Sunday 20 June 2010

Middle Manager

Middle managers are office workers who have no purpose in an organisation other than to propagate their own spawn. They tend to be canny survivors. The genus has evolved a number of brilliant evolutionary tricks and extended phenotypes to confound, obfuscate, blur and generally confuse matters in a way which (i) isn't directly attributable to them (though it often leaves other office workers with a vague but unprovable sense that they're responsible) (ii) conceals the fact that, whatever else may be going on, they’re not really helping.

Middle managers communicate (or "dialogue") in their own idiom, known to their own kind as "English", but to everyone else as "management speak". In fact, it is only distantly related to English.

One of the most widely recognised phenotypes of the Middle Manager is PowerPoint which itself has contributed to the evolutionary development and cognitive architecture of management speak. Some theories (such as the business worker archetypes) define a middle manager purely by reference to its use of PowerPoint. Middle managers are also fond of (and much beloved by) Business Analysts.

Middle managers will call themselves many things, but never "middle managers". "Chief of Staff" and "Chief Operating Officer" are common and highly prized titles.

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