crawl around the floor under the table looking for the plug socket. The Global Marketing Director stifles an involuntary sigh and scans his watch. With a smile he suggests continuing without the laptop, not realising he is crushing you with his kindness.

Thirty agonising minutes later, the Director mentions celebrity endorsement for the project: Russell Brand is too risky, Kanye West is too expensive, and Lily Allen is pregnant. With an upbeat tone and excited eyes, you pip in: “Oh, actually Lily Allen had a miscarriage last night, so she may be able to make it,” as if this is good news for everyone in the room. You then look down and remember that your boss is 8-months pregnant. “It’s awful.” Your attempt to salvage the situation is met with blank faces.

Some tips to avoiding Presentation Hell:

First impressions
The first 3 minutes are key to getting your audience onboard for the rest of your presentation: be prepared, test the equipment, and own the show before you begin. Don’t be late, sweating or hungover.

Keep it short and relevant
People are easily bored, so stick to the point of the presentation. Lily Allen’s miscarriage is not the point. Each slide should relate directly to your aim. If you’re getting to 75 PowerPoint slides, chances are you need to restructure your presentation. In any case, keep your audience on track with the three-step rule:
1. Summarise what you will tell them
2. Tell them
3. Summarise what you have just told them

Death by bullet point
Is there any other way you can present this information? In the undignified situation above, I scrapped the laptop and reverted to a mood board I had created in 30 minutes from Getty Images. Visual aids work much better than text-heavy slides, so look at each slide and ask yourself if it is there for you, or there for your audience. If it is a slide of bullet points designed only to help you through your presentation, scrap it - use an image- or video-led approach to help enhance your message for your audience. See below 2 ways of delivering the same speech.

Text-heavy presentation:

Image-led presentation: