Pressdog.com

The Pressdog Guide
to Your Personal Cash Harvest (Part 2)

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 04/09/01)

Last time we covered one way to get rich and famous -- coaching football or basketball at virtually any big-deal NCAA Division I school. Of course the one big wart in that plan is you have to actually be good enough to get hired by the college. That implies some skill, and that’s trouble for anyone who wants to get soaking rich “for no apparent reason.”

So what about the professional underachievers who want to do even less yet still buy BMWs? They need to go where they can disappear into the sea of employees and live out their professional lives as if in the witness protection program. Which brings us to:

Option 2: Duck and Cover in Corporate America -- This, if done right, is truly the route to major money with no discernible effort. Here’s the key weakness in huge corporations: They’re huge. Huge in budgets, huge in people running all over, ant-like, in many huge buildings. If you play your cards right, you can get lost in the hugeness and successfully stay out of the way of any actual work.

The followers of this minimum effort route to a paycheck will become like those little sucker fish that attach themselves to the sides of sharks and just ride along. Sure, working hard within the corporate blob and trying to make a difference is more honest and fulfilling, but you’re just in it for the Beemer, remember. It’s time to keep your head down and fake it.

If you could also take up the game of golf, that would be good. So here’s how it works:

1. Schedule at least 12 meetings a day. It’s vital that you’re not in your “work area” which often looks strikingly like a “cubical.” How can anyone expect you to get any work done if you’re in meetings all day? If anyone asks you if you have your stuff done, you say: “I’ve been in meetings all day!” They’ll feel sorry for you and say, “God I hate meetings” and you’re off the hook. Slick.

2. Talk a lot but say very little. This is key. Even though you have no clue what you are doing, it’s important to sound professional, that is “boring, tedious and as unfun as possible.” I know painfully well that humor is not professional. You need to master that native language of corporations: buzzwords. They impress people who think being professional is about how you look and sound than how you act. Therefore, always offer to liaise with another department. Maybe take a bunch of stuff off line and remember you always need more resources.

Clearly, stuff has to be calendarized so we can study the cost envelope and avoid any disconnects. And for the sake of all that’s holy, be proactive. If you find a paradigm, better shift it. Got an envelope? Push it. That way your company will be smartsized and the synergies will flow as if you’ve stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. That kind of 110-volt empowerment will leverage your gonads and stake out some real estate on the home page, I can assure you.

So at your next meeting, get down to blamestorming and pealing the onion so you can become very client-centric in your thinking. Close any credibility gaps and, for the love of all things precious, utilize turnkey solutions whenever possible. Just remember, hydrogen peroxide is just one of many solutions you can deploy to monetize everything, including the space on everyone’s personal forehead.

3. Plan, Plan, Plan. It’s key, of course, to have everyone onboard. Need that vital buy-in among the stakeholders so they take ownership. That’s why you need to plan stuff to death. Spend a minimum of 10 months meeting and planning everything. If you do this right, you’ll plan so long that by the time you may be forced to take action, your plan will be obsolete and you’ll be able to start over and complain about it and get sympathy for being so abused. Striking!

Insist on all or nothing. Everyone knows if you can’t come up with the ultimate, completely perfect, turnkey solution to a problem, it’s better to just do nothing. It’s perfect action or no action for you, Sparky! No action, no risk. No risk, no blame. Odds are you’ll never have to actually put any plan into action ever. Just get yourself a Franklin Planner the size of the Ten Commandment tablets and you’re good to go.

I used to work in a Fortune 500 company and I have to admit 85% of my colleagues worked hard and didn’t Duck and Cover. But the size of the CASH involved in huge corporations just kind of overwhelms you, you know? It’s hypnotic. If a company makes $1 billion in a quarter, that’s $11 million every day ($7,639 a second).

Now add in the fact that the bosses are yanking down $2.4 million a year. And the knowledge that even if the big bosses get fired, their contract guarantees they’ll leave with $5 million in lovely parting gifts. (Where do I sign for that deal?) It’s sooooo easy to get into the mentality of, “Ah, the company’s selling $11 million a day and I should be working my ass off to bring in an extra $109.98?” Then one day you hear yourself say something really bizarre like, “It’s only $21,000.”

Only the mentally strong can ignore the numbers with “billion” and “million” behind them and concentrate on making that $109.98, and then the next $109.08 and on and on. For the mentally weak there’s the Duck and Cover strategy (don’t forget to incent your team to focus on cross-utilization!) So if you have no pride, sink into the corporate ant farm and ride along on the ship like a corporate barnacle. And schedule in a few more meetings!

Last week we talked about the big-time sports cash trough.

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