Volunteers: Assignments with impossible deadlines or pointless pet-projects work best when asking for volunteers. Offer nebulous rewards with as few specifics as possible like “an appropriate amount of comp-time”, or “the thanks of upper management”, or the ultimate, vague non-reward, “a chance to work on elite company-critical research projects in the future”.

If no one volunteers, assign it to the team-member least qualified to handle the project, or failing that, the least paid. After struggling alone, the novice employee will eventually have to ask for help from your more senior team members. Such a debacle will assure that your most qualified employees will voluteer in the future for such projects, knowing that inevitablly it will be fall on their shoulders anyway.

Embedded within a performance culture is the ability and desire to seek opportunities to enhance performance throughout the organization. I believe the Maximizing Claim Productivity Worksheet we have created will enable us to continue to find ways to improve our productivity, implement changes in a timely fashion and appropriately assess the impact of such modifications.

The leadership and willingness of the plan champions to accept a greater role in enhancing our Claim productivity is a sign of Excellence!

[Ed: Extra strength bullshit bolded for your convenience!]

Greetings to All: I want to thank everyone for their participation in the organizational assessment done by [Expensive Consultantancy Firm]. I have discussed their findings now on two occasions and feel this assessment and the implementation of recommendations are extremely important to our institutional health and viability. I am calling for a facilitated meeting with [the directors] to discuss possible next steps that in turn could be incorporated into formal recommendations to the Board. The assessment has identified a number of key areas for improvement. A well-thought out plan for addressing the concerns and issues brought forward by everyone will help us to be more efficient, thus more effective. A plan for implementing these recommendations will need to be developed. Developing an action plan will take time as will implementing the action plan. Additional resources may be needed to put the plan in place. I will be seeking your input throughout the process and look forward to developing constructive plans to improve the organizational effectiveness of [Name of Institution]. Once again, thank you.

[Ed. This is a note from the employee, and I couldn't have written it better myself.]
Translation?

“The consultants have found out that I am worse than useless–in fact, I am a downright impediment to our progress. Thus, though one of the key recommendations of the consultants is to get rid of me, I am working desperately to conceal this from all of you. That is why, even though *another* one of their suggestions is that we have open meetings so you all have the illusion of shared authority, I am going to meet only with chosen directors. Any plan I come up with is not going to include input from any of you! Nothing is ever going to change for the better around here, not while I have anything to say about it!”

Committed to excellence, we provide supportive services necessary for learning, discovery, and service.

We adopted the above mission statement a year ago… just last week we get told that we can no longer afford customer service and the department is being outsourced overseas.

Just a few little highlights….
“We’re not trying to boil the ocean here.”
“Do you have any bandwidth to work on a support call?”
“We need to interface one-on-one offline post team meeting.”

As you are well aware, we have been experiencing a dynamic marketplace during Q3 and Q4. To ensure our competitiveness moving forward, recent job actions have consolidated and streamlined our product development teams. Let us redeploy our efforts and leverage our existing focus so that our new direction will bring us enhanced viability and momentum.

Our CEO sent this email…
“I am looking for a consultant to work with one of our prospects to build the functional specifications for their new marketing database. This would be a great project for a small consulting firm or independent consultant. Thanks.”

The kicker is that we are a marketing company that builds databases.

The following appeared on a resume recently sent to my company…these bullet points contained the worst offenses, although the entire resume was quite a stinker. [Ed: I'm sure he was hired instantaneously.]

* Project: OMCR MIB/UI For CDMA EGP Feature
* Developed OMCR MIB/UI Enhanced Generic Processor feature for CDMA network
* Designed feature to have the capacities of FEP, CDP, OMP, CPP Devices, to improve their logical functions, and to reduce the number of those processors per transcoder Improved other performaces

Please be advised that the RVI system should NOT be used today due to the ITS/HSY integration. It will be available tomorrow. There is no guarantee that any items sent via the RVI system today will be available tomorrow and the system may not function as anticipated.

If you experience any problems, please contact your local ITS department or Support Services at the SSC.
[Ed. This has gone WTF (way to far? ...or does that stand for something else?)]

An immediate improvement in personal presentation is required by some employees. The wearing of a [company] polo shirt is permitted at any time. If not wearing a [company] polo shirt then all male employees are required to wear business attire including a tie.