The hippopotami review...
I just got my annual review at work this week.
It’s interesting. I can’t really explain my job. I never have been able too. I mean my sister in law asked me last year what it was I did. I gave her the lesser deity discussion. (Blog entry of March 31, 2004) –Before I get on with review thingy I want to talk about, I just want to note, its pretty weird at this point I can refer to earlier entries in my blog to help the current one. I think I’m becoming indexed or something.
--But back to my review explanation.
Reviews at the company in the past were something you got each year that told what your boss thought you had done, or what you needed to improve on. You’d also get some sort of blurb about where you fit in the hierarchy of work without actually telling you any specifics. It is important that your review be nebulous when you are a middle-middle manager. It’s a high art form to tell someone they are really cool without telling them how they compare to anyone else. Things that have been written in the blurb part of my review in the past.
--Stan is a key member of my management team. Course, all us middle-middle people are.
--Stan is one of my more innovative out of the box thinkers.
(though people who say that “out of the box,” thing, need to get a new phrase.
Its so in the box at this point.)
--People like to work for Stan. This is true. Though, some don’t.
--Stan easily solves problems others struggle with. Yeah, and vice versa.
Fairly cool stuff, huh? It doesn’t mention whether I’m the best or worst at what I do.
But, there are good reasons for that. In Middle-middle management you tend to do something like run big zoos or farms. Every middle-middle manager gets a farm or zoo to run. Sometimes we get two or three farms or zoos. I’m lucky, I get to run a zoo, a big productive farm, and…. Oh yeah, I have this weird project no one else knows how to do, I get to clear land and build levy’s. This little side levy project is to make land arable for new farms or zoos. My fellow middle-middle managers are a little unsure about the levy job. Some would like to have it, but in reality are glad I do, and most are glad they are just managing productive farms. It’s easier for them, draining land and building levy’s is kind of out of the box for guys who run farms or zoos. But that’s not really that important as you see in a few minutes. Now, the important point is we manage managers. It’s like managing the foremen who tell the keepers to shovel up the dung from Hippo’s or horse stables. You get it? We are far removed from the dung and we try to keep it that way.
But as you can imagine it’s hard to tell if you are comparing zoos to farms and for that matter levy clearing what’s more important or who is doing the best. We are all telling people to have their people make sure the dung doesn’t pile up, but it’s hard to tell who is doing best at dung abatement. I mean those of us that run farms don’t even farm the same stuff. Some people just do carrots and wheat, others breed thoroughbreds. Figuring out who is doing a better job, the guy who grew 2 million bushels of carrots or the guy who sired 20 thoroughbreds is hard. Though over the years we figured out the basic thing was to get the new crop in, or breed some animals. In that process as long as you didn’t let the dung pile up, you were doing a good job. Though if you let dung pile up, we’d all talk about what a bad job you did. Those middle-middles who had big dung piles would get something like this written on their review:
--xxxx seems to have a lot of waste in his/her area. It should get some attention in the following year.
We usually get the message if that sort of thing appears on our review blurbs. The dung pile becomes the focus of our attention for a while.
So, why am I mentioning all this?
As it turns out, we have a new upper-upper manager who took over all the farms, zoos and levy projects this last year. Think of him as like the Secretary of Agriculture, high up in government, but still not ultimately in charge. He’s was not quite sure he liked not knowing how everyone fit in his department. You know which farmer, zoo keeper or crop was most important, and who among their farm hands and keepers did the best job. So he said every one should know how they fit. That is performance wise. Were they in the low, middle, upper or upper-upper part of the performance scale in the Department of Agriculture? We all scratched out heads. “How do we do that? Very few people have the same job or are doing the same thing?” we said. He said he’d leave those details to us. But he also mentioned his expectations were that most people fit into the middle part of the department, and the only thirty percent fit into the upper part. Of that thirty percent, only five percent fit into to upper-upper part of the department. –You can guess which part he thinks he fits in.
