And because I know you’re eager to aggravate everyone you work with just as much as the next person, I thought I’d share a few time-honored techniques.  If you like the process of actually watching all the hope and joy leave a person’s face, then get ready for some fun times!

Schedule 1-on-1 Meetings That Could Have Been Accomplished with a Phone Call or Email!  There’s no substitute for personal contact.  Or wait a second…hold on…yes there is!  It’s called a phone call or an email, especially if the issue is a simple question/answer deal.  This technique is even more effective if you’ve scheduled the meeting at a coffee shop or somewhere off-site, since it will eat up an extra 30 minutes of travel time and a half gallon of gas, which last I checked was running about $50/gallon.  Thanks for helping jumpstart the economy!

Make Everyone at Your Meeting Talk Their Recent Successes and Applaud the Recent Successes of Everyone Else!  I know someone whose every monthly meeting involves a circle of self-affirmation where each team member has to talk about what he/she has done well this month, and then everyone else says things like, “Good job!” and “Way to open doors for us!”  And I know it’s true, because the person who told it to me is a really bad liar.

Listen, everyone needs validation, and everyone needs to feel like what they do is important and appreciated.  But everyone does not need that validation to come in the form of, “Hey, everybody, here’s what I did good yesterday.  Please listen and then praise me for it!”  This technique will appeal to roughly half of your team and seriously annoy the other half.  But why should you care?  Figuring out each of your employee’s particular motivators and structuring things accordingly is a whole lot of work.

Schedule Meetings at the End of the Day on Friday!  “For the love of everything holy, please just let me go home!  It’s not that I don’t like my job, I just want to see my family!”  “Not yet.  First we need to talk about all the issues that we’ll be dealing with next week.  I know you won’t be doing anything about them over the weekend, but I’d like you to start worrying about everything the second you walk out the door.”

Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to go find a drink.  Or four.  After what I just experienced, it has to happen.

Mark All of Your Products Up 10% Just Before Your “10% Off Everything Sale!”

This technique will only annoy those of your customers who were in your store a couple days ago, found something they liked, and then waited for the ‘sale.’  But whoops!  There isn’t really a sale, is there?  There’s just the illusion of a sale.  It’s like you’re a wizard or something!

Aggressively Push Warranties for Everything You Sell!

A friend of mine once told me that Best Buy makes most of its money on three items: TVs, appliances, and protection-plan warranties.  Another friend of mine once had a salesperson spend 20 minutes trying to pressure him into buying an insurance plan for his couch.  “Seriously, pal, this couch is rickety at best and a deathtrap at worst.  You never know when one of the springs is going to pop through the fabric and…well, let me just say it isn’t pretty.  And you’ll have to pay all those horrible medical expenses, unless you get our comprehensive couch protection plan.”  I don’t even want to think about the sales pitch that might accompany an insurance plan for feather dusters.

Refuse to Sell the Floor Model!

And now you know how I failed to buy something I wanted.  Here’s a dramatized version of our conversation:

ME:  “I would like to buy that desk.”

SALESPERSON:  “Ooh.  Sorry, you can’t.  This is the only one we have left.”

ME:  “I don’t see the problem.”

SALESPERSON:  “It’s the floor model.  We can’t sell the floor model.”

ME:  “Why?”

SALESPERSON:  “Because then people won’t know that they could buy this desk.”

ME:  “Which you won’t let them buy anyway because this is the only one you have left.”

SALESPERSON:  “Yes, but we’ll be getting more in soon.”

ME:  “So why can’t you sell this one to me and make one of those desks the floor model?”

SALESPERSON:  “Because it’ll take a couple days for the new desks to come in, and in the meantime we’d like people to know that we have these desks for sale.”

ME:  “Except you’re not actually going to sell any until the new desks come in.”

SALESPERSON:  “Exactly.”

I could go on, but pretty much after this point it just ended with me cursing quietly to myself, leaving, and going to another store to buy a similar desk.  Someday I think I’ll open up a store called “Floor Models!” and populate it entirely with single-stock items that I won’t sell to anyone.  That’d be fun!

So there you go, shopkeepers.  Give any of these techniques a try, and soon your customers will be flocking to Ye Olde Shoppe Across the Road from Yours.

Thankfully, a friend of mine has been kind enough to provide a topic for me.  She recently sat in a meeting where (as in common in meetings) nobody spoke any real words.  Instead they loaded up the truck with pseudo-fancy terms that do an excellent job of masking the fact that nobody has any idea what anybody else is talking about.  All hail the jargon fog!

So, in honor of that concept, I’d like to share a few terms with you today that will help you survive any meeting in which you feel like you are completely over your head.  Whatever you say will still probably not make any sense, but at least you’ll get your coworkers to nod thoughtfully as though they actually understood you.

Circle the wagons – There’s nothing like a phrase that literally has to be explained to everyone under 30.  “You see, Jim, back in the frontier days, when a wagon train was under threat of attack, the wagonmaster – yeah, that’s what they called him, I read it somewhere once – the wagonmaster would organize all of the wagons into a circle for a better defensive position.  So think of our products as wagons, and the market forces are, you know, like a tribe of barbarians that want to attack our wagons.  You follow me?”

Sea change – This literally makes absolutely no sense to anybody.  It actually derives from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” but if any of you can explain what it actually means, I will mail you a box of cookies and a signed, framed photograph of me wrestling a boar.  (Which I happen to have, just so you know.  Seriously, you can Photoshop anything these days.)

