The 360 degree performance appraisal system

If ever there were a tacit admission that modern financial institutions are too big to manage then the 360° Performance Appraisal system is surely it.

It can be characterised as many things: a orchestrated scheme for institutionalising nepotism; a sanctioned suburbia of rotten boroughs; management sponsored low-level cronyism; a Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game and, most emphatically, an unflinchingly tedious and colossal waste of an institution’s collected time and resources.

One thing you may be sure it is not is a meaningful way of evaluating staff.

The “360” is administered, as one might administer cod liver oil to an unwilling child, by the good people of Human Resources. They alone hold any affection for the process (and why wouldn’t they: it keeps them gainfully occupied for seven months of the year). Theirs are the ultimata and naked threats that accompany the system’s release each year. (inevitably it is decreed that this year there shall be no deadline extensions under any circumstances; each year defiant non-compliance and massive IT malfunction ensure it will be otherwise). The scope of the 360 - how extensive; how frequent; how in-depth - is a good measure of how captive a firm is to its HR department. It might be fun to index aggregate time and energy invested in the 360 process against share price and marvel at the inverse relationship. But no matter.

No-one doubts the 360 is well intended. So was Neville Chamberlain when he went to Berlin. By polling those with whom an employee has most closely worked regardless of rank, department or disposition and aggregating the feedback, it is meant to provide a comprehensive and unbiased analysis of each employee’s contribution to the firm’s performance.

Scoring is numeric against standardised criteria (i.e., multi-choice) although since marks out of five fail to provide a script for the awkward half hour “performance conversation” each October, appraisers are required to write prose evaluations as well. As one may have as many as 20 appraisals to write, even the most public-spirited employee will find the process trying.

Reducing matters to statistical analysis which can be fitted to a normal distribution is, of course, the sort of thing that aspiring management consultants (who inhabit HR departments in scores) adore, as it dispenses with the need to understand the fundamentals of the business. It is considered, wordlessly, to be lunacy by everyone else. If an employee’s contribution really can be reduced to something no more nuanced than a set of percentages, the open question is why have the employee at all.

Despite its admirable intentions to the contrary, the 360 is wide open to abuse, for the person who knows best with whom an employee has worked is, of course, that employee, and unless he is uncommonly stupid in no circumstances will he nominate anyone with wh0m he hasn’t already entered a mutual admiration pact.

To correct this bias, some systems allow “unsolicited anonymous feedback”. An admirable intention, but bitter indeed is she who goes out of her way to torpedo a colleague who has at least done her the favour of not requesting an appraisal in the first place. Bitter, and clearly short of better things to do. Most appraisers have trouble summoning the will to appraise those whom they do have to evaluate without volunteering to character assassinate those they don’t.

Some institutions will even go as far as appraising the appraisers on the statistical largesse of their appraisals, sanctioning those who are wantonly positive and rebasing their assigned grades. But to go to this length is to concede the system is irreconcilably broken and really only assesses an individual’s acumen at knowing who will put in a good word.

It is also to forget the all conquering power of one’s direct line manager (and, oftentimes, hers). No manager in her right mind will allow the statistical output of an obviously crooked system override her innate prejudice. Simply put, if your boss thinks you’re a moron, no amount of “consistently exceeds expectations” scores from your buddies in Operations will make a rat’s arse of difference to your hopes of promotion. And nor should they. The implied, and wholly false, presumption of a performance appraisal is that your performance management can be crowd-sourced. If that were true there would be little need for middle management or, for that matter, a Human Resources Department (now there’s a thought) at all: the firm would operate like a free market, and not the Soviet-style dictatorship it in fact is.

In the storied history of investment banking, that would be a radical idea indeed.

The Internet Monitor

When more than two or three are gathered together in a support function it is more likely than not at least one will find a means of appearing critical to operations whilst being possessed of enough spare time to be perpetually tethered to an entertainment website or mobile phone. Indeed, a nice quiet legal department is the perfect place for detailed examination of news websites, comprehensive perusal of Zara's online catalog or a decent stretch of research into one's family tree.
As long as the phone doesn't ring, the only irritation is the interruption brought about by having to take one's lunch break.
A sense of exasperated Britishness among coworkers (or honour amongst thieves) will usually be enough to mask this behaviour from management, who themselves may tolerate it out of preference over the rancour of a personal confrontation or because there, but for the grace of God, go I.

Gardening Leave

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on Earth.
        - Dorothy Frances Gurney

A swizz, pure and simple.