Now all of us middle-middle guys were a little puzzled by this and decided to consult our upper-middle manager. (The boss) We asked how we should accomplish this task.
---And, like any good upper-middle manager worth his weight in carrots he answered. “You all should form a committee and give me a series of recommendations. In the meantime, I should let you know, I intend to hold a series of races between your teams. Each of you will need to run a wagon over a one mile course like five times. Each of you will have a different course, and the wagon will have to be pulled by your own draft animals. Your team’s performance in these races on the courses I assign will be used to determine your standing in the department.”
(Nothing like a distraction, to keep form answering a question.)
We all looked puzzled. The most puzzled were the organic carrot farmers who didn’t have any draft animals.
I should mention at this point that I have one of those organic carrot farms under me. I’m also the only middle-middle running a zoo. Three of my middle-middle peers raise horses, the rest are mechanized or organic farmers of one type or another. --No draft animals. We aren’t sure what a couple of my middle-middle peers do, but they seem to regularly develop big piles of dung a few of us have to help clean up.
When committees between carrot farmers, horse breeders and zoo keepers get formed, it’s about the time I decide to go work on my levy project. I took that approach while the carotene and dung pile rationalization committee was meeting. In the meantime I had a private meeting with my upper-middle boss and pointed out that these races seemed a bit skewed. I mean I really didn’t have any draft animals, unless you counted my zebra’s. Besides another middle-middle was demanding she get to borrow them for her race. I was left only with cheetahs and a couple hippopotami. The cheetah’s were too frail and lacked the endurance for long races. He said he understood that. Winning the race wasn’t that important as determining whether we individually met or exceeded his expectations. Being the out of the box thinker, innovator that I was, he was sure I could do something impressive with the hippos. I furrowed my eyebrows at him.
I should mention at this point, that I like a challenge. That’s why I have the levy project in addition to the organic carrot farm and zoo. Farming carrots is pretty darn easy. --For me anyway. I grew up sitting in apple trees and listening to Johnny Cash sing about cotton fields. (See Sept 2003 blog.) I’m a farmer by country music osmosis.
Organic vegetated material just grows between my ears and I spit it out. The whole “zoo thing”, on the other hand, is just a side amusement. I took it on because someone else (the middle-middle who now wanted to borrow the zebra’s) had let the dung pile up in the animal habitats one too many times. She had kept borrowing my levy workers for dung removal. We had gotten really good at quickly cleaning up wet muck in the levy building business. It seemed like a natural fit, this zoo dung removal business, and it was kind of fun to feed our carrots to hippopotami. But the zoo acquisition is another story.
So, I went to the zoo-keepers and told them about the hippo race. They gave me a look like you’d give someone at the time they suggest your hitch two hippopotami to a wagon and race them against a team of thoroughbreds. I reminded them that we regularly diverted rivers together, and they laughed, and said in an organic carrot farming sense of humor way, “Well, we’ll see what we can do Stan.”
-----------------Several Months Went By -----------------------------------
We got smoked on the first race. The hippopotami came in about as far behind a team of thoroughbreds as you could expect. But of course, the funny thing was. The thoroughbreds got beat by the zebra’s. (Remember the zebra’s were being run by one of the big dung pile middle-middles) But, I wasn’t discouraged. My hippopotami team lead and I like challenges. We formed a tiger team (no zoo pun intended) and set about improving our hippo’s performance. I’m not sure I should divulge the techniques we employed. It’s not something you can learn from a book, or blog for that matter. Its something you just know from experience. But I can tell you that we pretty much uncrated all the boxes and jumped out of the river to minimize the hippo dung spreading and figure out how to get those damn lazy ass carrot eaters moving. The next race we only lost to the thoroughbreds by like 30 feet. --Ten feet, the race after that. We actually tied the next race and beat the zebra’s too in the last race. But winning wasn’t as important as the fact we made such an improvement.