Piggyback – Nothing pleases me quite like the idea of a fully grown adult riding piggyback on a colleague’s shoulders.  Inexplicably, the phrase “I’d like to piggyback off of what Sally just said” is simultaneously considered more astute than “I’d like to add to what Sally just said” AND is somehow not considered sexual harassment.  Really, Todd, you’d like to piggyback on Sally there?  Sounds like a surefire trip to HR to me.

Any noun used as a verb – The one that comes to mind right now is ‘dialogue,’ but you can do this with literally any noun, and so you should.  Be creative!  Examples:  “I need you to rabbit that report to me ASAP” or “Let’s table this topic for a minute and telescope over to the next item on the agenda.”

There are a billion more here, people, but I’m going to go do something else now.  Feel free to share your favorites, though!  Seriously.  Do a big giant brain dump right here so we can get out of our silos.

Brain dump.  Nobody sees a potentially inappropriate connotation there?  Nobody?  Because I sure do.

In general, diversity is considered to be vital for the success of any institution.  The human body could not function without the intricate interworkings of its many diverse parts; a football team could not succeed without the masterful interplay between players at different positions with different skills and objectives.  In many cases, diversity is the key ingredient to give you any hope for success.

Which is why I’d like you to spend a lot of time thinking about farming.  See, farmers plant one type of crop on a given patch, but they can only do that for so long because that giant monocrop will eventually suck all the life out of the earth.  Then, at the end of the year, they harvest everything, and you’re left with a giant pile of dead stalks and leaves, a wasteland of emptiness where nothing will grow again for several months.

In a word – awesome.

So there you go, folks.  Strive to make everyone in your business operate identically to everyone else, and soon you too can stand proudly at your office window and gaze out upon the brown, barren, lifeless vista you’ve helped create.   Have them do the same thing over and over and over again until you suck the life out of them the way that monoculture sucks the life out of the ground.  You can do it.  I know you can.

(I grew up around a lot of corn.  In case you’re wondering.)

Anyway, I come in contact with a few dozen associations every year, and I know that 99% of them are looking for new members.  But I’ve wandered through a few associations that will never get any new members, because the things they’re doing are not new-member-friendly.  And since we all know that new people are both scary and evil, I thought I’d share some of their techniques so that you too can keep strangers at bay for the rest of your life.

Don’t Say Hello! – New members always have the new-kid-at-school look about them.  They stand off by themselves, nursing a drink and hoping that somebody will introduce them to the circle of cool people.  Which is why you should ignore them like everyone else is.  They’re not cool.  If they were cool, they’d already be in the circle of cool people.  And if you talk to them, you’ll lose your status as a cool person.  And then who’s going to go with you to Prom?

Don’t Explain What Your Group Really Does! – If there’s anything more amazing than having absolutely no idea what a given association does or how it might help you professionally, I don’t know what it is.  The best advocates of this approach will end every sentence with, “You should really just go check out the website.”

“But you’re right here, in front of me, and you can make words like I can.  Couldn’t you just, you know, tell me what you guys do?”

“I said you should check. Out. The. Website.  Good day, sir.”

Fail to Update Your Website!  I’ve seen some of them that are literally two years out of date.  You’d assume that those associations wouldn’t exist anymore, wouldn’t you?  I sure would.  But that’s not always the case.  This is also a stellar tactic if you’ve just told me to check out the website, by the way.

Enjoy, my fine readers, and good luck.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a purge to conduct.  Somebody took the last piece of cheesecake off the buffet table before I could get to it, and that somebody has to pay.

However, you should also be aware of the fact that the Mayan calendar has predicted that the apocalypse is set to arrive sometime around December of this year.  I’m pretty sure they knew what they were talking about, because John Cusack was in a movie about it.  So I don’t see a whole lot of reason for you to plan anything long-term.

Fortunately for you, I have a few ideas that should help you cope with the impending end of the world.

Don’t follow up! – If somebody doesn’t return your phone call right away, it’s probably because they don’t like you.  And why should you bother pestering them?  The world is going to end soon; the last thing you should be doing is trying to close a difficult sale.

Tell Everyone What You Really Think of Them! – I’m not exactly sure why this implies that you’ve secreted disliked the people around you forever and are only now giving yourself permission to say so, but that’s apparently what this phrase means.  So get to work.  They’ve been a thorn in your side for long enough.

Wake Up Late! – In a world full of impending doom, there is absolutely no cause to be setting an alarm clock.

Make Risky Investments! – Ideal options here include wagering all of your assets on double-zero at the roulette wheel, or betting everything you own that Donald Trump will never again pretend to run for president.

These are just the ideas that came to me; I’m sure if I spent some more time thinking about it that I could come up with things more immediately relevant to your business.  But why should I bother?  The world is about to end, and I’ve got better things to do than think.  I’ve got panic room rations to start collecting.

Happy New Year!

Repeat after me.  Do this out loud, please, and in company.

I resolve to give myself a larger bonus next year, which I will fund by getting rid of my company’s 401K matching policy.

I resolve to drink the last cup of breakroom coffee at 9:14am and not brew another pot because I know I won’t need another cup.

I resolve not to answer my cell phone unless the person calling outranks me.

I resolve to be at least 15 minutes late to every meeting that I schedule, and to leave 15 minutes early from every meeting that I’m forced to attend.

I resolve to ISSUE ORDERS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS SO THAT PEOPLE APPRECIATE HOW IMPORTANT MY REQUESTS ARE!

I resolve to tell everyone how amazing my latest vacation was, and to showcase pictures of all of my new purchases.

And last, at least for today, I resolve to pay less attention to my personal hygiene and stand closer to people while talking to them.  It’s a new year.  I deserve this.

Happy merry holidaytime, everyone!