Cash-money to own.
Generally speaking, I don't need a lot of tactical help when it comes to managing projects unless I am, say, assembling Interocitors from scratch (never done it)
or explaining to the legal department for the 100th time why I should be permitted to cashier an employee who was absent for weeks on end, was incapable of completing a one-day assignment in a month and a half, lied constantly and incompetently, slept snoringly at his desk on the days he did bother showing up for work at all, and had already been verbally and written-ly warned to the point of it being comic opera (did that, and would rather lose a limb to a knife-wielding rat in an alley fight than ever go through it again.)
What I do need help with from time to time is a gentle reminder that while the working world may be a pinata full of loco being beaten with rebar by gorgons, I myself am not mad.
Nor am I alone.
Doomed, perhaps, but not crazy, which, as it turns out, is exactly the brand of parable which Harlan Ellison has been exultantly gift-wrapping in fury and terror and leaving on our doorsteps since before I was born.
Yeah, sure, from the "Glass Teat" books, to "The 3 Most Important Things in Life" essay to his vivid autopsy of what happened to the "I, Robot" script, to the fate of those who live in a world where "The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge" gets disappointed...interleaved throughout his sprawling body of work are all kinds of seams of pure labor relations gold.
But selfishly and frankly it would be a hoot to see a big, mean hardcover by Ellison in the Business Book and/or Current Events section of my local Book-O-Drome, leaping from shelf-to-shelf, chasing Hank Paulson's "On the Brink" out of the store and into oncoming traffic, chewing the heart out of whatever unholy globitarian oligarch dreck Tom Friedman just extruded and laying a clutch of eggs in it's still-warm corpse, and cackling in the corner with Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia".
Suggested titles you ask? What about...
"The Kyben Way: Kanbanning your way to Market Supremacy"
"Jeffty's Visioneering Meeting has been rescheduled to 5:00."
"The Cheese Stood Alone until Someone Moved It."
"The One-Minute Ticktock Manager"
"PowerPoint of the Lost Hour"
"The Man Who Offshored Christopher Columbus"
"The Beast That Shouted 'Synergy' at the Heart of the World"
And of course
"The Management Secrets of Cordwainer Bird"
However since this particular grand idea may never come to fruition, I will probably have to satisfy myself with scraping up a few dollars and running out to buy "Brain Movies".
I can live with that.
9 comments:
I eagerly await your comments on David Brooks' latest column (The Haimish Line). DYING to hear them.
Somewhere, I have an old navy-blue paperback copy of Ellison's Stalking the Nightmare, wherein I first read his "3 Most Important Things" essays...thanks for posting this, because I hadn't read them in far too long.
Ellison is kind of like Larry Kramer: he pisses off a lot of people, but he's right a lot more often than they are.
I have a collection of "Harlan Ellison's Watching" F&SF magazine, and his insights into late 20th century cinema are priceless. Find his article on how the first Dune film was destroyed by the studio... a case study in incompetence.
heh heh
You are the best, Dg.
As was he.
Rock on, my friend.
My daughter, who just read your sparkling prose for the first time, said "but, Mother, he's a poet!"
S
"I Stole Your Money and I Must Scream."
""Repent Cheney!" Said the Froomkinman."
Thanks for reminding me that Harlen Ellison exists. I read just about everything he wrote when I was in college (early 70s). Also, I enjoyed watching him when he was on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow. I was working the evening shift then (late 70s) and I would get home just in time to roll one and have a beer before Tom's show started. I miss those days, I really do.
You owe me a new set of lungs, because when I hit "PowerPoint of the Lost Hour" I snerked so hard I inhaled my own saliva, then coughed for three minutes. You magnificent bastard.
He hooked me young with "Dangerous Visions" in the sixties. I might be the only person on the planet that liked the "A Boy and His Dog" movie.
He has been forced to sell of his personal things to pay for his medical treatment. That is sad. A real talent in an unreal world. I will miss his diatribes when he goes.
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