[wordup] Bonjour Paresse / Hello Laziness

[Adam Shand]

Awesome ... go go ... :-)

Adam.

From: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5698558/

The slacker's new bible
Management tips from the executive slow lane
By Jo Johnson
Updated: 7:15 a.m. ET Aug. 16, 2004

You sit next to idiots, loathe office bonhomie and crave escape. You're 
half- crazy with boredom, pretend to work when you hear footsteps and 
kill time by taking newspapers into the washrooms. Your career is 
blocked, your job is at risk and the most ineffective people get 
promoted to where 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. If this is you, help is at hand.

Bonjour paresse (Hello Laziness), a call to middle managers of the 
world to rise up and throw out their laptops, organigrams and mission 
statements, 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 
France's managerial class - the cadres - what the Communist Manifesto 
once was to the lumpen proletariat.

Written by Corinne Maier, an economist at state-owned Electricité de 
France, Bonjour paresse flashed albeit briefly to the number one spot 
on Amazon's French best-seller list.

An anarchic antidote to management tomes promising the secrets of ever 
greater productivity, Bonjour paresse is a slacker's bible, a manual 
for those who devote their professional lives to the sole pursuit of 
idleness.

There have been many works in praise of idleness over the decades, but 
with the French work ethic weakened by the introduction of the 35 hour 
work week, the siren's appeal has never been stronger.

The truculent chapter titles, including Business Culture: My Arse!, The 
Cretins Who Sit Next To You, The Best Management Con-Tricks and Why You 
Lose Nothing By Resigning, set the tone of the book.

Ms Maier is the closest thing France has to Scott Adams, the comic 
genius behind the best-selling Dilbert cartoon strips in the U.S., 
whose influence strongly marks her writing. Like Adams's satires of 
life in corporate America, her observations generate one universal 
reaction among readers: "Ohmigod, that's just like my company!"

The actively disengaged

Over lunch at the Café Bonaparte off the Boulevard Saint Germain, the 
40-year-old mother of two says it is time for wage slaves to hit back. 
"Businesses 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 little as possible and how to screw the system from 
within without anyone noticing."

Many already are. An IFOP poll cited in the book claims 17 percent of 
French managers are already so "actively disengaged" with their work 
that they are practically committing industrial sabotage.

Even if Bonjour paresse is quite obviously a tongue-in-cheek send-up of 
French corporate life, EDF, is far from amused and has started 
disciplinary action.

But the book is about so much more than EDF. It is a book of its time 
and place. France is entering a long-promised Age of Leisure. 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 percent more. France was not alone. Large declines were also seen in 
Germany and Japan. But the situation in France is extreme.

Two factors explain why. First, the proportion of people of working age 
in France who manage to find jobs has plunged to 61.9 percent, compared 
to over 70 percent in the UK, the U.S. and Denmark. Second, the 
introduction of the 35 hour week means French workers put in less time 
than ever.

Ms Maier, who works just 2 ½ 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 
workers are now "always-off".

In the Dilbert comics, one lesson is that it is not enough for you to 
succeed, 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 make it clear to the grunts that their work is not valued: reading 
magazines when they are talking to you, asking for information 
"urgently" then leaving it untouched for weeks, and having your 
secretary return their calls 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 middle manager occupying cubicle 4S700R for the Pacific Bell phone 
company, Ms Maier has had a very different taste of life in the 
executive slow lane - twelve years in the bowels of the French public 
sector.

This bureaucratic sprawl provides jobs for an astonishing one in four 
workers in France and enough comic material to keep business humorists 
in work for decades. Yet it is the private sector she most abhors.

Ms Maier describes how middle managers who have no strings to pull fail 
to win promotion because all the senior positions in big French 
companies are monopolized by well-connected alumni of the elite grandes 
écoles, notably the énarques from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

She writes for a group of people who no longer believe that work is the 
path 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 to pay the bills at the end of the month, it is a complete 
taboo to say so," she says. "One day I said in the middle of a meeting 
that I could only be bothered to turn up in order to put food on the 
table: there was 15 seconds of absolute silence during which everyone 
looked agonized."

It is a world where the over 50s are shoved out the door in early 
retirement 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 where companies parrot "our people are our most important 
asset" yet throw them out like used Kleenex. It is a world where 
impossible demands are made of the young thruster who believes the 
words pro-active and benchmarking actually mean something and who hopes 
his talents will be recognized and that he will be loved and cherished.

