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Besides pestering you with thankless tasks, what exactly do CEOs do all day? Thanks to a new Harvard Business School study, now we know:
Researchers asked the chief executives of 94 Italian firms to have their assistants record their activities for a week. You may take this with a grain of salt. Is the boss’s assistant a neutral observer? If the boss spends his lunch hour boozing, or in a motel with his assistant, will she record this truthfully? Nonetheless, here are the results.
The average Italian boss works for 48 hours a week and spends 60% of that time in meetings. The most diligent put in another 20 hours. And the longer they work, the better the company does.
Less diligent chief executives are more likely to have one-to-one meetings with people from outside the company. The authors speculate that such people are trying to raise their own profile, perhaps to secure a better job. Bosses who work longer hours, by contrast, spend more of them meeting their own employees.
You may think you have a difficult, greedy, egotistical boss, but you haven’t met anyone like the boss who locked his employees inside a factory, or the boss who paid in script only redeemable at his stores, or the one who made his employees analyze animal poop. Then there was Bryant and May who decided to save money on the material they made matches from.
They had a better idea. They had been making their matches with the extremely flammable but otherwise safe red phosphorous. But there was this other kind, white phosphorous, that was way cheaper. And there was absolutely no downside.
Oh, except it would literally eat your face off when you handled it.
The description of what happened to the employees may make you queasy. Read about all six horrific bosses at Cracked. Link
Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from Star Trek. If no one has written that book, perhaps someone should. And this should be one of the chapters: io9 blog described 7 types of bad bosses, according to Star Trek (and how to survive them without setting phasers to kill). Take, for instance, this guy:
The bully. He alternates between jolly and grouchy — but even his jolly side is a little scary sometimes. He enjoys "teasing" his subordinates, especially anyone who’s different in some way, like having funny-shaped ears. "Notices" his female underlings a little too closely. He does give an inspiring speech about risk-taking, but that’s usually just to drag you into some weird body-switching scheme that will leave you with a weird rash for a month. He’s also the original "I want it done yesterday" boss, who’s "sick of hearing the word ‘can’t.’"
How to handle him: If he yells, yell back. Say "Dammit" a lot. If he asks how long something will take, exaggerate by at least 200 percent. If he starts cracking jokes at you, just ignore it, and he’ll probably go away. But never, ever make fun of him back. (I’ve totally had this boss, like twice, and thinking of him as Captain Kirk really helped.)
Link – via Miss Cellania
