Liddle’s Law of Corporate Bigotry
The more politically correct an organisation, the more likely it is to be staffed at the top exclusively by self-flagellating white liberals.
New laws posted today
“When taxi drivers know the name of a FTSE 100 boss, it’s a bad sign”, says Harvard Professor John Quelch in his article ‘How to spot a chief executive who is going off the rails’. Read the 10 signs of trouble here.
Meanwhile, also on the subject of organisational flaws, Rod Liddle points out the discrepancy between the politically correct public stance taken by large organisations like the BBC and the Metropolitan Police on racism, and the exclusively white faces that sit atop them. Read Rod’s law here.
Quelch’s Laws of Executive Hubris
When taxi drivers know the name of a FTSE boss it’s a bad sign.
Bill Gates’ advice to school-leavers
As thousands of 18 year olds get ready for their gap year (after a hard summer flitting between villas in Majorca, the Algarve and St Tropez) parents funding the whole shebang could do worse than print off Bill Gates’ advice for their return.
The founder of Microsoft provides a healthy dose of realism to those used only to pre-Crunch largesse. Rule 5 of 11 gives you something of the flavour. ‘Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity.’
Bill Gates’ Rules for Spoiled Teenagers
Rule 1
Life is not fair — get used to it!
Rule 2
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3
You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping — they called it opportunity.
Rule 6
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
The Art of Blind Reviewing
News that Robin Goldstein’s fake Italian Restaurant - Osteria L’Intrepido - won an ‘Award of Excellence’ from Wine Spectator magazine, despite being completely imaginary, has put a spring in the step of hoaxers everywhere. The magazine has, with astonishing chutzpah, described the hoax as “an act of malicious duplicity”, overlooking its own duplicity in recommending a restaurant to its readers which it had not properly evaluated. Click here for more on Goldstein’s hoax, and for his book, here.
In The Times, Ben Macintrye draws parallels between the magazine’s restaurant reviewing practices and book reviewing, where it has, apparently, never been seen as a requirement that reviewers actually read the book.
Prescott’s class act
The words ‘Prescott’ and ‘grapples’ conjure up the most unsavoury of images, involving the former deputy PM and his diary secretary Tracey Temple, so it is a relief - almost - to learn that in his new BBC2 programme the only thing he is grappling with is “political apathy, middle-class syntax, snobbery and the wealth gap in modern Britain”. There is, of course, only one thing to be said about class, and Eleanor Roosevelt said it best. Money, on the other hand, is a more complex subject, with many laws.
Go China!
As the Chinese and American basketball teams clashed last night in an epic encounter watched by the presidents of both countries (score: 101:70 to the visiting team), it is doubtful whether Raymond Chandler’s Law comes as much consolation to the host nation. More reflective of their feelings are the words of Vince Lombard : “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” or even, to borrow from Mao, “Sport is the continuation of war by other means”. How quaint, and appealing, then to consider Grantland Rice’s old-fashioned views on the manner of sporting competition.
Strategy for Saakashvili
Captain Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, one of the most influential military thinkers of the twentieth century, distilled the essence of strategy and tactics into eight maxims in his classic work Strategy. His ideas strongly influenced German tactics in WW2, Field Marshal Rommel declaring that “The British would have been able to prevent the greatest part of their defeats if they had paid attention to the modern theories expounded by Liddell Hart before the war.”
Beleagured Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili looks like he has already breached the first of the 8 maxims. Survival of the Russian onslaught may now depend more in diplomacy than warfare. With that in mind, he and George Bush could do worse than study Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and, in particular, The Trollope Ploy.