The disenchantment with corporate life is total. Forget In Praise of 
Slow, Carl Honoré'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. It is hard to see Ms Maier and her electrician 
buddies rushing into new Spanish siesta salons' selling 20 minutes of 
sleep for €4. They'd much rather zonk out on the job for free. There's 
no "I don't know how she does it" quest for the tempo giusto because 
the object of work is simply to do as little of it as possible.

So what are some of her ten commandments for the idle? 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 personal network so that you're untouchable when the next 
restructuring comes around."

10 commandments for the idle

No. 1

You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. 
You work for your pay-check at the end of the month, full stop.

No. 2

It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it 
stronger.

No. 3

What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next 
by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and 
spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal 
network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes 
around.

No. 4

You're not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. 
Speak lots of leaden jargon: people will suspect you have an inside 
track

No. 5

Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You'll only 
have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts.

No. 6

Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and 
business development), where it is impossible to assess your 
'contribution to the wealth of the firm'. Avoid 'on the ground' 
operational roles like the plague.

No. 7

Once you've found one of these plum jobs, never move. It is only the 
most exposed who get fired.

No. 8

Learn to identify kindred spirits who, like you, believe the system is 
absurd through discreet signs (quirks in clothing, peculiar jokes, warm 
smiles).

No. 9

Be nice to people on short-term contracts. They are the only people who 
do any real work.

No. 10

Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate 
bullshit cannot last for ever. It will go the same way as the 
dialectical materialism of the communist system. The problem is 
knowning when...

Source: Bonjour paresse (Hello Laziness)

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)." The others are in 
similarly, subversive vein.

A publisher's surprise

Bonjour paresse initially seemed destined to disappear without trace. 
Published at the end of April by the little-known Editions Michalon, 
the book, whose title is a nod to Françoise Sagan's 1954 novel Bonjour 
tristesse, generated little comment. At the end of July, however, Le 
Monde, the leading daily, unexpectedly devoted a front page article to 
EDF's disciplinary action against the book's author. The newspaper of 
reference reported that Ms Maier had been summoned to a preliminary 
hearing on Aug. 17th.

Failing to see the funny side, EDF accused Ms Maier of "repeatedly 
failing to respect her obligations of loyalty towards the company," and 
of running a "personal campaign, clearly proclaimed in the book, to 
spread gangrene through the system from within." Citing her habit of 
reading newspapers in meetings and of leaving one gathering early on 
May 3rd, the charge 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 
expect. Her motor-bike helmet by her side and her long brown hair 
looking like it could use a good brush, she declares she has no 
intention of attending the disciplinary meeting. "It's the middle of 
August and I will obviously be on holiday," she says. "I have sent them 
copies of my train and ferry reservations to prove it." But she insists 
she is not looking to get fired. Her situation clearly suits her well.

Born into a family of aluminium siding salesmen, she studied in Paris 
at Sciences-Po, the French equivalent of the London School of 
Economics, before taking further degrees in industrial economics and 
later a doctorate in psychoanalysis. She has found time to write eight 
books since 2001, including several works on Jacques Lacan, the French 
psychoanalyst. Three of these come out later this year, two 
introductory books on Gaullism and Nazi Germany and "a more intello" 
book on Pasteur.

France's unions have championed her cause. They see EDF as determined 
to crush all sources of dissent to its transformation from 
quintessential symbol of the French public service into a regular 
société anonyme, a public company that the center-right government will 
then be able to privatize. An umbrella body representing the six main 
unions at EDF has issued a statement defending Ms Maier's freedom of 
speech, saying she had "not revealed any secrets, jeopardized any 
business or even mentioned EDF by name once in the book."

"EDF has cited the pettiest offenses," says Ms. Maier. "The real reason 
is that they don't like my book." Refusing to comment on "an ongoing 
disciplinary procedure", EDF is belatedly trying to bury the row its 
own clumsy response had started. The book, however, is already being 
re-printed. "My publisher is delighted with EDF's reaction," says Ms 
Maier. "It is all thanks to them that we have a best-seller. We have 
had interest from numerous overseas publishers wanting the translation 
rights."