Objectify people as much as possible.
Let's face it if it wasn't for Barr's Iron Law of Mediocrity (People will work just hard enough not to get fired) most of your employees would be worth more to you for the chemicals you could extract from their bodies. Studying best practices from tyrants we find an important lesson: Treat people like the statistics that they are. I know all the management speak put out about "rallying the troops" and "fulfilling the corporate mission" but that's the dog and pony show for the purchasing public. The bottom line is that it is much easier to drive cattle than waste time dealing with individual personalities. If you treat people like the means to an end that they are its much easier to use them that way. Referring to "that guy in the 4th cubicle" is far more bossship-like than cluttering your mind and wasting brain cells remembering useless information about him like his name and (groan) his spouse and the endless tribe of children he's spawned because he was too lazy to go to the drugstore.

The cubicle is an excellent tool for objectification. Cubicles are really sensory deprivation chambers that allow you to limit interaction among the inmates. They provide sufficient amounts of isolation so they work against stuff like creativity. People who are objectified develop (for you) a healthy sense of alienation and depression. They stop trying to "be" somebody and just accept that their total meaning and purpose in life is determined by someone more important (you). You may even notice that they develop a slack bovine like expression. This means they are reaching a level of apathy conducive to useful manipulation. Good past tyrants provided just enough subsistence to make themselves and the organization indispensable to the individual cog. Worker/cogs get so tied up with just existing that they aren't going to develop any ambition to go elsewhere. The cubicle becomes their world. The cubicle's confines are easy for the worker/cog to understand and don't provide any challenges. The cubicle provides a nice secure level of objectification and anonymity. They can be king of their little cubicle. They can belong to a democracy of zeroes...where its virtuous to be zero. The workers are relieved of the need to make choices instead they are happy just to accept conclusions. Over time your workers begin to take on this objectified role and even strive to be "happy cogs" by doing things like competing to be more cog-like (whoever invented "employee of the month" deserves a bosship award).

Objectifying people is liberating. It's honest. You don't have to lie and say other people are important or "special" when they are redundant, boring, and consuming oxygen higher life forms could be using. Simple, direct, honest, and efficient, that’s objectification for you!

Since only 2-5% of the population is capable of natural prevarication; the rest of you Bosship candidates desperately need this tutorial to develop this key leadership skill. "Lie" is such a harsh word loaded with all kind of useless ethical baggage. Really what you are doing is prevaricating. What is prevarication? It's reengineering reality; to tailor reality to fit people's limited brain capacities and unlimited desires.

Now there is a lot of societal noise about business and ethics and telling the "truth" in business. Bosship transcends the usual standards of morality by realizing that most if not all people are trying to escape reality (e.g., just look at how much time employees spend watching mindless TV, playing video games and reading blog sites) or at most experience it only as tourists (e.g., the news). Bosship candidates accept the fact that people can't deal with reality beyond their pay grade. When the Bosship candidate prevaricates he is being generous…he doesn't want to burden people with more reality than they can handle. As boss, it is your obligation to tailor make reality to the capacities of the individual's you're dealing with. Laying too much reality on an ill equipped person is like teaching a pig to sing. (You waste your time and bore the pig.) Prevarication is not "bad" like your nanny told you, but a revelatory, almost prophetic gift for dramatic fiction. Like great authors and artists your prevarications are the great lies through which truth is told; you're artistically reengineering reality.

Before I get into the various forms of canard let me list some best practices to consider when applying your brush to the artistic reengineering of reality:

1. Prevaricate when needed --- Prevaricate whenever the full burden of the truth is beyond the capacities of most people. It's your job as boss to enlighten workers much like a Zen master…only to their capacity. Reality is on a need to know basis. Workers only need to know enough to do your work and make you look good. Why distract them with something like "downsizing" when you can reduce their confusion by telling them that "management is realigning its priorities?" They can't do anything about it anyway and it could negatively affect the amount of work they produce and make you look bad. Adults know there is no Santa but they play along with children until the children can handle the stark reality. Employees can handle the stark reality on their last day of work at quitting time.

2. Reengineer reality within shades of what is probable and possible; provide hope—Saying that the sun is changing the climate is unbelievable even though true, after all the sun is 93 million miles away and out of your control. It is much more believable that human exhalation, car farting and driving cars is changing the climate because it is more immediate and you can live with the delusion that now you are …"in control of your destiny." Telling workers at a job review that they are "in control" of their future and having them create job goals to achieve keeps them from getting depressed over the reality that their accomplishments have anything to do with their continued employment…or lack thereof. But hey, when they are in the unemployment line they can always look back to their attempts to "maximize optimal outcomes" when they were in charge of the budget for staples and paperclips.