Now, given my hippopotami success story, while still farming carrots, efficiently managing a zoo and clearing half the bottom land in our departments territory for new farms, you’d think I get a pretty good if not amazing review. I suppose, I did. My upper-middle manager expounded on and on in my review blurb. He pointed out how much of an innovator I was. How I took on responsibilities far beyond my peers. How I could make the most impossible task look easy. How I could most likely handle greater challenges with ease. Then he said the only reason he didn’t rate me as exceeds expectations is because my team failed to win the most races this year. So, he rates me as meets expectations.
I was curious about this reasoning, so I made the mistake of asking. The upper-middle said, “What you did with the hippopotami teams was nothing short of amazing.” He said “If anyone was going to be able to do it, I knew it was going to be you.” But in the end, I had to give the edge to the middle-middle who won the most races.
Now, as I said earlier, that turned out to be the former zoo dung pile queen running the zebra team she had borrowed from me. I was puzzled given the facts of the race, so I asked another question I should of never. “Yeah but didn’t you expect her team to win? She was running zebra’s for Christ sake?”
He never hesitated a breath. “Hell no! She’s only every managed to pile dung. I was amazed she won, even with zebra’s. She exceeded my expectations. You didn’t”
You might note, that I’m a little confused at this point. I’m better than the people who exceeded expectations, but I don’t exceed the ones applied to me. I haven’t felt like this since I was placed in a ghetto school by a slight twist of fate in 11th grade for four months. The teachers there, all knew I was better than the average student. But rather than giving me A’s, I got B’s because they knew I was going somewhere and needed a challenge so I could strive for more. I sometimes wonder if those teachers ever grew up to be secretary of agriculture. Probably not, but I know I’m thinking of letting the hippo’s out of their cages tomorrow, and waltzing them down to the upper-upper’s (Sec of Ag’s) office. By the time they get done spreading carrot dung all over, the President will mentioning the dung piles in his review.
As for my upper-middle, well, I have these gibbons, that haven’t been out of the cage in a while. I won’t even mention what they can do with dung.
It’s interesting. I can’t really explain my job. I never have been able too. I mean my sister in law asked me last year what it was I did. I gave her the lesser deity discussion. (Blog entry of March 31, 2004) –Before I get on with review thingy I want to talk about, I just want to note, its pretty weird at this point I can refer to earlier entries in my blog to help the current one. I think I’m becoming indexed or something.
--But back to my review explanation.
Reviews at the company in the past were something you got each year that told what your boss thought you had done, or what you needed to improve on. You’d also get some sort of blurb about where you fit in the hierarchy of work without actually telling you any specifics. It is important that your review be nebulous when you are a middle-middle manager. It’s a high art form to tell someone they are really cool without telling them how they compare to anyone else. Things that have been written in the blurb part of my review in the past.
--Stan is a key member of my management team. Course, all us middle-middle people are.
--Stan is one of my more innovative out of the box thinkers.
(though people who say that “out of the box,” thing, need to get a new phrase.
Its so in the box at this point.)
--People like to work for Stan. This is true. Though, some don’t.
--Stan easily solves problems others struggle with. Yeah, and vice versa.
Fairly cool stuff, huh? It doesn’t mention whether I’m the best or worst at what I do.
But, there are good reasons for that. In Middle-middle management you tend to do something like run big zoos or farms. Every middle-middle manager gets a farm or zoo to run. Sometimes we get two or three farms or zoos. I’m lucky, I get to run a zoo, a big productive farm, and…. Oh yeah, I have this weird project no one else knows how to do, I get to clear land and build levy’s. This little side levy project is to make land arable for new farms or zoos. My fellow middle-middle managers are a little unsure about the levy job. Some would like to have it, but in reality are glad I do, and most are glad they are just managing productive farms. It’s easier for them, draining land and building levy’s is kind of out of the box for guys who run farms or zoos. But that’s not really that important as you see in a few minutes. Now, the important point is we manage managers. It’s like managing the foremen who tell the keepers to shovel up the dung from Hippo’s or horse stables. You get it? We are far removed from the dung and we try to keep it that way.
