Good reading to pass the time. May (or may not) make you appreciate your own boss that much more. http://www.scribd.com/doc/2743822/TigerMikeMemos-very-funny Some of my favs: Spoiler Spoiler
^^ January 12-13, 1978. That must have been an awesome two days in the storied annals of memo-writing.
Back when men were men and Earl Cambell would **** your wife, you would brag about it and hope you could raise his b*stard, goddammit.
A lot of these seemed quite reasonable, it's just that they're all coming from the CEO instead of HR or being stipulated in an employee code of conduct that you never read again unless you screw something up. The longer messages to truckers and plant staff seem reasonable, especially nowadays with extra regulations. You work around any safety or operations manager you eventually hear them having to knitpick about some very specific maintenance or equipment stuff; I worked for a regional plant manager for a few months and she had to drive around to each of the five different plants to check if they were leaving extension cords lying around. The home office stuff could easily be reacting to the daily byproduct of a bunch of unruly/stressed out professionals coming back from lunch drunk every day. The vacation stuff seems a little mean, maybe just because I've never had any trouble getting time off at a moment's notice, or even calling the boss and sending in an email at 7:30 am.
Yeah, no; these are not reasonable. The very first memo docks employees for sick leave. "Sick leave." It's right in the name. Dude was a micro-managing ---hole who ran his company into the ground/bankruptcy. The oil business is somewhat unique, in that a wildcatter makes one lucky find, and becomes convinced that his way is scripture, from then on. It's magical thinking; it was a crapshoot. This guy was just another megalomaniac in a close-knit society which had its share of them/allowed for that sort of behaviour.