3. Inhabit your prevarications with detailed quotes and sources --- You can become the authority about just about anything if you have enough sources and footnotes. Make references to obscure or out of print journals that could only be found by a week long search of the Library of Congress. Better still simply create facts out of thin air and have them repeated through your lackey system. A prevarication repeated enough times takes on a mythic reality of its own. It you get the word out that "everyone knows that marketing is due for a housecleaning" eventually people in marketing will live down to the estimate and your bosses will appreciate the opportunity to "save costs." Just remember "Barr's Law of Confirming Large Numbers"-- If you point at a cow paddy and call it chocolate mousse, loud enough and long enough eventually someone will return with a spoon and say, "I guess a million flies can't be wrong."

4. Good canards are good stories---The best prevarications are entertaining, detailed, possible and repeatable. Good canards distance people from the oppressive parts of reality that they are ill equipped to deal with. When your canards are repeatable they make you a resource; a "go to" person. A good bosship canard is like a puppet show entertaining a child in pain from a toothache. They forget the toothache by becoming involved in the story. Reality TV and CNN are great examples. By becoming involved in watching "American Idol" the adult employee is able to forget how talentless he is and how dull and pointless his life and work are. Be entertaining and tell people what they want to hear. Eventually they'll be blindsided by cruel and relentless facts that will knock them out of their delusional world. But in the mean time you might as well squeeze every ounce of productivity out of their soporific complacency. In the mean time tell them how "essential" they are to the team and build up their sense of self importance.

5. Speak with implication; add innuendo---Frame the parts of reality with contextual cues and suggestions that leave people inferring the type of reality you've intended. Spice it up with innuendo phrases that gets them to finish the picture for you For example, "Fred's department hasn't done that bad a job; it's not like someone's going to get a pink slip this week." Innuendo is great because it offers excellent leverage. The listener does all the work for you. It's like getting twice the sex for half the foreplay.

6. Prevaricate from humility--- Canards that come from or make you look superior generate a suspect reality. Remember people trust lies that appear to put them in control. Reengineering reality is a public service. Prevarication can make you look good by indirectly making others look bad. It's the old problem of improving the neighborhood. You could build a better house than everyone else….but then you'd put yourself out and be out of pocket a lot to money, not to mention everyone benefits at your expense….easier to just tear down some surrounding houses. If the company is performing poorly and you can massage your numbers to look mediocre in comparison don't point out the canard directly. Instead talk about the need for more "team work" or some other management speak and then pass out a comparative department graph displaying the company's poor performance with your high numbers tucked neatly in the report so that others will discover the comparison. When people discover a prevaricated truth on their own they are more likely to believe their judgment about it.

7. Emotions need to match the scope and size of the reengineered reality and make it come alive---If your canard is small don’t' build it big by over-acting. At the same time a good canard about a relatively insignificant issue can increase your leverage in the zero-sum game of Bosship. Put simply, there's a time to pound the table with your shoe and point out how your enemies are undermining profitability and other times when you've lost the company money that you stare blankly, smile sweetly and say, "I've never really minded the little things" or "These aren't the droids you're looking for…you can go about your business."

8. Stick to your story--- There's nothing more inartistic than to watch some Bosship wannabe back down and change their story to make up for a poorly designed prevarication! Even if people are demanding your head and begging you to confess, stick to your story. Repetition without variation is the bitch goddess of prevarication. People either give up out of exasperation, become confused and return to their sudoku puzzles, or shrug it off and move on. The bottom line is that a good prevarication outlasts most attempts to prove it wrong. People just don't have the staying power and they forget quickly.

9. Compartmentalize and deny--- Good prevarications should be made up of a series of partial truths any portion of which can be denied. This allows you to cut your losses…usually by letting some poor yutz pay the check by having to take the blame. However that isn't always the case. For example, someone points out you promised new health insurance and nothing has happened. Point out that you indeed did promise and you've kept your word, because keeping your word and maintaining the trust of others is very important to an effective team. Now about the health insurance, let's examine the meaning of health…Blah blah blah…and insurance…blah blah blah. That it's important to spread risk equitably but proportionally yet not in a counter negative way that would injure the long term profitability of the company…after all what good is having health insurance if the company can't afford to employ you? By breaking things down into points you can always "define down" a person's statement to the smallest and most unrelated denominators. Most people will get bored or confused. In either case, they will either lose interest or just hear the part about how you kept your word and how you talked about new health insurance. If things turn aggressive deny the accuser's version…one part at a time. This is the "I've never had sex with that woman" technique, or what I call "Didn't-say-that-wasn't-there." This leads into the next best practice.

10. All prevarications should generate doubt and confusion in the listener (or accuser) and then do the same with the facts---Tell simple canards in a complex way and complex canards in a simple way. Most people don't want to have to think and will do just about anything to avoid it. So leverage this human frailty and make it easy for them to just go along. Alternatively make your prevarication hard enough to keep track of by giving it as many parts or subparts that people don't want to task their brain with figuring it all out. At their best people can usually remember 7-9 bits of information. So you are going to need to plan on at least a 10 unit prevarication. If inconsistencies are pointed out just quiz them about an obscure portion. When they can't remember just say, "Geez, you're not ever paying attention!"This is also called the "Who's-on-first?" technique.

In part two of this tutorial I'll show you some very important prevarication techniques…