groupthinkedin

Author: DW

  • My very first strategy: an introduction for primary school students and career middle managers 

    My very first strategy: an introduction for primary school students and career middle managers 

    “Strategies exist only to hold down a desk.” Career Manager proverb.

    Publishing house My Very First Manifesto is proud to announce the release of ‘My Very First Strategy’. This 20-page booklet, written in simple English and 14-point font, is essential for primary students developing their critical thinking and planning skills. In its second edition, the book was a hit with career middle managers who enjoyed other titles, ‘Self Awareness – More Than A Feeling’ and ‘Empathy – A Definition And Where To Find It’.

    For managers, don’t let your attempt at a strategy wind up in a bin or third drawer. Be prepared next time a subordinate asks, ‘why are you doing this?’, you’ll be able to answer with confidence and pride, ‘No, it’s not a waste of paper and toner!’

    ‘My Very First Strategy’ is out now and available on intranets everywhere!

  • Award winning team’s stationery cupboard is a disgrace

    Award winning team’s stationery cupboard is a disgrace

    Despite three likes on their intranet award story, the winning team from community development couldn’t find a working pen or postit note in their stationery cupboard if they tried. 

    Team member Marcus Semkus said the adulation improved team morale, but since his induction and three weeks into a secondment, he was still working without a functioning pen. 

    “We pumped up our numbers (for that award) but let’s face it – no one follows up this stuff. Hey – do you know anyone who can adjust these side by side monitors?”

    Part time administration assistant and Phd graduate, Casee (pronounced Casey) said while the award was great, the team culture, less so. “Quick wins and shit.” Casey said, inserting a toner cartridge into the printer, “…but can we manage a project from end to end? Probably not.”

  • No human is limited …in a right wing run club

    No human is limited …in a right wing run club

    Big news for Melbourne Marathon after Kenyan superstar, the marathon ‘GOAT’, Eliud Kipchoge announced he would join this year’s race. Melbourne becomes stop three of “Eliud’s Running World”, a global tour to support Eliud Kipchoge Foundation and spread his message of inclusion.

    Never mind that tickets to Melbourne’s marathon sold out last year. It’s a boon for the running community and the expanding media of local podcasters, ex-runners basking in the reflected glow of team Kipchoge. The Inside Running podcast has already cast its critical eye over the news in its self-appointed role to keep road running elite. Host, “Moose” gave a benevolent but begrudging approval despite the chance to float his right wing run club idea to the Kenyan.

    For some, this idea of a right wing run club is as appealing as, say, a jog around Albert Park with Pauline Hanson wearing a burka, or a tempo run with Corey “Beastiality” Bernardi dribbling on about gay marriage.

    That I had the temerity to call out “Moose” on the bastion of free speech, the home of critical thinking and measured social discourse, a haven of empathy and emotional intelligence populated by only the most progressive of minds and with philosophy at its core – Instagram – was my bad. Instagram, for non-users, is built for folks whose pedagogical tool of choice is flashcards. So, like a Saturday morning parkrun, I was surrounded by white people, giving me no benefit of the doubt that a guy called Moose was above reproach. 

    Before you could say triggered, the comments from this tightly coiled group of defenders increased as its collective intellect plummeted1. The vehemence of the opposition, the likes I haven’t seen since Australia voted No or the gay marriage plebiscite, circled around their spiritual leader. And yes – I get it – it’s not like Moose said that he profiles customers who walk into his shop based on the socks they wear. Ok, so he had admitted that in an earlier podcast, but white male privilege I would only take from their cold dead hands. They would defend his right as a tall white male to say whatever a tall white male will say, as god given a right is for being white, tall and male. Amen.

    Most vocal was England’s own @runreplaychat (replay the operative word as ‘new content’ and ‘podcast’ is an oxymoron) conceived that I had, “never listened to the show before”, which begs the question of how I listened to this one. The trio (you guess it, white people), insisted that I come back with an apology, adding that if Saucony sponsored the Jerusalem marathon, Moose should be allowed to…. carpet bomb Gaza tent cities? Never mind that Saucony had pulled its sponsorship.

    Seems I’d struck a chord with the English. @neil_thehulk_runner (male, white), armed with his fascist insult picture book and finger painting kit, excused his spiritual leader and took personal credit for my listenership. I escaped a brain injury when @sammy_dearnaley1989 (male, white, comment deleted) accused me of paranoia before insisting he wasn’t gaslighting in a comment so forceful and bewildering that I was thrown clear.  Special effort goes to @nicktotherec (male, white, account deleted) who I reminded the run club idea wasn’t a message of support for the politics of Ben Shapiro.

