It's been in our face recently because inane droning Philistine David Bobo Brooks used it in his allegedly & apparently abominable new book (No doubt Brooks copped it somewhere, but researching exact origins would no doubt be a depressing affair.) which has been widely eviscerated across the Internet, mostly by P.Z. Myers.
For example, Erica makes a life-defining career decision: She meets a woman who runs a restaurant chain, who is thin and well-dressed in a conservative business suit, and Erica can imagine being like her someday, as Brooks tells us. And then, "Erica was suddenly consumed by a burning desire to be a business leader." What, how? Was it the suit? I don't know. We leapt from a superficial description of the appearance of a visitor to Erica's school to "Something had lit the furnace of the little engine of ambition, which from this day forth would know no rest," and on that train of stock phrases, a personality is fixed and launched unchangingly toward the end of the book.So being thin, wearing a suit & running a restaurant chain makes one a business leader? A veritable Steve Jobs (Thin, 'though probably wouldn't be caught dead in a suit. But we digress.) except running Applebee's®? What is it w/ Brooks & restaurant chains? See also the gelato ordering in this selection.
Kill us now, please. We never learn. (How many ways can we say there is no hope, & we were fools ever to imagine there had been any?) What did we find when we decided to exercise journalistic responsibility? Someone always in the running for Asshole of Whatever Time Period, Deepak Chopra. (WARNING: Reading this act of corporate slurping may lead to bile being spewed on your devil-box.)
Right now, I’m working Frito Lay, the division of Pepsi. Frito-Lay’s CEO, Al Carey, is extraordinary. He is taking the company to carbon neutral manufacturing. They’ve cut their water consumption by six billion gallons. They are teaching leadership down the chain of the organization. They’re repackaging their foods and making them nutritious. They’re getting involved in health and well being, a goal you would normally not associate with Pepsi. But it’s good business, right now. Not only that: these days, it’s also a great news story. [NB: Business conditions may change at any moment, of course. Heh. — M.B.]Vishnu on a stick, Deep-Packed, does ol' Al's shit taste like Fritos® or Doritos®? Of course, we can only imagine the kind of scratch Chopra hauls down for one of these suck-fests. Worth it?
And what keen spiritual insights does Dipstick bring to the corporate world? PR. Stories. Image. Mere surfaces. Bullshit.
It helps to regain control of your own story, and to do that, you have to ask two key questions. When I sit down with senior management, I say, “Who are you? What do you want?” Everything starts with those two fundamental questions, and then you move on to: “What’s your story? What’s the story you want to create?”Who's w/ us on shoving those stupid glasses up Chopra's chute? Only question: Folded, or working them in open?
Crap, so distracted & disgusted by what we found we almost forgot the illustration & inscription.
I had a head
for business.
They said
to get ahead
I had to lose
my head.
They said
be concrete
& I became
concrete.
They said
go, my son,
multiply,
divide, conquer.
I did my best.
— Philip Levine, 1990
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