Le Bureau

Now here is the sort of person who is hated by coworkers. It all has something to do with how Barack Obama is a LEADER. (It's curious, by which I mean ironic, by which I really mean sad and ridiculous, that Obama's supporters are motivated entirely by feelings of filial inferiority, but as the great rebbes have said since time immemorial: Eh, what can ya do?) The post breaks down the top three candidates into three categories: Executive; Manager; Worker. Obama; Edwards; Clinton. In the sort of Welchian, who-moved-my-cheese, HR-department, Business-Times cant that passes for deep thinkin' in the current American economy, this means that:

Executive = Declarations: bring forth, generate something new, lead.
Manager = Requests: please do x by time y with condition of satisfaction z.
Worker = Promises: deliver competent performance in a domain, over and over.

And never the twain shall meet.

Let's walk it back to our Presidential candidates.

One speaks in declarations, inspires, leads.
The second requests you elect him to fix problems, lobbies for a change so he can fix the system.
The third talks of her competence and experience, promises she will do what she's always done, and has the policy plans and papers to prove it.

Leader. Manager. Worker.

It ain't yer gramma Rosa's socialism, that's for sure.

A corrective. Executives speak in generalities because they want to befuddle the board of directors and make certain that no downsteam fuck-ups can ever be traced back to them. They generate wealth, i.e. do as little as possible and get paid as much as possible for it. Their purpose is to craft high-sounding nonsense for the annual shareholders meeting and to give corner-office interviews to the morons at Marketplace on NPR. The executive hitches vaguely martial adjectives like "bold" onto kooky neologisms like "synergisms" and concocts fictions about why it is essential for a company that has made metal stepladders for seventy years to "rebrand" itself as a "vehicle for generating shareholder value through the structured leveraging of ascencion-based commodity investment products." He is a bullshitter, but a better one than you are, which is why he makes 400 times more money than you, you jerk.

Managers do indeed make requests. The preferred mode is interrogative because it's the surest way to avoid blame for any downstream fuck-ups. They live a fevered existence in which the entirely nonsensical directives that float from the executive office in fruity, Latinate non sequiturs must be transformed into something resembling work. They transform abstractions into arbitrary measures, often called benchmarks, and they generate mountains of data showing that whatever it is they're doing is totally up to the standards of however it is they're measuring it. This takes approximately five minutes of every day. The rest of the time, they're probably blogging about anarchism or some stupid shit like that.

Workers spend eight hours a day not doing what their managers ask them to do, because frankly, who cares? They aren't competent and they know it, but at least they're getting benefits. They spend a lot of time taking long shits in the third-floor bathroom that no one uses, or smoking, or bitching that Sue got more hours than Danielle even though Danielle has seniority. Everyone knows that Sue gets more hours because she caught her manager looking at porn on his work computer, or blogging about anarchy or some stupid shit like that, but they argue anyway. They will go to any lengths to avoid doing things. They don't like you. They don't respect you. They don't care.