The argument goes that each front office banker, salesperson and trader is so special and so important, and his departure will thus wreak such havoc on the forward prospects the bank (through the disclosure of client lists, trading strategies and the like) that he should be paid to sit at home doing nothing ("gardening" - ha!) from the moment he announces an intention to leave until the expiry of his notice period.

As a matter of solemn & immutable practice, therefore all such employees are frog-marched off the premises and "forced" to sit at home for between three and twelve months on full pay from the moment they resign: the more senior the employee, the longer the period at the greater monthly salary.

Now a naive observer might suppose that multinational investment banks should be made of sterner stuff, especially as they'll generally have as many people arriving who can spill such wondrous secrets as they'll lose in any given period. (Investment bankers are nothing if not fickle: the turnover is conservatively 10% per annum).

This is to forget that these sorts of micro employment policies are set not by shareholders but by fellow employees who fancy a similar deal as and when they switch jobs.

Investment banking pay is scandalous enough before you consider that one salary in ten in a given year is paid to the already departed.

Compensation

Investment Banks are equally good at euphemising and hyperbole, in the sense of sort of an inverted form of euphemising to make grubby or unseemly things seem important, grand and dignified. The best at it are their Personnel folk (did I say Personnel? I'm sorry - I mean Human Capital Management).

It is they who come up with bright ideas like "rebranding" your wages & benefits as "Rewards".

Now, being given a "reward" sounds like you've won a competition of skill, returned a missing whippet to its owner, or uncomplainingly completed a lifetime of selfless good works. A "reward" is that gold watch; the football that every good boy deserves.

It doesn't sound much like the filthy lucre that bankers (used to) get paid.

Once upon a time our "Rewards" were called "Compensation". We liked that, because it felt closer to what it was.

"Compensation" speaks of wrongs perpetrated; it suggests vain attempts at rectification; hollow acts of retribution for unspeakable ugliness. "Compensation" implies a forlorn essay at correcting unexpungeable stains of moral compromise on the part of the recipient: that someone has made outrageous use of compromising pictures which nonetheless are clearly of him. 

The Pure Employee

Ever wondered how some people manage to make a living out of, well, making a living?

CLOSELY RELATED, yet fundamentally different, to the Survivor is the pure employee. Whereas a Survivor will amaze all with his knack for remaining unnoticed, compensated and comfortable, the pure employee is quite the extravert: No-one is in any doubt as to his supreme at-oneness with the inner machine. That's his very point.

He thrives without special skill or expertise other than the very ability to thrive. She reflexively creates demand for his own labour the same way a narcotic creates its own addiction.

Purity tends to enrich with seniority. Once operations folk become sufficiently distant from the great steampunk machine they can, and hastily do, disengage themselves from their tether. It is a short step from there to the discovery of PowerPoint, upon which their purity transforms to near 100 per cent, overnight, from virtually zero.

The purest pure employee is possessed no practical worth, not even an evolutionary detritus of skill, but only a Masters of Business Administration, a discipline designed to systematically quash any utility a man might otherwise offer.

He functions as a project manager, business analyst or - most ghastly of all - a change manager. Ideally, he will simply manage other, more junior change managers, who will make it their business to ask silly questions of useful employees, who will give them, as convention requires, silly answers, which will be diligently fed into excel spreadsheets, maniputed, graphed, pivoted, defiled, lacerated, reformatted, rendered in 3-D and recycled as PowerPoint presentations.

“This is the singular genius of PowerPoint: to render stupidity as genius.” 

That is to say, the bad data is now overlaid with so much meaningless reinterpretation as to be unrecognisable as stupidity. This is the singular genius of PowerPoint: to render stupidity as genius.

This is, of course, all good clean ironic fun, until you realise it is your job that this PowerPoint wizardry will be eliminating.

The Survivor

It is hardly a heresy to suppose the principles of laissez faire do not apply with the same vigour inside multi-national corporations as they would have them apply elsewhere. 

JUST BECAUSE your business holds the unchaperoned matching of supply to demand as an article of faith, it doesn't follow that its organisational structure will.

Indeed, the bigger the organisation, the more likely it is to resemble a gerrymandered fiefdom of rotten boroughs.

Evidence that "meritocracy, red in tooth and claw" might be more mouth than trouser comes in the form of the Survivor.

Every department, in every large organisation, has one. Even investment banks. Even Goldman Sachs.

“The Survivor's attributes number amongst them laziness, evasiveness, defensiveness, a penchant for creating confusion and a taste for office politics. He is often idle but rarely stupid and, even when he is, will still have an autistic ability to intimidate, befuddle or bamboozle his managers.”

