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Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.
Several years ago I was hired as an underling in a division of a Fortune 50 corporation and made it to low-low level management. Here's some stuff accumulated over those three and a half years
Say it ain't so!
In the summer of 2000 allegations arose of inappropriate accounting practices by Xerox in Mexico. Initially Xerox proclaimed it was a small-scale problem limited only to overly greedy execs in Mexico. But Mexico didn't seem to be doing anything that I hadn't already sensed big Xerox doing. Soon in early 2001 the Wall Street Journal reported that the Mexico really was following the skanky 'best practices' exhibited by the company overall. This was soon denied by Xerox as "untrue and without merit" in a press release and an internal e-mail declaration.
As is the case so often with big organizations and celebrities, vehement and specific denial of wrongdoing is as good as a confession. The SEC soon found that the accounting techniques indeed ran all the way to the top of Xerox and has recently fined the President, the CEO, and the former CFO with a $22 million fine for cooking the books.
It makes me so glad that while it was nearly imposible to get decent wages for the employees I supervised, and even harder to get a raise for employees already hired, people in the tippy-top were doing and taking whatever they wanted. Hey execs: fuck you!
Xerox Business Services (XBS) Vice President of Sales William R. McDermott was in the right place at the right time. During a national economic boom with lots of businesses wanting to outsource their copier/document management needs the XBS division increased its business 30-45% annually for several consecutive years. This gave him sanction to offer metaphysical guidance to XBS employees.
Extemporaneous Wisdom of Baghwan Shree McDermott
Bill McDermott's remarks transcribed by me during a conference call:
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Bill does a layup at the start of a video launching "The Document Source" as a name brand for customer sites (Xerox employees wear polo shirts, inane posters made up, other sway). Watching the video makes me tense. I feel like I know all of the people, their anxiety and seething ready to spray out (3.5 MB). |
Xerography inventor Chester Carlson works on his Sales Android. |
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President Bill Clinton confers a blessing to McDermott, fellow Kennedy afficinado, with his thumb. Where that thumb has been one can only speculate. |
A movie sent to salespeople asking to add "throughput" (i.e. paper) into their customer accounts. Note how he cites historian Edward Gibbon before he starts. An erudite quote often precedes one of his communications (1.5MB). |
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Bill McDermott (in green shirt and white pants) shows Dorf-like contempt for gravity as he leans all over the place (237K) |
Excerpts from a brochure McDermott had mailed to the home of XBS employees titled "Success Ritual for the 24-Hour Person"
Click here to download the first brochure sent out along with supplemental materials sent in later phases (a large card and its companion, a letter from Baghwan McDermott, and one side then the other of 25th Hour wisdom)
| The opening of a video touting the arrival of Kickoff 1998 "Go 4 Growth". Note the co-opting of several important civil-rights slogans in the montage. Also note the voices of historical figures are imitated, not authentic. McDermott once again quotes a Kennedy to begin, and to finish quotes Martin Luther King Jr. McDermott also used "Keep your eye on the prize" many times to evoke and equate copier sales with major sociological struggles (9 MB). |
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The first part of an internal motivational video that came out at the end of 1998 to celebrate a wildly profitable year. The man at the start is Chester Carlson. Nice to see inventors have been twitchy for a while (2.6MB). |
Note the zen power struggle with the camera and the mock-Clinton facial expressions (e.g. mouth pursed in savory thought). The theme of the presentation is "Beyond Expectations" (6.4MB). A faux-swing song accompanied the rollout (MP3, 1.9MB) written by the same man who wrote the song below. |
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| The 1998 XBS Kickoff theme song "Go 4 Growth". The man pictured on the left wrote the song and worked in the same position I did: Customer Account Manager (CAM). At the local version of the Kickoff I provided a running commentary to this video. The results were traumatic: half the people in amused hysterics, others telling me essentially to shut up (8.4MB). | ||
Tips from the
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Here's a motivational speech [MP3, 8.3MB] McDermott gave regarding the DMSI program (Document Management Solutions Implementation), which attempted to coordinate salespeople who don't think logisitically with operational people who rarely interact face to face with the customer. I was placed somewhere in between as the DMSI coordinator for the Portland office. It was a shit post.