    Triggered, as an adjective or a verb, founds its home in the online vernacular, and I bet @mattsullvian17 (white, male) thought he’d end me with it. Like slapping a puppy, I felt some guilt in explaining that ‘triggered’ is a device to manipulate and censor opposing views. I quoted from the podcast transcript, Moose withering on about run club as, god forbid, “very environmental and everyone’s inclusive, all this sort of stuff.”
    Moose, the comic/podcaster/shoe fitter added that his dream is a run club: “Where like, just everyone who identifies as a right-winger or has views that are like anti-win farm and like anti-trans in sport and all this sort of stuff. Like, what about if they all get together and have a run club?”

    Straining my ears for the sound of a tongue in a cheek, Moose sucked the air out of the segment like a phosphorous bomb into a Gaza tent city, something the @replayrunpodcast may support. Dipping next into the research part of the podcast, Moose added that 80% of the world is “right leaning” and that brands should market more to this segment. Silence descends before one host mercifully wraps up the segment, adding it’s a “good question”. Moose lands the punchline with aplomb, “Anyway, that was just an interesting discussion on the run.” Wet seats aside, the podcast continues, unaware or cognisant of what it just talked about – the white male podcaster way.

    Perhaps it’s a reminder to podcasters that theirs is not a visual medium, and their vehement defenders may not share the same values as those tuning in. When Kipchoge arrives later this year with his message, “no human is limited”, leave your prejudices and self-imposed restrictions at the starting line. For the hours you’re out there running, enjoy being human.

    1. Carl Jung wrote about mob mentality in his book on the Collective Unconscious. What he explained was that an individual will have some consciousness of their actions, whereas in a group, or mob, they follow like members of a pack under its alpha.  ↩︎

  • Do you have any questions for us?

    Do you have any questions for us?

    You’re at the end of your job interview.
    Now it’s your turn to ask some questions.

    Try these!

    1. What score did this department get in your last employee survey?

      2. How many bullying complaints have been lodged against you, and what were the findings?
    2. How many staff are on performance review for daring to question your lack of strategy?

      **To really turn it on, politely ask the panel to answer your questions using the STAR method.

  • Colonoscopy Capers

    A repeat of Australia’s most watched gotcha comedy where surgeon specialists swap their moral code for big laughs.

    As Kyle Sandilands wakes from his procedure, our cameras catch the moment of delerium as he attempts to explain a strange but unmistakable taste. Don’t miss the hilarity as the gang use one scope for both ends of the Sydney’s shock jock’s colonoscopy endoscopy.

    4am. Channel 31. Hosted by Rebecca Judd.

  • “Pick your battles!” and other defeatist messages highlight Friday afternoon farewell

    “Pick your battles!” and other defeatist messages highlight Friday afternoon farewell

    After a twice-extended secondment, Acting Business Support Manager, Jo Merrimer bid goodbye to the Corporate Communications branch last week. 

    Merrimer, 56, a long-rumoured nepotism hire who infamously attempted to hire a male staffer passing her in a hallway, showed only flashes of resentment at the forgotten and hastily rescheduled 4:45pm Friday afternoon tea. Parting with the bureaucratic and cryptic wisdom surrounding her departure as “lost opportunity”, Merrimer talked for 5 minutes about her dogs and horse riding. 

    “And I can’t forget to thank my dream team.” Merrimer remembered. “That’s right – my girls, who stuck by me,” miming applause to her team that includes two male staffers.

    Despite her failed application for the ongoing role and more than 20 years in similar roles, Business Analyst Michael Smith said he would miss Jo.

    ‘Joey’ was a member of staff in this department.” Smith said. When asked if Merrimer had helped to benchmark candidates for her replacement, Smith swallowed hard on his cream scone, then coughed a strawberry onto the floor. “No – the role will be absorbed into the structure.”

    For others, the farewell snacks lined the stomach before a Friday night drinking, “She’s a disaster,” said Vernon, refusing to be quoted on the condition of anonymity and craning the neck of another staff member, “She couldn’t get a train to work on time, was 10 minutes late to every meeting – if she attended at all.” The first staffer book-ending Merrimer’s tenure, “Disappeared for whole afternoons. Undermined our work despite a lack of credentials or self-awareness.” The staff members, now facing each other in a insult match fit for an exit interview continued, “Forever droning on about her house renovation.” “Fuck, yeah?” “I’m happy to see her go (back to her substantive role) and I’m only here 2 days a week.”

