Corporate Koans

Yes, I know. What on earth is a koan? A koan is a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/koan

Unless you’ve been hanging out under a rock in your corporate environment (a relatively safe hideout given the alternatives but from which you may eventually emerge an amoeba) you have surely intuited by now that the practice of the following qualities has not been in your best interest:

• Thinking
• Reason
• Integrity
• Common sense
• Knowledge
• Smartness

To immediately immerse ourselves in corporate practice that demonstrates thorough application of abandonment of reason, let us from here forward use an acronym for these qualities that will be incomprehensible to everyone else: TRICKS.

Even if you’re not a Zen Buddhist monk in training and have a healthy fear of too much enlightenment, insistence on applying your TRICKS to nonsensical policies and conversations will continue to get you absolutely nowhere.

What might get you somewhere, if not up the corporate ladder at least down off a ledge, is to gain sudden illumination of illogic by meditating upon your company’s most fascinating koans. An additional and lesser known benefit of meditation is that if your company has an annual evaluation on which you are required to list your participation in mandatory health initiatives, meditation may be an acceptable alternative to uncomfortable activities such as charity walking, institutional stress reduction, contortionist dancing, and group dieting.

To give you a frame of reference, here are some famous Zen koans.

What is the sound of clapping with one hand?

What was your face like before you were born?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

Of course these are small change in comparison to the more complex corporate koans. In order to solve those, meditation may not be enough. In addition, those not skilled in total abandonment of reason may find it impossible to practice corporate koan meditation without the insidious intrusion of tendrils of TRICKS. It will therefore be necessary to commit yourself to intensive and careful practice of the lessons contained in this training. Otherwise, your corporate survival is not guaranteed.

Prior to meditation, it is suggested that you engage in some activities in order to enrich the meditative environment. Each lesson suggests activities to assist you in mastering an antidote to one of the TRICKS and is followed by opportunity to meditate on a practice corporate koan. In order to engage in the activites, you will first have to identify coworkers who exhibit qualities that demonstrate their total corporate assimilation or at least adaptation. You can probably recognize them by their eternal  smiles and happy participation in the mandatory health initiatives and company events.

I was recently critiqued for being intolerant of the learning styles of coworkers as evidenced by my failure to chunk written communication into sufficiently small consumable bits. Imagine my distress when I was informed that my unbridled verbosity actually reduced some coworkers to tears. Therefore, in pursuit of lifelong self-improvement, I have diligently applied myself to facilitating your reading comprehension by the use of shortened paragraphs in bulleted format.

Lesson 1: Sinecogitation
From the Latin sine – without – cogitare – to think

• Surround yourself with others who have mastered sinecogitation. In most corporate environments, this should not require too much effort.
• Attend as many meetings as possible. Sinecogitation is practiced liberally where groups conduct corporate business.
• Attempt to involve yourself in the corporate decision-making process. No other activity will teach you sinecogitation better than hands-on exposure to the way corporate higher-ups arrive at life-changing decisions.
• Study your supervisor’s management practices, especially if your supervisor is a middle manager. As a sinecogitation trainee, you will find that careful study of the middle management mechanisms employed by your supervisor will yield invaluable learning moments.

Practice koan:
What is the sound of 1 cell thinking?

If this is just too much koan for you, consider this situation. Your company leaps into the multi-thousand dollar purchase of a heavily researched, tried and true product to solve a major corporate failure and then brands the product by imbuing it with the principles that guaranteed the failure.

Meditation is most successful when focused on one idea. Therefore, reserve further consideration of this topic for Lesson 3.

Lesson 2: Abratio
From the Latin ab – away from – ratio – reasoning

• Ask to shadow employees in the department that develops the annual evaluation.
• Carefully analyze the process by which employees are ___d (fill in the blank with your company’s word for “fire”).
• Apply yourself to diligent discovery of the relationship between the annual evaluation and the ___ing process.
• Research the relationship between the quality of an employee’s work and how suddenly they were ___d.
• If your company has an active ___ing process, there will be frequent openings in strategic areas. This will give you the invaluable opportunity to study the hiring process.
• In most corporations, the triad formed by the evaluation, ___ing, and hiring processes is a rich repository of abratio.

Practice koan:
What is the brainwave like of a person who spawns this statement? “We know that you struggle with too much work and too few competent staff. We have therefore decided to focus more on shortening the time positions remain open than on the qualifications of applicants.”

If you have no working knowlege of brainwaves, please know that I tolerate your ignorance. Here are some descriptions from floatdreams.com/brainwaves.htm:

Beta: waking rhythm: The brain is focusing on the world outside itself, or dealing with concrete, specific problems.

Alpha: often present when the brain is alert but unfocused.

Delta: produced when people are deeply asleep or otherwise unconscious.

Flat: no description provided but even a dumbass should know what that is.

