Book Review: Supervisors Survival Kit, 11th ed.

So I'm reading this book for one of my librarian classes and I have to say that translating it into English from Jargon (it was written in Jargon), makes it very cynical. Its an updated version of The Prince. I can't say I'm disappointed because it is everything I have both feared and personally witnessed to be true about modern managers, which is that they are generally horrible and a fantastic argument for both Unions and returning certain medieval organizations back to life. I won't say which ones, but they sometimes had Guilds and tended to wear black.

Never let your employees feel safe and they won't ask for a raise. 

This book is depressingly accurate. It gives all sorts of bad but functional advice which is certain to drive any supervisor nuts and turn them evil if they weren't already. There's no warnings about the dangers of ambition, or how to shield employees who get the work done from bosses who have no clue how that happens while you're dealing with their egos and abuse. Not nice. I want to say that this book is realistic, but I already compared it to Machiavelli.

I am writing up the cliff's notes version of the translation and using the filter of real world experience to correct the Positivity!! that real humans find so insulting. See the smile? That's what you see on Middle Managers told to do the impossible and expecting to lose their best employees by giving the order.

Consider Azula, from the same series. She's a raging psychopath, who only cares about getting what she wants, nothing else. Her ambition and madness define her, and while she can motivate her friends as allies she eventually drives them off, and fails when alone. This is the truth of management. If you go into management with ambition, you are screwed, and will destroy yourself and everybody around you. This is why new "experienced" managers coming into your workplace from somewhere else should be FEARED, because they just ran from the mess they made somewhere else, and haven't learned from their mistakes. They're going to make the same ones again somewhere new.

Good managers need to avoid ambition, and defend at all cost their productive employees, and go home at night despite complaints and threats from your own boss about how you should get things done or they'll get even. They won't. It is too much work. Sometimes the best manager is a slacker.

The Trouble With Innovation

I'm a library student, learning the skills in college (and eventually grad school). There's a fair bit of promotion of "innovative programs" from time to time. I'm trying to be fair as I read these things, but I find the use of Jargon by library writers like Dysart to be really off-putting. Jargon gets used a lot by con men and people after other people's money (OPM). This being a retirement community, con men after practically a constant threat. They call twice a day with Nigerian Prince Trusting and Your Close Relative is in jail in mexico and need your credit card to bail them out. And they get enough hits to justify the calls. They often use jargon, and I've suffered through all sorts of "programs" and cults over the decade so my filter is primed and ready for the next one. And maybe Dysart is just really excited about the subjects. But I'm not.

I work in libraries because they have books. People come to the libraries to read books. They have internet at home. They don't need that at the library. They find a book and borrow it and bring it back when they're done. Know what self-checkout kiosks do? They get ignored and people still wait in line to see the librarian. And when people use the kiosks half the time they don't work, but print a receipt as if they did, so people take the book home and bring it back, so half the books out aren't checked out. That that come back doesn't fix the issue, because the number of checkouts impacts the budget and which books get weeded (thrown out). So the automatic kiosks which SHOULD solve problems created ones we didn't anticipate. This is a law of engineering, btw. Its called the Law of Unintended Consequences. This is important and relevant to all library programs. The people supporting their promotion gain something from them being funded, but are not responsible when they fail. Until such time and failure is punished, stupid programs will continue to be a problem in tax-based govt services, like libraries and schools. So I always think about whether a program is going to have unintended consequences, and ponder just what those consequences will cost.

Think about that when you're excited about some jargon filled program that only costs OPM. Sigh. Wasting public money is not the way to get better funding. For a library, it isn't innovation which will save you. People want boring libraries. They want new books in them, too, and you can't buy the books if you're wasting funds on BS. Stick to the basics and only invest in things you know will work. Not what's hot in some city far away. That's what I think.