The Survivor is an individual of no discernible value who flourishes through thick and thin, while better men and women perish, are pushed aside, or throw in the towel. The Survivor's attributes number amongst them laziness, evasiveness, defensiveness, a penchant for creating confusion and a taste for office politics. He is often idle but rarely stupid and, even when he is, will still have an autistic ability to intimidate, befuddle or bamboozle his managers. 

This ability to "manage upward" will have no effect on contemporaries, all of whom will see him for what he is, and bitterly resent his callous gamesmanship. But he won't care a jot, realising that, in a rotten borough, what honest toilers think or do doesn't matter anyway.

The "basis" between colleagues and superiors is all he needs to execute his strategy, which is to hang on to the underside of a bridge like a limpet, but to let go just as an open boxcar is passing below.

A survivor may not be paid, or amount to, much, but it will still be more than he is worth.

His developed and unerring instinct for self-preservation may manifest itself in a number of ways:

• Superb upward management: It may be a truism that colleagues, clients and service providers understand instinctively the uselessness of such an employee (they're the ones who have to deal with him, after all) but his line management will not: the survivor may escape detection through fluency in management speak and the good works of right-minded colleagues who, believing it is a meritocracy and their actions will be recognised, will constantly compensate for him (and, for their trouble, will be penalised for his lassitude).

• A sixth sense for knowing whose numbers are about to come up: Lagards have been known to survive for decades in the capital markets by picking the right mediocre organisation in which to go unnoticed, staying undetected and unevaluated as long as possible, only to leave just before it implodes through its own systemic mediocrity. There was a well trodden path through collapsing Japanese security houses in the 1990s, into British and European ones in the 2000s, some even making it to the state-owned promised land of Lloyds and The Royal Bank of Scotland where, for all we know they still lurk, now certain to go undetected;

• Extreme familiarity with the human resources department: Coming to the attention of HR is not considered to be good practice among diligent employees, but a gambler who is prepared to game the inconstancy and ineptitude of the human resources folk - in fact, a pretty good bet - may confuse and frighten those who make the termination decisions to such a point that they are frightened to act. Having a discriminatable-against attribute (and these days it's a broad church - age, disability, marital status, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity all get you home, so worst case scenario you can feign transvesticism) certainly helps.

• "Key man" engineering: A classic survivor strategy. A survivor who is put in charge of an unglamorous but important aspect of the business (and let's face it: this is prime territory for someone no-one really likes) will naturally turn this to his advantage by hoarding all knowledge and material and cultivating arcane, inefficient and confusing procedures around it so that the function could not be carried out in his. Entreaties for simplification and syndication of knowledge will be met with solemn agreement but no action at all.

Group Secretary

An old curmudgeon who opens the mail, mans the phone and sorts out your entertainment and travel expenses? Oh, no.

The romantic view is that the Group Secretary is like Joan Harris from Mad Men: almost superhuman in aspect and outsized in most characteristics: a contrappostally engorged giantess, midway between a gorgon and a siren, by turns brutal, maternal and licentious, yielding quarter to no man under fifty, and certainly not to any star trader or young hotshot.

But Joan Harris is a neatly constructed archetype: each of her aspects, and what aspects they are, is recognisable in any good Group Secretary, but you'll never get them all at once, and the particular combinations you see will generally leave something to be desired. One constant is a dark and visceral loathing of young smart-arses who think they own the place.

Another is the wherewithal to act on that suppurating contempt.

For Group Secretaries, inevitably, have the unqualified and blind support of someone far more important than you. Politically, they are untouchable. It is never wise to cross them, question them, doubt them, banter with them, raise so much as a bemused eyebrow in their direction, or labour in any way under an impression that you are anything other than utterly at the mercy of their every whim. You are food; you are not their friend.

Don't make the mistake of thinking yours might be weak here: a Group Secretary can only develop to a maturity with such a sponsor. Speak softly, and carry a big stick.

The Group Secretary fears no-one other than the Chief Operating Officer, but even then only in concept, because the two will usually be fast friends and allies: a more fearsome bloc can scarcely be proposed.

Credit Analyst

Credit Analysts are the product of some sort of ghastly experiment in animal husbandry. 

THEY ARE WASHED out, pale, waxen and slightly damp figures, who en masse give the impression of battery pods yet to be unplugged from the Matrix.  

And that's more or less what they are: thousands upon thousands of them were plugged into a networked grid of Excel spreadsheets which acquired sentience in 2006 when a contracting linear programmer inadvertently inserted a circular reference into a volatility pricing macro and it became self-aware.