Lesson 3: Circumintegritas
From the Latin circum – around – integritas – integrity

• Remember the Lesson 1 koan? Study the ins and outs of the alteration of data designed to prove that the adapted product resulted in more success than the original.
• Cosey up to someone in your company’s Human Resources department. If you are really fortunate, you may get a peek at the number of strategic low level positions that your company has approved with no funding source while allocating mega funding to new high level positions without which everyone got along just fine.
• Collect photographs of those in your company who rise quickly through the ranks. Some companies call this process of selection “talent management”. Make a chart that compares and contrasts these photos of the talented with those of prominent skinheads and of people of diverse race and color throughout the world.
• Parse the correspondence and communication of your upper management for the following words and phrases: “bless, our Father, bow our heads, in the Lord’s name, faith-based, Christian values”. This exercise has particular value if your company is a publicly funded enterprise and not an arm of Catholic Charities or ChristianMingle.com.

Practice koan:
What is the wallop one under-qualified internal candidate packs on the chances of a host of qualified externals?

A word of caution. Don’t cheat and avoid further meditation by latching onto the too obvious solution that successful hires are related to someone high up in your organization or attend the same church.

Lesson 4: Exiudicium
From the Latin ex – out from – iudicium – common sense

• Gather data on your coworkers’ assessment of their training needs. Your efforts in this regard will be immeasurably advanced if there is a person in your company who is blind. In that case, you can be on hand to watch the blind employee trip over objects a coworker left in the way of a previously clear path and hear the coworker grumble, “I didn’t get training on blind people.”
• Study your company’s energy management practices. Take thermostat readings during extreme heat and cold weather conditions and record the degree (no pun intended) to which the thermostat reading corresponds with the outside temperature. If you are particularly ambitious, visit coworkers’ offices and record the number of questionably safe heating and cooling devices in use to compensate for your company’s energy management practices.
• Take careful note of how your company’s productivity goals align with its technology roll-out methods. The exiudicium lessons to be gleaned from the arrival of employees to the sudden appearance of a new operating system coupled with an understaffed help desk cannot be overestimated.
• Examine the relationship between your company’s building plans and its growth objectives. A company with its eye on exponential growth and its feet planted on a spit of a plot in an overpopulated urban area is an invaluable teacher of exiudicium.

Practice koan:
What is the what-for of conducting intensive, expensive searches for qualified applicants to fill important positions only to appoint an under-performer who has brought another department to its knees in order to save that other department from collapse?

Lesson 5: Preterignorantia
From the Latin preter – beyond – ignorantia – ignorance

• Examine the secretary whose “strong Office skills” consist of knowing how to sit in an office, affix labels to file folders, and smile but do not include knowledge of MS Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access.
• Determine your coworkers’ zone of comfort and offer to teach them a skill just outside the zone. Then evaluate the level of comprehension, retention, and application.
• Arrange a meet and greet with key players in your budget department for the purpose of studying how they move funds among budget lines.
• Participate freely in your company’s cross-training initiatives. However, avoid the trap of focusing on actually learning other people’s jobs. Remember that the purpose of this activity is to acquire preterignorantia techniques while they try to learn yours.

Practice koan:
What is the projected effectiveness of a company emergency response team that consists of 4 strategically placed members, one whose 6-inch heels prevent actual ambulation, one whose recent eye surgery prevents exposure to sunlight, one whose lack of spatial orientation prevents understanding of the building layout, and one who does not know she is on the team?

Lesson 6: Adfatuus
From the Latin ad – toward – fatuus – stupidity

• Ask to be mentored by a coworker who is not afraid to ask questions, no matter the topic. If you’re careful when making your selection, you will literally be overwhelmed with adfatuus.
• Request to make presentations at departmental meetings. Be sure to populate your presentation with some big words (more than 4 letters). Then record the questions, comments, and non-verbal behavior of your coworkers.
• Attentively observe your supervisor while she issues directives to her staff on how to carry out tasks she knows nothing about. There are few examples of adfatuus as splendid as the death of brain power by the hand of position power.
• Resist the temptation to attend mandatory company events as an anesthetized slug numbed to its surroundings. Be an active participant! Use your iPhone to furtively audio and video record the goings on. It’s worth it to risk incarceration to later be able to revel in such a fertile vegetable garden of adfattus.

Practice koan:
If a person in a position that requires a higher degree says she can only attend to your reports if they’re funny and you find yourself with your hands around her throat, does her statement make a sound?

Even if your TRICKS are thoroughly engrained and you have an unreasonable attachment to them in the face of repeated failure, dedication to this training should loosen their hold on your corporate persona. I will be rooting for your assimilation of SACEPA (if you can’t figure out what that is, you have already mastered most of the lessons in this training and need not waste your time here).

Best of luck and check back often for more corporate training opportunitites.