Recently I was asked to give a speech about Bosship to a group of Bosship candidates. Here is a transcript of the speech:

I look around the room today and I see a lot of people with shining futures behind them. If you don't believe me look to your right and left….Okay now realize that 2 out of 3 people have a terminally low self concept and if they didn't they do now. Two thirds of you are pretty hopeless. You're never going to amount to anything. Now the remaining 1/3rd with a high self concept? You're deluded. You woke up one day and thought you could be somebody. The organization doesn't need that type of novelty. You'll make a lot of fuss and bother about "fighting for an ideal," "servant leadership," "being more creative," or "saving the company money" as if it was really going to change something. That's the trouble with motivation….its just as addictive and mind altering as crack, but it has more collateral damage. You're trying to shore up your ego with the notion that you "can make a difference" when you're just being different in the same way as the other 2/3rds. Congratulations, you've found a unique way to express your insecurity. Stop wasting your time thinking. Stop trying to come up with "new" strategies. First of all no one asked you to think and second its probably just going to get you in trouble. All that crap you hear about "showing initiative" all sounds good, but it's really a terribly bad idea if you want to get ahead. Why run risks when you could just accept what you're told? Let some eager beaver idealist with no future play pointman. Someone's got to take the first hit. You can use his body for cover. There's nothing more dangerous than introducing change that threatens the way an organization does things. Who the hell do you think you are?! Get over yourself! You don't matter in the larger scheme of things. Avoid change, hunker down and conform and you'll get a paycheck every 2 weeks. There are perks for embracing SOP. Organizations love you until you are an exception to the rules. Then you're just a malfunction the system can live without. So if you like that paycheck, health benefits, vacations, etc. stop thinking and make a more concerted effort to make the system happy.

Now profits…A lot of you have been told to be concerned about profits. If you've been permanently damaged by the MBA experience you've read tons of case studies about profitable companies. Before moving on lets understand what we're talking about. "Profit" consists of sales-product costs-labor costs-taxes/interest, and since labor is the bulk of costs the surest way to increase profits is to get fewer people to do more work so you'll earn more out of proportion to your contribution. It's about leveraging your employees to do more for less while you buy a beach house in the Hamptons with the money you saved by not providing health insurance. It's turning the employee pension fund into a college education for your kid by "converting" it to some private ownership plan run by Flibinite Investments in Ogallah, N.D. Profits are good. It's how you go about getting them that gets you in trouble. What is a bosship candidate to do in the context of industrial turmoil, technological change, outsourcing and offshoring. Simple…cut corners and take the shortest available route to profitability while doing the least amount of work. Shareholders are concerned about whether you made this quarters projections and secondarily how you did it. Remember you can justify just about anything in the name of shareholder value, short of killing the CEO…and you can probably get away with that if it results in an extraordinary dividend.

Now whenever you make a profit someone (usually a politician who doesn't own stock) will accuse you of being greedy. Well as St. Gordon Gecko said, "Greed is good." If you notice it's always poor people that whine about greed. "It's evil to have what I'm too lazy to earn so you must be evil for having it. Oh…and by the way the government should take it away from you and give it to me." Poor people are just competing with you using the government. They'll go out and vote once a year for whatever political pimp is willing to show them a good time on your dime. Poor people are just like you except they have a whole lot less and whine about it to Lou Dobbs while they collect unemployment, welfare and their earned income credit. Just remember what St. Jay Gould said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

That reminds me. A lot of you aren't delegating blame very effectively. You know how I know that? Look at how many of you are here today! There should be about half as many here! The rest of you should have already been used as a corporate wet nap to clean up somebody else's negative outcome. The road to corporate success lies on the career corpses of your fellow workers. If you're still listening to this part of the speech then someone else has already probably come up with a way to throw you under the train.

That brings me to the next subject. The List. You need to have one if you don't already. This is basically for underlings because anyone at your level or higher knows how the game is played. You need to be walking around and periodically announcing, "Okay Jones, you're on THE LIST!" preferably when the person hasn't done anything wrong. This will create distancing behavior on the part of other employees as if Jones was recognized as having Bird Flu. Making The List should seem entirely arbitrary, and in fact it may will maybe. The point is The List maintains high levels of anxiety and employee friction. You can use any loss in productivity to axe some people and add to your income. A particularly effective method combines The List with management du jour buzz phrases like, "Jones! You're not a team player. You're on The List!" Of course this places everyone else on the "team". This is an excellent tool for building a group of lickspittles, lackeys, and flunkies.

Many of you will never earn out of proportion to you actual work because you fail to embrace Barr's Iron Law of Mediocrity—(People will only work hard enough not to get fired.) That's because you still have a little bit of conscience left. You still have a sliver of belief that people can be motivated and can learn to get something intrinsic and ennobling out of work. The real problem is in some way shape or form you are letting your employee's work have meaning! The whole point of work is for the employee to realize the futility of individual effort. They're not supposed to be getting anything out of work! They shouldn't be getting better at what they do! In fact the more disconnected and unrelated their activities are, the more soulless work becomes for them. If your employees aren't alienated, you're not doing your job. They depend on you to keep work pointless! Do your job and make them do your job! When you earn the "Dante's Inferno Award" from Bosship.com and can proudly put "Abandon all hope all ye who enter here" above your department you'll have successfully reduced each employee's work to a set of purposeless output and them to ciphers. They'll stop wasting time and resources trying to do better rather than just doing what they're told. When I walk into a business and see a lot of slack bovine expressions on employees that have lost all sense of self, other than that which prevents them from committing suicide (on company time) I know someone truly understands, "The Law." Work on you demotivators. When some employee comes up with an idea point out, "If it was such a good idea I would have already come up with it. Now quit wasting company time thinking and do your job!" or "Let's have an intelligent conversation….I'll talk."

Which is what I've been doing for the past few minutes. Other than being paid to speak I look around and see it was a total waste of my time. I'm reminded of the time I gave a "motivational" speech to a group who was trying to build their self esteem. When I asked for questions somebody raised his hand. I pointed and said, "Yeah let's hear from the short dumpy guy in the back with the ill fitting suit that his mother bought for him at Sears." I don't know why I mention that now other than this guy in the front row reminds me of him…except you have really bad dandruff too. Thanks for paying me for nothing. If you happen to see me outside, don't come up to ask questions or talk to me. You'd probably bore me to death. Besides I'll call security.