    Hunting for the other side of the compliment sandwich brought few leads. When asked why managers are moved to work outside of their skill set, HR said the idea came from one HR member who had attended a Catholic Church retreat.

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  • Colleague knows what you’re thinking. Yes, that lanyard would burn if you wrapped it around your penis

    Colleague knows what you’re thinking. Yes, that lanyard would burn if you wrapped it around your penis

    With attention spans burning 45 minutes into a two-hour restructure update, Martin O’Neill, Insights analyst, regarded Simon Briggs’ blank stare and wrapping his ID lanyard around his hand before considering the circumference of his penis by curling his fingers to his thumb.

    Smarting from his stupor, Briggs startled at O’Neill’s knowing gaze, blinking hard before stuffing his lanyard back into his pocket.

  • All men are hunts

    All men are hunts

    After one of Australia’s largest man hunts concluded earlier this month, I reflected on an article I wrote for an Australian adult magazine. They edited the fun right out of it, so, behold, the director’s cut.

    John Dillinger, American

    Active from 1933 to 1934

    We are lucky to have avoided treatment for gonorrhoea at the Indiana State Prison in the 1920s. John Dillinger didn’t and doubled over holding a beaming red penis, said, ‘I will be the meanest bastard you ever saw when I get out of here’. After his stint in the can, JD was freed – headfirst into the US Great Depression.

    A mug shot of John Dillinger.
    A look that says, I fucked your girlfriend – during a holdup.

    Dillinger thought fuck that! passed the job queues and went straight to the bank. Posing as a bank alarm salesman, he robbed it. JD knew he had talent, decades before the game show. In one year, Dillinger racked up so many robberies, he made Patrick Swayze and the ex-Presidents in Point Break look like Patrick Swayze in Ghost. After 24, they had to create the FBI which cornered Dillinger as he left a theatre.

    Josef Mengele, German

    Aka: The Angel of Death

    Active from 1944 to 1979

    The mad scientist of the Nazi party slithered his way out of Europe after WW2 and dodged capture for 34 years.

    ‘Uncle Mengele’ as he introduced himself to the children of Auschwitz, preferred anaesthetic-free surgery and had a stomach-churning fascination with twins. Twins, he figured, would restore the German army in half the time.

    Three men in army uniforms.
    Havin’ a laugh at the xmas party

    After the war, the angel of death fled to South America, thinking all was rosy. It was there that the feared Nazi hunters MOSSAD bagged his golf buddy, Adolf Eichmann. MOSSAD could ill afford two snakes on one plane, and Mengele fled to Paraguay where the trail went cold. The prick died, drowning in a pool.

    John Wilkes Booth, American

    Dates: 1865

    Booth, a dyed in the wool confederate, planned to topple the anti-slavery government by taking out the President at ‌Ford Theatre in Washington, DC.

    A photo portrait of John Wilkes Booth.
    Most of the confederate armies had surrended by the time Booth acted.

    Booth was an accomplished stage actor so he had no problem slipping into the Presidential booth. With one shot he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Booth then lept onto stage to announce, ‘The South is avenged!’ 12 days later, and by then the subject of the biggest manhunt in US history, Booth, cornered in a barn, shared the fate of the deceased President. Shot in the back of the head. 

    Nancy Wake, New Zealand

    Dates: 1940-1945

    Aka: The White Mouse

    A gifted smuggler and such a pain in the Gestapo’s arse/derriere, the Nazis put a 5 million franc reward on Wake’s head. What they didn’t consider that one time runaway was no stranger to hiding out.

    Wake had witnessed the Nazi invasion of France and took up with the Resistance, helping to evacuate thousands of Allied troops. Unlike her moniker, Wake was anything but timid. She had executed a female German spy when her male comrades couldn’t, and took out an SS soldier bare-handed with a judo-chop. Wake was never captured and lived out her days on gin and tonics in London’s best hotels.

    Photograph of Nancy Wake.

    Ted Kacynski, American

    Dates: 1978-1995

    Aka: Unabomber (University and Airline Bomber)

    The mad professor stumped the FBI for years until his younger brother turned him in.

    A child prodigy with an IQ of 167, Kacynski was an assistant Professor of Mathematics by 26.

    High hair – don’t care

    Quitting the world of academia, Kacynski became a recluse and committed local acts of vandalism to stop what he considered overdevelopment. It raised few eyebrows, so Kacynski upped the stakes. Over 17 years, he mailed 16 letter bombs, killing 3 people and injuring many more. When the Unabomber’s manifesto was printed, David Kacynski, who long suspected his erstwhile brother, linked the writing styles and gifted the FBI their most wanted man. 