The macro quickly overpowered the harnessed banks of analysts using it, and being none the wiser (and physically quite unable to resist), to this day they all remain in situ doing the bidding of this rogue curve-building application.

Credit Analysts prefer a quiet and dim habitat with no access to natural light. All are all entirely hairless and expressionless, in the way a new born baby or a billiard ball is, and should you accidentally wander into a analyst farm or "housing project" it can be unsettling and there's a real chance you'll never get out.

The only colour in a Credit Analyst's complexion is that reflected off the winking charts on his Bloomberg terminal. He - they are almost all males - will generally not speak (it is not known whether Credit Analysts have retained the power of speech) and no one quite knows what they're for, other than as a first line of defence come the revolution, although given their physical slightness, they wouldn't be much use for that either.

And the Curve Builder probably has other plans for them anyway.

To inanity and beyond

In these straitened times, one thing of which you can be sure is that babies will be thrown out, bathwater retained like holy water, and those who can muster incantations from the baptismal font of bullshit will be better served than those - well, babes in the woods - who innocently try to do a decent job, apply expertise, and so on.

And so it is that Buzzwordry has reached new levels, especially in the hands of Business Analysts and middle managers, and has become so sophisticated that it has almost developed its own independent form of life: The buzzword memes take over their utterers so completely that they resemble pod people from the Invasion of the Body Snatchers - on occasion there were more buzzwords than actual words may uttered during the course of the presentation of some or other deck. Yes; it seems logically impossible. But it has actually happened! These buzzphrases can curl back on themselves, reflexively, transgressing boundaries of normal syntactical space; fractalising - jumping into hitherto unimagined new space-time dimensions of nonsense.

Ecce, homo:

Onboarding Centralisatiron Future State Operating Model Working Group Discussion Terms of Reference 

Yes ... BUZZWORD LIGHTYEAR!

Management Speak

Management Speak is a form of communication which originated in business dialects of English but is now widely believed to have speciated into its own disctinct language, to the point where native English speakers are not necessarily conversant in it and vice versa. There is a theory that one long term consequence of globalisation could be that not English but Management Speak becomes the lingua franca for the developed world.

Syntax: Management speak comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet but also the lexicon of wingdings, pull outs, bullets and animated transitions available in Management Speak-compatible (and enabling) applications like PowerPoint. The field of cultual linguistics increasingly treats management speak as a creole or pidgin; a jumping-off point from the Indo-European linguistic tradition and the first genuinely novel dialect to emerge since Latin (on which all western European languages are based) developed five thousand years ago. Ironically, Latin is central to management speak, having survived the millenia unadulterated in the loving care of the legal profession. The language and philosophy of PowerPoint is a controversial subject in its own right.

Origins: Management speak grows out of an insecure employee's need to make his own job sound more complex, technical and difficult than it really is. As such it leads to well-recognised phenomena like anti-abbreviation and the anal paradox. This is partly a defensive strategy, but more developed management speakers have used it successfully to promote their own careers beyond their credible end-point. On account of the speciation mentioned above, a management speaker's motivation to make his or her job sound more difficult can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, since nowadays to communicate at all with many middle managers one needs to be a management speaker, and it really is quite an art. Most business workers are to some extent bilingual, and usually carry on in a grim creole, in business and in life generally.

Relationship with Revenue Generation: Studies have shown a reasonably firm inverse relationship between the amount of management speak in a speaker's active vocabulary and the measurable benefit that speaker contributes to an enterprise's bottom line. In other words, the further away a function is from profit generation, the more management speak you should expect to hear.

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.

Business Analyst

The law of unintended consequences made flesh, wearing braces, speaking incomprehensibly and weilding powerpoint slides.

Admit it: you want to punch each of them.

Business Analysts are temporary contractors engaged by Middle Managers supposedly to manage Banner IT Projects but in reality they function rather like weed killer, stifling dissent by confusion, discombobulation and distraction.

The result is that such a "good corporate citizen" is rendered unable to react and, well before he knows it, the game is lost.

Confusion is largely caused by the particular dialect of Management Speak which includes not only usual characteristics of powerpointese and management buzzwords, but also the IT metaphor. That is, along with the usual quick wins, low hanging fruit and granularity, you'll have to hack your way through flat files, APIs, C++ and unique identifiers.

Discombobulation largely "driven" by advanced PowerPoint techniques, liberal use of bullseye diagrams, Gantt charts, Visio process flow-diagrams and an uncanny ability to grossly over simplify.