But as you can imagine it’s hard to tell if you are comparing zoos to farms and for that matter levy clearing what’s more important or who is doing the best. We are all telling people to have their people make sure the dung doesn’t pile up, but it’s hard to tell who is doing best at dung abatement. I mean those of us that run farms don’t even farm the same stuff. Some people just do carrots and wheat, others breed thoroughbreds. Figuring out who is doing a better job, the guy who grew 2 million bushels of carrots or the guy who sired 20 thoroughbreds is hard. Though over the years we figured out the basic thing was to get the new crop in, or breed some animals. In that process as long as you didn’t let the dung pile up, you were doing a good job. Though if you let dung pile up, we’d all talk about what a bad job you did. Those middle-middles who had big dung piles would get something like this written on their review:
--xxxx seems to have a lot of waste in his/her area. It should get some attention in the following year.
We usually get the message if that sort of thing appears on our review blurbs. The dung pile becomes the focus of our attention for a while.
So, why am I mentioning all this?
As it turns out, we have a new upper-upper manager who took over all the farms, zoos and levy projects this last year. Think of him as like the Secretary of Agriculture, high up in government, but still not ultimately in charge. He’s was not quite sure he liked not knowing how everyone fit in his department. You know which farmer, zoo keeper or crop was most important, and who among their farm hands and keepers did the best job. So he said every one should know how they fit. That is performance wise. Were they in the low, middle, upper or upper-upper part of the performance scale in the Department of Agriculture? We all scratched out heads. “How do we do that? Very few people have the same job or are doing the same thing?” we said. He said he’d leave those details to us. But he also mentioned his expectations were that most people fit into the middle part of the department, and the only thirty percent fit into the upper part. Of that thirty percent, only five percent fit into to upper-upper part of the department. –You can guess which part he thinks he fits in.
Now all of us middle-middle guys were a little puzzled by this and decided to consult our upper-middle manager. (The boss) We asked how we should accomplish this task.
---And, like any good upper-middle manager worth his weight in carrots he answered. “You all should form a committee and give me a series of recommendations. In the meantime, I should let you know, I intend to hold a series of races between your teams. Each of you will need to run a wagon over a one mile course like five times. Each of you will have a different course, and the wagon will have to be pulled by your own draft animals. Your team’s performance in these races on the courses I assign will be used to determine your standing in the department.”
(Nothing like a distraction, to keep form answering a question.)
We all looked puzzled. The most puzzled were the organic carrot farmers who didn’t have any draft animals.
I should mention at this point that I have one of those organic carrot farms under me. I’m also the only middle-middle running a zoo. Three of my middle-middle peers raise horses, the rest are mechanized or organic farmers of one type or another. --No draft animals. We aren’t sure what a couple of my middle-middle peers do, but they seem to regularly develop big piles of dung a few of us have to help clean up.
When committees between carrot farmers, horse breeders and zoo keepers get formed, it’s about the time I decide to go work on my levy project. I took that approach while the carotene and dung pile rationalization committee was meeting. In the meantime I had a private meeting with my upper-middle boss and pointed out that these races seemed a bit skewed. I mean I really didn’t have any draft animals, unless you counted my zebra’s. Besides another middle-middle was demanding she get to borrow them for her race. I was left only with cheetahs and a couple hippopotami. The cheetah’s were too frail and lacked the endurance for long races. He said he understood that. Winning the race wasn’t that important as determining whether we individually met or exceeded his expectations. Being the out of the box thinker, innovator that I was, he was sure I could do something impressive with the hippos. I furrowed my eyebrows at him.
I should mention at this point, that I like a challenge. That’s why I have the levy project in addition to the organic carrot farm and zoo. Farming carrots is pretty darn easy. --For me anyway. I grew up sitting in apple trees and listening to Johnny Cash sing about cotton fields. (See Sept 2003 blog.) I’m a farmer by country music osmosis.