Where's Bill McDermott now? After working at Xerox for 17 years in May 2000 he left to become President of Gartner Group, Inc. Then in May 2001 he left Gartner to become Sales Chief for Siebel. In September 2002 he abruptly resigned from Siebel and in October 2002 took on the lead sales position in North America for SAP, Siebel's direct competitor. Wild stallions have to run, and run free.
Thank you, sensei.
Businessweek magazine came out with an excellent cover story on the troubles at Xerox, beyond what I saw from my cubicle and preceding the SEC fines mentioned above, which you can download for review (728 KB).
One of my favorite days at Xerox was the era of the e-mail storm in February 1999. The huge e-mail storm began in Xerox Brasil typed in Portuguese, a standard e-mail ruse involving a dying child's wish to have a message passed around. The message bounced around Brasil until it finally was sent to all Xerox employees. At that point people decided to respond that they didn't understand the message and rather then reply only to the sender, they selected "Reply All", which copied their complaint to all 100,000 employees again. Only two or three of us in the office found this amusing. My favorite remarks can be read here. Xerox later scolded everyone involved and estimated the cost of lost productivity and repairing the problem at $1 million.
More amusing documents:
A letter written for my friend Jon upon his departure. He started in a mailroom position, became a full-time lackey, finagled a Lead Account Associate position, then took advantage of security footage from the elevator to get promoted to System Analyst. You can read the whitewashed version on his resume here by following the link to "who?"
A letter written for my friend Joel upon his departure. Joel and I started work at Xerox on the same day and have tried several times to expand the Bill McDermott cult past the two of us, but didn't recruit more than a few amused spectators. Joel, know that the covenant we formed with Bill McDermott will be our MFR to salvation!
A vain attempt to raise the level of some Account Associates to something more exalted, and a possible raise. More pathetic than ha-ha funny.
The Xerox Quality Improvement Process and Problem Solving Process. For years our division sent all new employees to an asylum in Leesburg, Virginia to spend an entire week to study these two documents. In the three and a half years that followed I don't know if I was ever part of a group that successfully applied it.
One example of Xerox attempting to document its processes (330K). I've got loads of documents like these that I'm fond of, but you're likely bored already. Look at the price of Xerox shares over three years to appreciate how successful these processes have been. Note the drop immediately follows my departure from the company in early September 1999:
A Xerox-issue primer to psychology. This was part of a long training program to get people to understand that human beings have different personality types. Imagine twenty or thirty page documents reviewed over several hours with role-playing exercises and you can begin to appreciate the dull terror. Fortunately these seminars produced no effect whatsoever. The illustrated frolicking polar bears haunted many of us, until we imagined them turning around and mauling the people they were next to. Training sessions and questionaires like these motivated my friend Jon to create a mock quiz to alleviate the onset of madness.
An e-mail sent between myself and a manager two tiers above me and three times cooler. An employee under my charge was passive/aggressive and driven but not aware enough to get promoted to even the scum-sucking management level I was on. This other manager and I decided to test the employee's sarcasm meter by creating an issue out of the paper the employee stored in the other manager's cubicle. That manager was rarely in the office and it was the only space available for it, so it was a good decision. I asked the other manager to send me an e-mail describing/creating the problem and I would respond while copying in the employee. While the only pertinent part of either communication was the very last sentence of my response, the employee's reaction was what we predicted: defensive and while declaring the situation's stupidity, and going on the attack out of proportion to the pretend issue.
UPDATE: The person mentioned above fulfilled his dream and one morning was finally promoted to low-level manager, then by the afternoon the promotion was rescinded! Another year later he was promoted again, but banned from managing any people.
A detailed complaint regarding feedback I received from a Management Panel that evaluated my promotability. It was composed in rage at the time and caused several murmurs that I had just sabotaged my prospects at promotion. Within a few weeks I was promoted, perhaps just to shut me up. None of the people on the Panel were Managers six months later.
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