Management secrets of Darth Vader

Actually some of these tips are old hat to some managers I’ve seen.

I remember when I worked for a building society in England, I sent my manager an email criticising some of the convoluted language in a memo that had gone out a couple of days after we’d been exhorted to use plain English.

She told me the next day that BD, her manager wanted to see me. Now.

I went to BD’s plush office and it was pure theatre.  He stood with his back to me, framed in his window overlooking, well, the car park. He said ‘I heard you weren’t happy with the memo that went out yesterday.  That’s a shame considering …’  BD turned to face me ‘ … that I wrote it’.

After I’d got over my shock (at his cheek, not his reprimand) I explained what I thought was wrong with the memo. He relaxed but we parted with him rather patronisingly saying he’d run any future memos past me. If the expression ‘yeah, right’ had been current at the time I’d have thought it.  I heard later he was an amateur actor. Maybe he thought he was drawing on the Dark Side.

3 thoughts on “Management secrets of Darth Vader”

  1. Your site looks nice and you finally bent Typepad to your will! I take it that you keep your music etc on a separate bit of webspace.

  2. Hi Rosie. Thanks for the kind words. Where I keep the music? Well, the ‘music’ section of the site is a separate TypePad blog using the same template. For the albums what I’m gradually doing is uploading them to Reverbnation and putting their player widget on the page. This saves me the trouble of putting the code for a player for each individual track. But I may find a better way to do it. Is that what you wanted to know?

  3. Thanks Norman. I used to keep the music on virginmedia pages that I had free via my broadband connection but they seem to have cut all the space. By “separate typepad” blog you presumably mean paying for the same space but using a different name? I shall do that too.

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