Страница 3 из 17
The Rise Of The Modern Corporation
At the begi
The problem was that when the owner died, the family members were darned if they’d come in off Long Island and engage in anything as filthy as smelting, so they’d hire a professional manager to run the business. Often, however, the professional manager was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and consequently he wasn’t exactly dying to smelt either. So he’d dream up other corporate activities for himself to engage in, such as Marketing, Long-Range Pla
This is how we arrived at the modern corporation, where at the very top you have a chief executive who spends his entire day posing for A
This modern corporate system offers something for everybody:
THE EXECUTIVES get enormous salaries and bonuses and stock options and offices big enough to play jai alai in.
THE SECRETARIAL, CLERICAL, AND RECEPTION PERSONNEL get medical plans, dental plans, pension plans, savings plans, go-to-college plans, stop-smoking plans, lose-weight plans, softball plans, and bulletin boards it takes upwards of two working days to read.
THE STOCKHOLDERS get regular a
And So ...
... and so we have come to the present day, to the incredibly sophisticated world of the modern corporation—a world that YOU, thanks to this book, are about to become part of! In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how you can land that all-important entry-level job, so you’ll want to study it very carefully! Unless your dad owns the company, in which case you can head on out to the golf course.
Chapter Two. Getting A Job
In this chapter, we’ll take you step-by-step through the job-hunting process, starting right at the begi
Birth
This is the time to start preparing for your business career. You can bet your little navel protuberance that the other babies are preparing, and you don’t want to fall so far behind that they wind up as vice-presidents and you wind up serving them food and wearing a comical white hat in the corporate cafeteria. In fact, I’d recommend that you start preparing before birth, except that you’d have trouble seeing the flashcards.
The flashcard procedure is as follows: you lie on your back in your crib, and your parents lean over you and hold up cards, each of which has printed on it a basic fact that will help you succeed in business. As your parents show you the card, they should read it out loud in a perky voice, as though they are just having the time of their lives, and you should indicate comprehension by waving your arms and pooping.
You should spend as much time with the flashcards as possible. Ideally, you’ll reach adolescence without ever once getting an unobstructed view of your parents’ faces. As an adult, you’ll carry around a little wallet card that says “7 x 9 = 63,” because it will remind you of Mother.
Preschool
Look for a strong pre-business curriculum, one that emphasizes practical activities, such as blocks, over liberal-arts activities, such as gerbils.
Elementary School
This is where you should learn to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, which are skills that are essential for filling out expense reports; you should also develop lifelong chumships with anybody whose name ends in “II,” or, even better, “III.” You might also consider learning to read. This is not really necessary, of course, inasmuch as you will have a secretary for this purpose, but some businesspersons like to occasionally do it themselves for amusement on long airplane trips.
High School
The point of high school is to get yourself into a good college. The way you do this is by being well rounded, which is measured by how many organizations you belong to. Many college admissions officers select students by actually slapping a ruler down on the list of accomplishments underneath each applicant’s high school yearbook picture. So you should join every one of the ludicrous high school organizations available to you, such as the Future Appliance Owners Club and the National Honor Society. If they won’t let you into the National Honor Society, have your parents file a lawsuit alleging discrimination on the basis of intelligence.
Another thing you need to do in high school is get good SAT scores, which are these two numbers you receive in the mail from the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. They have a whole warehouse filled with numbers up there. To get yours, you have to send some money off by mail to Princeton, then you have to go sit in a room full of other students with number-two pencils and answer questions like “BRAZIL is to COMPENSATE as LUST is to ...” Then you have to look at the various multiple choices and try to figure out what kind of mood the folks up at the Educational Testing Service were in on the day they made up that particular question.
Nobody has the vaguest idea anymore how this elaborate ritual got started, what it has to do with anything in the real world, or how the Educational Testing Service decides what numbers to send you. My personal theory is that it has to do with how much money you send them in the mail. I think the amounts they tell you to send are actually just Suggested Minimum Donations, if you get my drift.