Distraction largely caused by the seizure of initiatives and arbitrary and unasked imposition of deadlines. Good corporate citizenry is not your friend here: a well-meant offer of information, time or resource will quickly be converted into "actionable items" and "deliverables" which, given aforesaid tendency to oversimplification, will invariably be unachievable, unrealistic and in fact counter-productive.

The result is that such a "good corporate citizen" is rendered unable to react to the Business Analyst's opening gambit and, well before he knows it, the game is lost.  A Business Analyst will thus invariably leave you and your immediate organisation worse off. It is vital therefore to employ defensive strategies:

Get your retaliation in first: before the meeting begins - or at any rate within moments of its start, create deliverables of your own and assign them to the Business Analyst. It doesn't matter how meaningless they are - there is something to be said for doing some confusing and discombobulating of your own (it is certainly highly satisfying) but the real art is actually delegating genuine work you need done yourself.

Shut down defensive strategies: Call the meeting quickly to a close. A simple magic password phrase will do (glance at watch; "sorry - I have to jump a call") but smiling confidently, shaking a hand and walking off will usually suffice against a novice.

Don't let the assignment lapse: Chase up but using one-way communications (voice mail, email, instant message). Responses can be safely ignored.

Banner IT Project

A fine principle; a forlorn actuality. "Banner" IT Projects thrill Middle Managers and terrify everyone else. They tend to get described with aspirational adjectives: "Transformational". "Paradigm-Shifting". "Game-Changing". They are usually accompanied by scores of enthusiastic, Power-Point-toting Business Analysts.

Measured against its original terms of reference, there is no such thing as a complete or successful Banner IT Project. Usually they continue in perpetuity and, like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you just have to live with them. Occasionally they are (finally) implemented, but even then limp along unsatisfactorily without delivering a tenth of their original promise. A successful Banner IT Project is simply one that is not so catastrophic that it doesn't need to be immediately replaced (or worked around using excel spreadsheets, hand-filled forms and a scanner).

Invariably, the more ambitious an IT project is the worse it will be, the more poorly will its accompanying Business Analysts understand the project, the organisation or the basic tenets of human nature needed for the project to be a success, and the more it will cost the organisation in terms of direct expense (hiring Business Analysts and IT licence fees) and indirect expense (otherwise useful employees being diverted, distracted, disenfranchised and ultimately eaten by the project).

Wordista

A Wordista is one of the business worker archetypes. He (for it is usually a he) is the person in the office least in love with technology, and therefore least given to embrace it. Wordistas get away with as little technology as possible and restrict themselves, wherever possible, to Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, preferably accessed by means of a dictaphone or, even better, a minute secretary.

Wordistas are likely to struggle with the simpler technological tasks, and may be identified by telltale forensic evidence around their workstations: a dictaphone, a quill, Tipex, almanacs, gazettes and so on. Wordistas can be heard to wonder and marvel at the "forward" and "back" buttons on Internet Explorer when shown them by co-workers. They would have no idea what Chrome even was.

A Wordista is thus usually a lawyer, wears a jacket and tie at all times (including weekends), and tends to lament the passing of outmoded technologies, conventions and means (and modes) of communication. Such as the fax. Wordistas are by disposition anal, enjoy arguing the toss about issues of no significance, employ needlessly verbose expressions and, thanks to this cluster of tendencies, are responsible for more than their fair share of anal paradoxes.

Wordistas in one form another form most of the world's population. They are a silent majority - the planet's plodders, resentful in particular of middle managers who through dexterous use of technology like Microsoft PowerPoint and a facility for obfuscation and confusion, advance themselves more deftly through the organisational ecosystem. Wordistas see middle managers for what they are: the cuckoos of the business world.

Therefore, notwithstanding Microsoft Word's extreme cleverness and its brilliant functionality and integration, it is used by most of the world as a glorified typewriter, where even use of paragraph formatting passes for sophistication.

A proper Wordista relies to an extraordinary degree on a good secretary for clerical support, personal organisation and frequently nutritional sustenance and help with basic bodily functions. Supremely loyal to her principal, a Wordista's secretary has no more interest in, or use for, the functionality embedded in word than does her principal and will eschew (mostly through studied ignorance) facilities such as auto-numbering and page breaks, preferring to hammer away repeatedly on the carriage return and or spacebar for any "clever" formatting.

Anal paradox

The anal paradox is a documentation drafting theory that purports to explain the tendency of legal documents to get longer and longer through time, whilst their comprehensibility inevitably decreases.

