National Boss Day

Get ready to celebrate! This Tuesday is National Boss Day.

My book The Ape in The Corner Office deals in part with the behavior of bosses.

So have a listen to the NPR commentary I did on the big day last year.

http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/start/00:00:19:52.0/end/00:00:22:29.0/marketplace/2005/10/14_mpp.ram

Laying Down The Law

I like to collect gratuitous opinions served up as laws of social behavior. Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”) is the most famous example. But the obscure ones are more fun. Say, for instance, that someone in an argument starts to foam at the mouth. You mildly remark, “What you’re saying is a perfect instance of Benford’s Law of Controversy,” and it will take a Google search for the poor sap him to figure out that you have insulted him: Benford’s Law states that passion in any argument is inversely proportional to the amount of real information advanced.

Godwin’s Law is also handy. It holds that the longer an argument drags on, the likelier someone will stoop to a Hitler or Nazi analogy. And in common practice, when a rival tries it (other than in appropriate contexts like genocide), you have only to say “Godwin’s law,” and a trapdoor falls open, plunging him into a pool of hungry crocodiles. Sweet, no?

Sweeter still, these little rules allow us to sound intellectual without necessarily having to do any homework. That’s why people are always citing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Well, it’s also the reason they almost always get it wrong. The Uncertainty Principle actually has to do with physics, and let’s just say that if you read it, your head will explode. So what’s that nice idea about how observation inevitably alters the thing being observed? That’s “the observer effect.” But nobody calls it that because the absence of a tag like Heisenberg means it lacks smartypants heft. What we really need is the Heisenberg Probability Principle, which states that anybody mentioning Heisenberg is probably a pompous twit. (And may I be the first to plead guilty as charged?)

Well, o.k., it’s not just about the pleasures of intellectual one-upmanship. Some of these rules actually hold precious wisdom. Hegel’s Paradox, for instance, says, “Man learns from history that man learns nothing from history.” And Clarke’s First Law, coined by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, nails the tricky nature of wisdom: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible he is almost certainly wrong.”

Once in Ireland, I ran across a statement by a nineteenth-century bishop that struck me as particularly profound: “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the complete unimportance of almost everything.” I’ve never been able to track down the source (but that’s unimportant). In any case, Sturgeon’s Revelation, named after science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, gives the same idea a nice modern spin: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

The workplace has spawned more than its share of such obiter dicta (not to mention crud.) Thus the Dilbert Principle says, “The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.” But Joy’s Law, coined by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, also captures every manager’s sinking sense of despair: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Harried tech workers like to trot out Brooks’s Law, from software engineer Frederick P. Brooks: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Or as Brooks also put it, “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

Impatient bosses often strike back with Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.” (“Come on, I know you can get that baby done in eight …”) In fact, my annoying editor just showed up at the door to remind me that time’s up.

”Don’t be such a deadline Nazi,” I snapped.

“Godwin’s Law,” he replied.

***
Note: This article of mine appears on the back page of the October Smithsonian:

NOT THE MAN YOU USED TO BE?

In 2003, professional golfer Shaun Micheel took his game to a new level, winning the PGA Championship on the 72nd hole, with his 21st birdie of the tournament. Then everything seemed to fall apart.

“I lost my drive. I didn’t enjoy practicing anymore. If I made a couple of bogeys, I just wanted to go home,” he says. It was more than a slump. He barely even showed up on the professional circuit the following year. At first, he thought it was depression. “I seemed to be tired all the time, and irritable. I wasn’t myself.”

But in April, 2005, a blood test showed that, at the age of 36, Micheel had the testosterone level of a 60 year old. His doctor put him on one of the standard replacement therapies, a gel that gets rubbed into the shoulders each night. By September, his testosterone level was back to normal. It wasn’t a miracle cure. He still hasn’t won another major tournament. But Micheel is working his way back up the list of professional golf’s top 100 money-winners. More important, both he and his wife say testosterone has given him back his old upbeat personality.

Some scientists now wonder if a lot of other “walking, talking, normalish guys,” as one urologist put it, are also experiencing the same elusive problem—a fading of the hormonal basis of masculinity, leaving them feeling like less than the men they used to be, less than their fathers were in their time.

A long-term medical study last year suggested that testosterone levels of older American males appear to be lower than they were even 15 years ago, and a Finnish study found a similar trend in young men there. In an article published last year in the Medical Journal of Australia, one group of scientists suggested that the problem might go beyond testosterone. They theorized that male reproductive functions generally may be facing what they termed “xenobiotic attack.”