The Organisation of One

The heading above is the working title for a book I'm writing. It's how I think of myself these days. A bit pretentious? Maybe.

This morning I have been working on the chapter outline. I'm thinking of calling the first chapter "Office Rot". I want to convey something of the dismal attitudes that have developed around office work and office life, moving on to where we need to be.

Ricky Gervais as David Brent summed things up pretty well in this extract from the first series of The Office, episode one:

“What is the single most important thing for a company? Is it the building? Is it the stock? Is it the turnover? It’s the people, investment in people. My proudest moment here wasn’t when I increased profits by 17%, or cut expenditure without losing a single member of staff. No. It was a young Greek guy, first job in the country, hardly spoke a word of English, but he came to me and he went ‘Mr. Brent, will you be the Godfather to my child?’.
Didn’t happen in the end. We had to let him go, he was rubbish. He was rubbish!”

I also liked this quote on achievement from Gareth:

“He’s thrown a kettle over a pub, what have you done?”

More quotes from the series here.