By The Informer

The business world is like the real world, but with everything slightly altered. That’s because, in the real world, we’re not constantly under pressure to appear to be productive. If we want to spend days on end slumped on the sofa in front of the cricket we can, although as the Informer can confirm, dissent from those close to you is never far away.

This is why we have evolved a parallel language that we only use in a business context, to make it look like we’re busier and more productive than we actually are. It’s one thing to say you’re busy, but saying “I don’t have the bandwidth” sounds far more impressive. Merely using something isn’t going to get you that big promotion, but if you leverage it they’ll make you CEO in a flash. But you need to move fast, or even better: transition aggressively.

And then there are the subdivisions of ‘doing things’. It occurred to the Informer upon receiving news of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) recently, that actually doing something is the culmination of a potentially infinite number of preliminary stages. The great thing about each of these stages is that they provide the business person with a clear increment of progress to use as collateral when challenged by their boss.

“Have you actually achieved anything at all today?” said boss might enquire.

“I’m pleased you asked,” the business person would reply. “I drafted an MOU.”

“Wow,” beams the proud boss. “You’re really on fire today – have a promotion and unlimited use of my private jet.”

But you don’t want to use all your collateral up in one gesture. There’s no point in expending a full MOU when a mere meeting would get the job done. So an empirical system of measuring these increments of tangible productivity is required and the Informer would like to propose the following:

10 PowerPoint presentations = 1 achievement

10 internal memos = 1 PowerPoint presentation

10 MOUs = 1 internal memo

10 mission statements = 1 MOU

10 meetings – 1 mission statement

10 emails = 1 meeting

So 1 email = a millionth of an achievement, or 1 microachievement.

Anyway. That’s quite enough productivity for one day. The Informer is going to take a well-earned break for a month, so see you in September.

Take care.

The Informer