I'm sure there must be loads of "Message Statements" that have made you cringe!!
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"flexible is another way of saying 'lack of control'"
This one
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I'm sure its a famous one:
'it's not the hours you put into the work, it's the work you put into the hours'
Funny when said I'd be prepared to work twice as hard and do half the hours I normally work for the same salary they didn't seem to keen!
Back to coasting I suppose!
Royal Mail being slow on the uptake years after everyone else decided they didn't expect us to work harder just smarter .Ho hum .This got me thinking about all the management speak out there and wondering if the person uttering the meaningless drivel realises how irritating they are .Examples ;Blue Sky Thinking ,Run It Up The Flagpole See Who Salutes ,Think Outside The Box and the latest gems that keeping popping up in the media .
Lets see how this affects things going forward and how many people appear to be on a journey !FFS talk sensibly don't try and be frickin clever ."Educated "half wits ! 😈
My mind was with the Muffin Man.
We had a rash of "motivational" posters put up last year, so I put this one up...
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😆
Northwind love it !
Heh. Funnily enough, on the wall above my desk I have the very symbol that the-muffin-man has posted above. I think the slogan from Bullshit Detector Vol.2 would work well....
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No particularly crass ones, but we do have a set of 'motivational' posters in our small canteen: Strength, Goals, Perseverance, Attitude, Teamwork.
I'm sure they'll be somewhere on here:
http://www.allposters.com/-st/Motivational-Posters_c12920_.htm
Gawd knows who thought it was a good idea...we're engineers, give us interesting engineery things to solve and we'll be happy bunnies...
Where I used to work there was an office manager who stuck notices everywhere, "Turn off after use", "Please leave this area as you would want to find it", "Bicycles are not allowed in the cellar", "Do not store anything here without written permission", etc., they were everywhere. So I printed off a poster that said "Please do not stick posters here" and stuck it to one of the cupboard doors.
It lasted about 2 hours before she saw it and ripped it down...
Just saw one not 10 minutes ago that said
'The only difference between Try and Triumph is a bit of Umph!
FFS!
I can't really bad mouth the project on STW, but suffice to say a simple bit of umph won't make much difference..!
Every time I go to the lav, I pas through a door with a notice on it asking if I am devlivering project management.
I have - only just - resisted the urge to respond, in writing with "No, I'm just going for a sh*t".
Maybe if this Friday's interview works out, I'll do that just as I leave....
The place I used to work at was well known for not spending anything on extra equipment, nothing ever got replaced when it broke so we were spending half the day searching the labs for a working piece of equipment that no-one else was using.
We had a noticeboard where management used to stick motivational posters and various bits of "essential" information.
So I stuck this up on it:
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It lasted about 2hrs before it was replaced by a notice that said if management found the culprit, they'd be disciplined for misconduct.
I can't claim credit for this but in an old job someone stuck up a "there is no I in team" sign. Someone else stuck up under it "There is no U in team either".
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b r - Member
Try this
Worryingly only half of those I think are actual bS, the other half I think are not 😳
Northwind - Member
I can't claim credit for this but in an old job someone stuck up a "there is no I in team" sign. Someone else stuck up under it "There is no U in team either".
Or - There is no I in team, but there is a me
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I WAS THERE!
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Sounds like you need [url= http://www.despair.com/viewall.html ]www.despair.com[/url]...
there's no I in team, just meat
I can't claim credit for this but in an old job someone stuck up a "there is no I in team" sign. Someone else stuck up under it "There is no U in team either".
I prefer the response "Theres no U in 'Competent'"
You don't need to be mad to work here, so clear your desk.
"Competence Builds Confidence" is the current winner for me.
"Be the reason!" is a close second.
Both seen on posters in the office today...
"there is no I in team"
no, but there's a U in c**t
I know you believe you heard what you thought I said, but is what you heard what I really meant?
or something along those lines
Ace. Always wondered about your username BA Nana.
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Crass were a massive influence on me back in the day.
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All of our motivational posters have been taken down due to the latest idea to hit our department.
So thats a PASS
But the latest scheme is called LEAN....Invented by Toyota.....
FAIL !!!
But at least we are still "Going the extra mile !"
Not me though, i stopped for a bacon buttie.
But the latest scheme is called LEAN....Invented by Toyota.....FAIL !!!
"The latest scheme"
LOL
Maybe cos you and just about everyone else in the UK is finally getting to hear about it... And we wonder why the UK is so far behind the rest of the world in terms of quality, output and profitability!
Ignorance is obviously bliss mate! 😉
In fact, ROFLMAO... Just seen you're a "Civil Servant" and you live in Glasgow... Work for the HMRC per chance? I'd bet money on the fact I know some of the Lean guys working with you! 😉
Pff, lean. Lean is what we call "common sense" in my office, when we heard of another department saying "Oh, we saved 35 man hours a week through lean" or "we saved £100000 per annum through lean" we say "Why the **** were you so ineffective in the first place, you tools". Just a case of putting a clever name on what competent people should be doing.
Ironically our lean process is now the least lean process in the entire department- lots of pointless tasks, jargon nobody understands... I can see it's a good idea for the clowns though.
Munkster- I have just printed some of those off. I may put them in a few appropriate places.
Lean is what we call "common sense" in my office
Bingo
Just a case of putting a clever name on what competent people should be doing.