Divisive Topic: Generational Differences

IN my library supervisor class, LIBT 208, taken for my AS degree at Cuesta, a topic was raised requiring the students to generalize about the different ways that different generations both communicate with each other and think of themselves. It was revealling. It was also divisive. The Baby Boomers were offended that younger generations do not respect them. They believed we didn't mind being insulted as slackers when we work harder than they do, and find their disrespect in the workplace offensive. We hadn't said anything, instead quitting those jobs rather than deal with an abusive boss, which Baby Boomers tend to be. Many inherited their jobs from the Greatest Generation, who grew up in the great depression and fought WW2 and Korea before pumping out 2.4 babies. Those babies, the Boomers, are the most spoiled in history of our species, and lived through the greatest wealth and peace, ever. What did they do with it? They got high. They partied. They spread diseases. They joined cults. My generation watched all this in disgust, and many in my generation saw their parents divorce, which largely broke the entire idea of marriage for us forever. The Baby Boomers also voted to extend the party, insisting that selling off the future in enormous debt, and then printing money without anything to back it, mirroring the collapse of Zimbabwe and Germany (creating Hitler), and think we should be Grateful to them for their stewardship... I am appalled at their gall. My whole generation agree with me, too, as many articles confirm on the internet. While it is possible to work together, Boomers tend to be really arrogant and ineffective leaders. Only the job itself can keep the younger generations coming back, and only until its obvious that the current leadership failings are destroying the business or institution being run by Boomers. That's what we discovered in our discussion. The Boomers focused on how disrespectful younger generations are towards their authority, accidentally confirming my point. They just don't see themselves realistically, and this inability to recognize their sadistic need for dominance, likely caused by the Veterans running things so long, means they overcompensate and aren't listening to those around them. Boomers don't have to be this way, but they often are, and their knee jerk responses in the classroom discussion are exactly what I predicted.

That's the thing about work experience. I have worked for two decades in businesses or organizations run by Baby Boomers. Sometimes I've had a good boss. Often I've had sexist, racist and sometimes raping bosses, drunks or drug addicts, all of whom got away with it. Some were stealing from the till, but most were stealing from the employees. They were horrible people. They were laughing sadists, straight out of a horror film, and nobody in charge of them wanted to admit they'd hired a sadist, so they protected them to the detriment of the employees, who quit in droves, just as soon as the abuse became too much. Some of those employees quit pregnant with the boss's baby, after he raped them after hours. It was NOT okay. I quit a job where a coworker was fired for nearly dying from a miscarriage, but at least it wasn't the boss's baby that nearly killed her.

Gen X, which I belong to, has too many decades of watching the Baby Boomers thrash around harming themselves and their loved ones and neighbors and employees to respect the monsters they've always been. They are a threat, not an ally. We are polite because they have the majority votes, and consistently vote to harm the future. It is mostly a matter of waiting for them to die so they can stop hurting the future. Only then can we make things better again. And we've had decades to learn what not to do, which is why we get along better with the Gen Y/Millenials. We learned to ignore/disregard the Boomers. They aren't wise. They are harmful. They don't like being caught out, and deny deny deny. This is why they mostly vote Democrat, and defend racism and creating poverty and communism. They don't care that they're wrong because they were taught two things: 1) It doesn't matter what you do. It only matters how you FEEL. and 2) If you throw money at a problem it will eventually go away. And steal the future's money. They don't have a vote!

Small wonder we don't like them. I feel a great sense of relief when dealing with Veterans, who respect the future and youth more than the Boomers who tend to be smug about how rich they are, or blame everybody else if they're poor. Its never their own decisions that lead to their poverty today. This is really common, for both outcomes. Rich boomers tend to be quite offensive to the generations they robbed, but we can't do anything about it but stare, and possibly add another entry to our eventually history books on their generation, published after they die and no longer control what is said about them. History is written by the winners, and dying rich isn't really winning. I predict that Gen X will be pretty harsh about the Boomers in our history books on them, listing every greedy vote, every act of cultural depravity, every bit of hypocrisy and mania they perpetrated against themselves and us. They will be a warning to the future. Don't spoil your kids or they'll turn into Boomers. The Boomers who nearly destroyed democracy and civilization.

It isn't a nice thought, but it is the result of the abuse. Boomers are pretty consistent with their arrogance.