www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5698558
Financial Times The slacker's new bible Management tips from the executive slow lane By By Jo Johnson You sit next to idiots, loathe office bonhomie and crave escape. You're h alf- crazy with boredom, pretend to work when you hear footsteps and kil l time by taking newspapers into the washrooms. Your career is blocked, your job is at risk and the most ineffective people get promoted to wher e they can do least harm: management. You recoil at jargon, consider the expression 'business culture' an oxymoron and wish you had the guts to resign. Bonjour paresse (Hello Laziness), a call to middle managers of the world to rise up and throw out their laptops, organigrams and mission statemen ts, is the unexpected publishing sensation of the summer in France. Sub-titled The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace, the 113-page "ephlet" (part-essay, part-pamphlet) is to Franc e's managerial class - the cadres - what the Communist Manifesto once wa s to the lumpen proletariat. Written by Corinne Maier, an economist at state-owned Electricit de Fran ce, Bonjour paresse flashed albeit briefly to the number one spot on Ama zon's French best-seller list. An anarchic antidote to management tomes promising the secrets of ever gr eater productivity, Bonjour paresse is a slacker's bible, a manual for t hose who devote their professional lives to the sole pursuit of idleness . There have been many works in praise of idleness over the decades, but wi th the French work ethic weakened by the introduction of the 35 hour wor k week, the siren's appeal has never been stronger. Ms Maier is the closest thing France has to Scott Adams, the comic genius behind the best-selling Dilbert cartoon strips in the US, whose influ ence strongly marks her writing. Like Adams's satires of life in corpora te America, her observations generate one universal reaction among reade rs: "Ohmigod, that's just like my company!" The actively disengaged Over lunch at the Caf Bonaparte off the Boulevard Saint Germain, the 40- year-old mother of two says it is time for wage slaves to hit back. "Bus inesses don't wish you well and don't respect the values they champion. This book will help you take advantage of your company, rather than the other way around. It will explain why it's in your interest to work as l ittle as possible and how to screw the system from within without anyone noticing." An IFOP poll cited in the book claims 17 percent of Fre nch managers are already so "actively disengaged" with their work that t hey are practically committing industrial sabotage. Even if Bonjour paresse is quite obviously a tongue-in-cheek send-up of F rench corporate life, EDF, is far from amused and has started disciplina ry action. No other OECD country has witnessed as dramatic a fall in the number of hours worked per inhabitant. In its 2004 employment outlook, the OECD reported that the French worked 24 per cent fewer hours than in 1970, whereas Americans toiled 20 percen t more. Second, the introduct ion of the 35 hour week means French workers put in less time than ever. Ms Maier, who works just 2 days a week, is hardly unusual. The average French worker clocks only 1,459 hours per year, compared with a mean of 1,762 for the OECD as a whole and almost 2,000 for the Stakhanovites in the Czech Republic. As the rest of the world becomes "always-on", bosses complain French work ers are now "always-off". In the Dilbert comics, one lesson is that it is not enough for you to suc ceed, others must fail. You have to improve your own standing by subtly disparaging those who surround you. Demotivating others is also a core management skill as with employee self -esteem come unreasonable requests for money. There are many ways to mak e it clear to the grunts that their work is not valued: reading magazine s when they are talking to you, asking for information "urgently" then l eaving it untouched for weeks, and having your secretary return their ca lls or e-mails. In Bonjour paresse, the very notion of personal advancement is ludicrous. Whereas Scott Adams drew his inspiration from his nine years as a middl e manager occupying cubicle 4S700R for the Pacific Bell phone company, M s Maier has had a very different taste of life in the executive slow lan e - twelve years in the bowels of the French public sector. This bureaucratic sprawl provides jobs for an astonishing one in four wor kers in France and enough comic material to keep business humorists in w ork for decades. Ms Maier describes how middle managers who have no strings to pull fail t o win promotion because all the senior positions in big French companies are monopolized by well-connected alumni of the elite grandes coles, n otably the narques from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration. She writes for a group of people who no longer believe that work is the p ath to personal fulfilment. "It is de rigueur to claim you work because 'your job interests you' and even if in reality everyone is only there t o pay the bills at the end of the month, it is a complete taboo to say s o," she says. "One day I said in the middle of a meeting that I could on ly be bothered to turn up in order to put food on the table: there was 1 5 seconds of absolute silence during which everyone looked agonized." It is a world where the over 50s are shoved out the door in early retirem ent programs at a rate that has left only a third of France's 55-64 year olds still working - "a world record", Ms Maier says. It is a world whe re companies parrot "our people are our most important asset" yet throw them out like used Kleenex. It is a world where impossible demands are m ade of the young thruster who believes the words pro-active and benchmar king actually mean something and who hopes his talents will be recognize d and that he will be loved and cherished. Forget In Praise of Slow , Carl Honor's faddish new treatise on "marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age" and all the other wimpy pleas for work -life balance. There's no "I don't k now how she does it" quest for the tempo giusto because the object of wo rk is simply to do as little of it as possible. Take number three: "As what you do is pointless and as you can be replaced from one day to the next by the cretin sitting next to you, work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your perso nal network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes around." Then there's number five: "Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You'll only have to work more in exchange for a few thousand more francs (effectively peanuts)." A publisher's surprise Bonjour paresse initially seemed destined to disappear without trace. Pub lished at the end of April by the little-known Editions Michalon, the bo ok, whose title is a nod to Franoise Sagan's 1954 novel Bonjour tristes se, generated little comment. At the end of July, however, Le Monde, the leading daily, unexpectedly devoted a front page article to EDF's disci plinary action against the book's author. The newspaper of reference rep orted that Ms Maier had been summoned to a preliminary hearing on Aug. Failing to see the funny side, EDF accused Ms Maier of "repeatedly failin g to respect her obligations of loyalty towards the company," and of run ning a "personal campaign, clearly proclaimed in the book, to spread gan grene through the system from within." Citing her habit of reading newsp apers in meetings and of leaving one gathering early on May 3rd, the cha rge sheet also alleged she had neglected to secure permission to mention on the back cover that she worked for EDF. Corinne Maier is as bolshy and unrepentant as her book leads you to expec t Her motor-bike helmet by her side and her long brown hair looking lik e it could use a good brush, she declares she has no intention of attend ing the disciplinary meeting. "It's the middle of August and I will obvi ously be on holiday," she says. "I have sent them copies of my train and ferry reservations to prove it." Born into a family of aluminium siding salesmen, she studied in Paris at Sciences-Po, the French...
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