Organic vegetated material just grows between my ears and I spit it out. The whole “zoo thing”, on the other hand, is just a side amusement. I took it on because someone else (the middle-middle who now wanted to borrow the zebra’s) had let the dung pile up in the animal habitats one too many times. She had kept borrowing my levy workers for dung removal. We had gotten really good at quickly cleaning up wet muck in the levy building business. It seemed like a natural fit, this zoo dung removal business, and it was kind of fun to feed our carrots to hippopotami. But the zoo acquisition is another story.
So, I went to the zoo-keepers and told them about the hippo race. They gave me a look like you’d give someone at the time they suggest your hitch two hippopotami to a wagon and race them against a team of thoroughbreds. I reminded them that we regularly diverted rivers together, and they laughed, and said in an organic carrot farming sense of humor way, “Well, we’ll see what we can do Stan.”
-----------------Several Months Went By -----------------------------------
We got smoked on the first race. The hippopotami came in about as far behind a team of thoroughbreds as you could expect. But of course, the funny thing was. The thoroughbreds got beat by the zebra’s. (Remember the zebra’s were being run by one of the big dung pile middle-middles) But, I wasn’t discouraged. My hippopotami team lead and I like challenges. We formed a tiger team (no zoo pun intended) and set about improving our hippo’s performance. I’m not sure I should divulge the techniques we employed. It’s not something you can learn from a book, or blog for that matter. Its something you just know from experience. But I can tell you that we pretty much uncrated all the boxes and jumped out of the river to minimize the hippo dung spreading and figure out how to get those damn lazy ass carrot eaters moving. The next race we only lost to the thoroughbreds by like 30 feet. --Ten feet, the race after that. We actually tied the next race and beat the zebra’s too in the last race. But winning wasn’t as important as the fact we made such an improvement.
Now, given my hippopotami success story, while still farming carrots, efficiently managing a zoo and clearing half the bottom land in our departments territory for new farms, you’d think I get a pretty good if not amazing review. I suppose, I did. My upper-middle manager expounded on and on in my review blurb. He pointed out how much of an innovator I was. How I took on responsibilities far beyond my peers. How I could make the most impossible task look easy. How I could most likely handle greater challenges with ease. Then he said the only reason he didn’t rate me as exceeds expectations is because my team failed to win the most races this year. So, he rates me as meets expectations.
I was curious about this reasoning, so I made the mistake of asking. The upper-middle said, “What you did with the hippopotami teams was nothing short of amazing.” He said “If anyone was going to be able to do it, I knew it was going to be you.” But in the end, I had to give the edge to the middle-middle who won the most races.
Now, as I said earlier, that turned out to be the former zoo dung pile queen running the zebra team she had borrowed from me. I was puzzled given the facts of the race, so I asked another question I should of never. “Yeah but didn’t you expect her team to win? She was running zebra’s for Christ sake?”
He never hesitated a breath. “Hell no! She’s only every managed to pile dung. I was amazed she won, even with zebra’s. She exceeded my expectations. You didn’t”
You might note, that I’m a little confused at this point. I’m better than the people who exceeded expectations, but I don’t exceed the ones applied to me. I haven’t felt like this since I was placed in a ghetto school by a slight twist of fate in 11th grade for four months. The teachers there, all knew I was better than the average student. But rather than giving me A’s, I got B’s because they knew I was going somewhere and needed a challenge so I could strive for more. I sometimes wonder if those teachers ever grew up to be secretary of agriculture. Probably not, but I know I’m thinking of letting the hippo’s out of their cages tomorrow, and waltzing them down to the upper-upper’s (Sec of Ag’s) office. By the time they get done spreading carrot dung all over, the President will mentioning the dung piles in his review.
As for my upper-middle, well, I have these gibbons, that haven’t been out of the cage in a while. I won’t even mention what they can do with dung.
posted by Stan at 1:35 AM
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