Being Childish Is All In A Day's Work - 26/07/2007
Business Week (July 30) has stern words for a number of chief executives caught behaving like naughty children. Frowned-upon antics include lying, plagiarism and having more than one girlfriend. John Buckey, a school principal, suggests some suitably juvenile punishments, starting with detention. "Sometimes adolescents give themselves credit for being much savvier than they are," he says. Ouch.
She's got the trendy haircut, the Mikes, the new pencil case — face it, she's so much cooler than you are. When in doubt, copy, suggests The Wall Street Journal (July 24). Employees desperately want to be like their bosses. One US consultant was so keen to imitate his British superior that he started wearing tweed jackets and tried to import a black cab.
Even more childish is the urge to get out of trouble, whatever it takes. officebroker.com, an office search company, draws our attention to the business manager who accidentally sent employees' salary details to everyone in the company. Panicking, he did the mature thing and set off the fire alarm. This bought him just enough time to go round deleting the e-mail from each of his colleagues' inboxes.
Kids like cute fluffy things. OK, so seagulls aren't your standard pet, but staff at the law firm Lester Aldridge were distraught when they found that birds in a neighbouring roof had fallen victim to a cull, reports RollOnFriday.com. "If I'd known what was going to happen I'd have taken them home myself," sobbed one.
Not so cute are the women turning nastiness into a lucrative career via ultimate fighting, reports Time (July 30). You wouldn't want to bump into Sofie Bagherdai, an ultimate fighter, in the bus queue. "She's- been mad-dogging me, looking me up and down," she says of an opponent. "I wanted to make her pay."
Children are the future, argues the Financial Times (July 24). Procter & Gamble sent its global marketing officer to South Korea to find out the latest technological trends and found teenagers in "online discos", where participants use keyboard strokes to simulate dance moves. Whether you will be cyber-jiving with Keith from human resources while bashing out that late-night presentation in five years' time remains to be seen.
