nameless man Gifts

Like all the rest who toil in the guts, bowels, or clogged arteries of one of the world's great corporations, our nameless man™ has struggled for years to make some sense of it all.

Asking endless questions of his superiors, co-workers, fellow commuters, bartenders, and equally nameless female acquaintances, he gradually realized the futility of ever hearing answers that could actually explain anything.

He became morose in his outlook, even depressed. But then, like others who do enough non-essential thinking to qualify as a real expert, he began to understand that his mission was not to find answers, but to ask ever-more-unanswerable questions.

He was, he realized, responsible for his own particular truths. The first one, "less is more", was not his, since others had spoken it long before. And yet it was his, too, profoundly, since the more he plodded along, the less point there seemed to be in doing so.

"Less is more" became his foundation, since it seemed to explain so much and so little at the same time.

You can say that our nameless man was well on his way to becoming a fool, but to his mind, he was "transitioning" from merely being philosophical to being a philosopher.

(We agree, especially since the difference between a fool and a philosopher is often mainly in how they hold their briefcase.)

It was only a matter of time, and our need for a really commercial character, before our nameless man began to see how his new-found utter absence of understanding could be exploited -- by becoming a management consultant.

All at once, the lights went on! What was needed is less wisdom, not more; advice that could fit in a soundbite; education that could be consumeed in an elevator ride.

Here then, is the first in his collection of five-second doses of bureaucratic and marketing wisdom for all the one-minute managers out there.