Good morning and welcome to the Closed University, the academic institution for people who don't want to be in an institution. Below we present our first degree-level course, the instant MBA.

The instant MBA

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs never went to business-school, yet people flock in droves to such establishments and spend small fortunes on books about management and self-help. You'd be forgiven for speculating that, if near-illiterates can become millionaires, the secrets of success must be pretty simple. And you'd be right. Here they are.

Timekeeping

At school they taught you to be punctual but, in business, this is a big mistake. People who are on time for meetings plainly have too little to do. Busy people are always late, preferably with an outlandish excuse. It is an immutable law of commerce that people will arrive at a meeting in reverse order of importance.

Management-rutting

Every meeting must have the last 15 minutes reserved at the end for this fascinating territorial (and sometimes pre-mating) ritual. The top managers will, of course, have arrived late and may have spent a good part of the meeting fidgeting, taking mobile phone-calls, asking irrelevant questions and eating all the biscuits, but they must nevertheless be allowed to rut. Indeed, nothing will stop them—not even the arrival of office-cleaners shouting at each other in Portuguese. Management-rutting is performed in order to demonstrate that:
  • everything said so far by junior people in the meeting has been rubbish
  • everything said so far by the other managers has been rubbish
  • it's all been tried before
  • I'm surrounded by idiots and nincompoops
  • when you've been in this business for as long as I have, etc., etc.

ASAP and I'm too busy

This principle is easy to enunciate yet, for junior managers at least, hard to implement. The basic assumption is simply that my work is more important than yours. This means that, if I ask you to do something at the last moment that's OK but, if you ask me to do anything at all—well, you must be joking. Can't you see how busy I am?

The endless paperwork

I'm not sure what managers expect to do their work on—goat-hide?—but they will invariably complain about the amount of paper which arrives on their desk. You wonder what they think the significance of such stuff is. Maybe they genuinely believe it lands there like leaves in autumn. By contrast, we are supposed to hang upon every ill-conceived, poorly-expressed, hare-brained, half-baked "thought" which managers get their sub-literate "girl" to type for them and then distribute late to an out-of-date circulation list which contains several people who have been sacked or are dead or both.

In-trays

Although the true businessman is very busy and is therefore assumed to do a lot, this does not apparently extend to the contents of his in-tray. This may be because important people spend all their time in meetings and not working. And well all know how productive meetings are.

Lessons to unlearn

This humble article helps explode those homespun, virtuous myths about work which they taught us at school and which, if we are to succeed as MBAs, we must pretty quickly unlearn.

Keep your desk tidy.

This is corporate suicide. A tidy desk doesn't imply efficiency. It means idleness. By contrast, there's nothing which impresses management more than your inability to find a piece of paper you were given that morning because your desk is covered with undone work and back numbers of recruitment magazines.

Do as you are told.

Absolutely fatal. If you do what the boss wants, how do you know there'll be anything left for you to do afterwards? No, mate. Stalling and dumb insolence is the name of the game. Do that consistently for a while and you could even get promotion.

Mind your Ps and Qs.

Rudeness and being foul-mouthed is the best way to keep your critics and customers at bay. Such insensitivity and brass neck is perceived by management as a sign of toughness and grounds for swift and relentless promotion.

There is no discrimination in the workplace.

Don't you believe it, mate. Whether you are discriminated against depends upon whether you belong to a small group (known as "the majority") or a large group (known as "minorities"). While it's a sackable offence even to make mild fun of minorities, members of the majority are fair game and can be ridiculed and otherwise attacked at will (though only by members of minorities).

Hard work brings rewards.

Rubbish. If you do too much work you'll get branded as a drongo who lacks imagination and creativity. If, by contrast, you spend all your time in meetings having rows with people and passing the buck, management will recognise you as one of them and eagerly clasp you to the corporate bosom.