Couldn't agree more
Ironically our lean process is now the least lean process in the entire department- lots of pointless tasks, jargon nobody understands... I can see it's a good idea for the clowns though.
Often the case sadly.
Lean is basically just common sense and good working practice with a fancy name and a few tools to help you do so. The problem is, being British, in general if there is an easy way and a hard way, we'll choose the hard way! It never ceases to amaze me just how little common sense most of the British working public have for the most part, but also just how accepting they are of doing things in an inefficient and ineffective way. Too many people switch their brains off when they go to work, they turn themselves into robots, when actually what is required are intelligent, free thinking human beings that are prepared to challenge the conventions in the name of progress!
Still, if putting a trademark name on Common Sense helps me earn a decent crust for what is essentially money for old rope (or at least it should be), then who am I to complain!
If only sense was common...
Not a message statement, but I worked somewhere that was going through the process of making a large proportion of their staff redundant. Something like 60% at my level, and 40% at the level above.
One of the partners sent an email to another partner, explaining what a good time he was having on holiday, the food & hotel were fantastic, and how he was having a trip in a private jet later in the week.
For some reason, the partner thought that the rest of the office would be interested to see, so he printed it out and stuck it to the noticeboard...
I was going to post what Maverick Boy posted. Sure, Lean might just be a way of formalising common sense, but it's clearly needed isn't it? 🙂 If it really were "common" sense everyone'd be doing it, and they're manifestly not.
A bit like Agile development in IT really.
Back in the mists of time I worked freelance for a large American bank. They had motivational slogans expensively sign-written down the walls of their enormously ostentatious offices. Every day I looked at the slogan 'Complacency is Devastating!'. It seems Ironic as we now know that.... In fact... its large American banks that are devastating!
In the battery farm (call-centre) they had a great one on the wall that said:
"If we have 1 million customers, and just one isn't satisfied.. What do we say to that customer?"
The answer seemed pretty apparent and I was constantly amazed that nobody scrawled the obvious 😀
the best one I ever saw was in Ford many years ago, it said
"Ford Engineer training school"
and underneath was a picture of an Ar#e and an Elbow with a training officer asking
"now gentlemen, can anyone tell me which one is which"
My old boss used to talk about a "wooden dollar." It was a pump repair centre, owned by a multi-national pump manufacturer. The "wooden dollar" referred to a job we were doing for another subsidiary: benefit for us, loss for them, neutral for the parent company.
Although, this same guy talked about "getting our ducks in a row" and put a memo out to say that "The term "Brain-storming" must not be used,it could be offensive to anyone with epilepsy (his words, not mine!). The term to be used is "Thought Shower". Anyone heard using the former term will be sacked." I highlighted to him that this was not company policy and would he like to talk to my Union Rep. about it. We framed the memo, as a shrine to "How not to manage people"... 😀
when this appeared i pointed out to the company MD that wolves are pack animals, so being a wolf meant you weren't alone and got to kill sheep
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Not me, but a good one.
Bus Depot with a rat problem
Management denies that there was a rat problem
Rat killed by staff in canteen on night shift
Dead rat placed in freezer
At the end of the shift (6am) the rat was removed from the freezer and sealed up in a jiffy envelope.
Defrosting rat in said envelope placed in depot managers in tray (for him to pick up when he arrives at 9am) with a note made of newspaper cuttings saying 'rat problem, what rat problem?'
Project management - a beautiful thing!
1.It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by impregnating nine women.
2.Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it.
3.You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.
4.At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.
5.The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situatee.
6.A problem shared is a buck passed.
7.A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would anyway melt when heat is applied.
8.A user will tell you anything you ask, but nothing more.
9.Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the leastconvenient is the correct one.
10.What you don't know hurts you
11.There's never enough time to do it right first time but there's always enough time to go back and do it again.
12.The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of making a date is forgotten.
13.I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.
14.What is not on paper has not been said.
15.A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.
16.If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven't understood the plan.
17.If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.
18.Feather and down are padding, changes and contingencies will be real events.
19.There are no good project managers - only lucky ones.
20.The more you plan the luckier you get.
21.A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager.
22.Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.
23.If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.
24.Everyone asks for a strong project manger - when they get them they don't want them.
25.Overtime is a figment of the naïve project manager's imagination.
26.Quantitative project management is for predicting cost and schedule overruns well in advance.
27.The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.
28.Metrics are learned men's excuses.
29.For a project manager overruns are as certain as death and taxes.
30.Some project finish on time in spite of project management bestpractices.
31.Fast - cheap - good - you can have any two.
32.There is such a thing as an unrealistic timescale.
33.The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.
34.A two-year project will take three years, a three year project will never finish.
35.When the weight of the project paperwork equals the weight of the project itself, the project can be considered complete.
36.A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected - a well planned project only twice as long as expected.
37.Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be.
38.Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.
39.There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.
40.A project gets a year late one day at a time.
41.If you're 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you're a project manager.
42.No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirement
43.Yours won't be the first to.
44.Activity is not achievement.
45.Managing IT people is like herding cats.
46.If you don't know how to do a task, start it, then ten people who know less than you will tell you how to do it.
47.If you don't plan, it doesn't work. If you do plan, it doesn't work either. Why plan!
48.The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job.
49.The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.
50.The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
51.Good control reveals problems early - which only means you'll have longer to worry about them.