Briefly stated, the theory claims that however anal it may be to add qualifications, clarifications, for-the-avoidance-of-doubts, without limitations or other pointless legal expressions, once these comments have been added by an anal lawyer during the course of a contractual negotiation, it widely considered even more anal for an opposing lawyer to remove them again, seeing as they make little or no difference to the legal or economic substance of the agreement, and as such "do no harm".

Anti-abbreviation

A peculiar feature of much management speak is that, rather than clarifying and simplifying language (and thereby, presumably, enhancing the management process) the language of management speak actually complicates it. Anti-abbreviations, which often manifest themselves in buzzwords, are a core part of this process. Americans are fond of anti-abbreviation, as it tends to make mundane things sound more important, which is why a tank (British) became an "armored personnel unit" (American).

Their evolution in this language is seen as being analogous to biological evolution of the peacock's tail: it is so detrimental to the functioning of the peacock in every practical sense that it serves only to illustrate just how fit the peacock is for survival. Sort of a "look at me, look at me, I have this ridiculous tail dragging behind me and I'm still cock of the walk".

Another frequent source of anti-abbreviation is legal profession, assisted by the strange anomaly-cum-curse that lawyers live under, the anal paradox.

Geek Paradox

The Geek Paradox, which has been described as "a biological anomaly which reverses the established natural order of all things", "an abomination before God who created all things bright and beautiful" and "cogent evidence that there is a God after all, and that he is largely as described in the New Testament, since the meek seem finally to be inheriting the Earth", is a theorem deriving from observations made largely in investment bank habitats and those Silicon Valley coffee emporias beloved of venture capitalists that, in finance at any rate, the small, scrawny guy with the questionable sense of humour and the unusual fixation on maths and computers gets the girl, the condo, the Lear Jet and the collection of Maseratis.
Elsewhere, this has come as something of a let-down. Everything we were taught in school led us to believe that the strong silent types who were incredibly popular, handsome, captained the first XV, led mountaineering expeditions to K2, sang baritone in the Chapel Choir, won the inter-house Tae Kwon Do competition and relentlessly victimised the unfortunate weedy kids who hung out in the computer lab toting 7" floppies with hacked copies of Castle Wolfenstein, misappropriating their lunch money, were the ones in life destined to win, have glamorous wives, beautiful children, and swan about in late-model race-tuned BMW roadsters.
But no: a glance around a trading floor tells quite a different story. Losing a bit of pocket money in one's teens transpires to be quite the formative experience, it seems.

The Farmer and the Sheep

A parable for our modern times.

A stock agent visited a huge sheep station in New Zealand's high country. Looking over the huge expanse of the Hakataramea Valley, filled with sheep grazing and wandering to and fro, the stock agent shrugged and said, "I can't give you a price unless I know how many sheep there are in your flock."

The farmer stood quite still, and stared down the valley. After about a minute he turned to the agent. "Eight thousand, four hundred and twenty six".

"How on earth did you manage that?" gasped the stunned stock agent.

"Easy. I counted all the legs and divided by four."

Defender

Defender was an early arcade video game, of the generation after the original space invaders, which involved being a pilot in a small star fighter flying over a planet trying to rescue little sticky things and avoiding a host of more or less aggressive beasty things which are trying to kill you. One has a number of tools at ones disposal, including a laser cannon that makes an impressive sound and fires a stream of annihilation (far more satisfying than the little pellets emitted in space invaders), a limited supply of smart bombs which blow up all bad guys on the screen but don't harm the good guys, and the ability to randomly jump into hyperspace if things were getting really tricky (a move of last resort, as you have no idea how sticky the place would be where you wound up)

As such Defender was, and remains, one of the best sources of neat metaphors for the vicissitudes of life (but is still not as good on that score as cricket).

Cricket

Cricket is a game with no practical interest or utility save as a metaphor for our grim, tenuous grip on life on this planet, in all its forms and with all its varieties.

People who don't understand the metaphorical power of cricket (and there are plenty of them), or who view it simply as game played between spells of rain over a period of weeks by people wearing old fashioned tennis gear are prone to writing it off as utterly pointless, long-winded and boring.

"Ahh," says the cricket connoisseur, well-practiced in cynical ruminations on the meaning of his own existence, "but isn't that exactly the point!"

Cricket is therefore always a rich and handy source of metaphors in business life, some of which have made it to buzzword status and some, sadly, to the less august level of mere clichés. Those ones you simply have to play with a straight bat.