Ice breaking exercise. Literally and in other sense too. That’s what we’ve been doing today. I must say two words on managers. They are of different planet. Truly. Aliens. Trust me. Recently we’ve got a new one. The Big Man. Enterprise level. And he’s “The” manager with everything what being a manager means. And today he wanted to play one of those manager’s games on “team building” …and the day before we’ve been sent an agenda…and you don’t really want to know what kind of "fun" has been prepared for us. I’ll just mention “ice-breaking”, “people bingo” and “wrap up”…
First of all we didn’t knew that the ice-breaking starts from early morning – apparently there was a frost overnight and I’ve spent 15 min scrapping ice off my car. Truly ice-breaking. The human bingo game was supposed to be a socializing thing and is probably in every text book on management. Now...we are the breed of IT people and IT people have their own odd ways of socializing. We socialize mostly with servers or via instant messaging. We are too immature to socialize in life. But we tried to do our best, of course. And not to giggle during presentation and not to snore during questions and answers sessions. For the new guy. Because it is not his fault that he is our boss. We are, after all, a good team of nice IT humans, kind enough in their own way. But even if anybody did have any doubts before, now they are all totally convinced that bosses are aliens living in different dimension from the normal people. And there is no universal language between the civilizations.
"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the Darkness he called Management. And God said, Let there be best value performance indicators, that all the beasts of the field may compete in a global marketplace. And Lo, the earth brought forth beasts of the field and creeping things, which were promoted unto senior management positions and given dominion over all mankind. And on the Seventh Day, God rested, and said unto himself, 'I wonder if I should have outsourced this to someone who knew what they were doing?'
["The Little Book of Management Bollocks" by Alistair Beaton]
First of all we didn’t knew that the ice-breaking starts from early morning – apparently there was a frost overnight and I’ve spent 15 min scrapping ice off my car. Truly ice-breaking. The human bingo game was supposed to be a socializing thing and is probably in every text book on management. Now...we are the breed of IT people and IT people have their own odd ways of socializing. We socialize mostly with servers or via instant messaging. We are too immature to socialize in life. But we tried to do our best, of course. And not to giggle during presentation and not to snore during questions and answers sessions. For the new guy. Because it is not his fault that he is our boss. We are, after all, a good team of nice IT humans, kind enough in their own way. But even if anybody did have any doubts before, now they are all totally convinced that bosses are aliens living in different dimension from the normal people. And there is no universal language between the civilizations.
"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the Darkness he called Management. And God said, Let there be best value performance indicators, that all the beasts of the field may compete in a global marketplace. And Lo, the earth brought forth beasts of the field and creeping things, which were promoted unto senior management positions and given dominion over all mankind. And on the Seventh Day, God rested, and said unto himself, 'I wonder if I should have outsourced this to someone who knew what they were doing?'
["The Little Book of Management Bollocks" by Alistair Beaton]