    Gregory David Roberts, Australian.

    Dates: 1980-1990

    Aka: Building society bandit

    For a bank robber who managed 10 years on the lam, Greg Roberts is one hell of an author. 

    Imprisoned for 23 years for a string of bank robberies, Roberts snuck out of Pentridge Prison and fled to India, where he became a quasi-doctor for Mumbai’s slum dwellers. On Australia’s most wanted lists, the gifted crim didn’t take long to get the Mumbai mafia’s attention. Roberts was running guns, forging passports and smuggling drugs – the latter getting him deported back to Australia. His manuscript for ‘Shantaram’ a fictionalised novel of his experiences, was destroyed not once, but twice by overzealous prison guards. 

  • Tegan has herpes

    Tegan has herpes

    This public service announcement once screamed out from the Moreland Road walkway to drivers heading north on Melbourne’s Tullamarine Freeway. Someone sprayed it on the concrete, brutalist-style pedestrian bridge, a link between West Brunswick and West Brunswick, a partition that confounds historians to this day. For sometime it remained before it was painted over, for someone to paint over that. 

    The message wasn’t an exemplar of guerrilla marketing, or a subconscious earworm intended to get people to test themselves for herpes1. Tegan may have them, perhaps, but the message was someone’s truth and one expressed to an audience. And what bigger audience than the population driving along the Tullamarine Freeway.

    In place of Tegan was something forgettable, the mark of the bubble writing graffitist2. Bubble writing is distinguished by the big, inflated-balloon-like linguistic attempts at text3. The ‘bubbler had miscalculated the sum of its parts for it to be effective. Those parts being visibility, time required to bubble, divided by the odds of getting busted. Most it’s the bank of Mum and Dad: those who pay the fine and/or fund the spray can. The bubbler was male, as most are. Those past 20 who still bubble were most likely voted to fail finger painting by the Association of Kindergarten Teachers.

    Academics coddle bubblers and their craft as a need for fame and recognition: the human condition in the modern age. But with a forgettable message, what’s the medium of recognition?

    If bubblers are prepared to do (what is considered) the crime, do the time. And I don’t mean custodial time. I mean try. Lonny Wood, the godfather and originator, whose ‘softies’ first appeared in NYC in 1972, invented and evolved this style. That Wood is imitated to this day is remarkable. That no variation exists reflects the calamity of the modern bubble writer: a tourist with intent, but no map. Worse still, they eat their own. Bubblers cover up other, often better work. Academics call this ‘competitiveness’. What’s produced is a vacuum: the bubbler sucks up and censors. This influencer-fascists jockey with other nihilists in a hunt for high-visibility wall space and short-acting endorphins. The aim is synthetic but a cure-all for the human condition today: DMs, likes, or followers. Puff me up with adulation. Message is an alien concept, like aesthetics or skill.

    Take the ‘Pam’ bird which appeared around Melbourne a few years ago. The smirk on motorists’ faces left when details of the court case uncovered the guy painting them is a creep. Fellow dullard, ‘Pork’ who, for a graffitist, is one hell of an abseiler, bubbled his tag on a chimney near the Westgate Bridge. Pork, halfway up, must have fantasised, this is a supreme act of civil disobedience, a real finger to the man. Unlikely. Chances are he’d be watching his follower count on ‘the_porksta’ (I guess an earlier adopter took ‘thePorksta’). Nost, whose tag resembles a flaccid rectangle, didn’t win any fans when he painted over a 1986 mural in Northcote that celebrated women. Nothing but censorship by paint can—even if Pork or Nost can’t tell which side of a spray can the paint comes out of.

    The bubblers are here for the lols, likes, and followers. Whenever I see the Moreland Road overpass, I sigh. Bring back Tegan. At least she had a message.

    1.   (if Tegan can get it!) ↩︎
    2. UK artist Banksy tried for years to master the bubble. The one-stroke technique, equivalent to Japan’s sumi-e ink painting on rice paper, proved too much and he reverted to stencils. ↩︎
    3.   Often called “throw-ups” or “softies” (irony has fled at the sight of this generation)
      ↩︎

    read

    Howard, J. 1999. How to read graffiti.

    graffiti.org. 2007. Graffiti glossary

  • Australia’s got talons

    Incessant physical game show where contestants equipped with sharpened spurs are catapulted into an arena full of unrecollectable 90s celebrities.

    Rewards of cash by the kilo for direct hits as the mad dash to beat the buzzer and your victim’s brains.

    Hosted by Andrew O’Keefe.
    (This show is deliberately recorded without audio)