Tag: #ManagerOnEdge
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant goal-setter and spreadsheet victim Every January, normal people lie to themselves with New Year’s resolutions: “I’ll run every day. I’ll stop eating sugar. I’ll finally learn French.” By February, it’s over. Corporate life does the exact same thing, except it calls them OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — and wraps…
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant translator of corporate Elvish Corporate jargon is less communication and more spellcasting. Nobody actually knows what half of it means, but if you chant it loudly in a meeting, you gain +3 charisma and temporary immunity from accountability. It’s not English. It’s a fantasy language pack, installed directly into PowerPoint and…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling trainee in email paranoia Corporate security training is the modern workplace’s favorite pastime. Not because it works, but because it wastes hours of your life while teaching you absolutely nothing — except that your employer really enjoys sending fake phishing emails just to watch you squirm. The Ritual of the Training…
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant novelist of corporate fiction Performance reviews are supposed to measure your work. In reality, they’re creative writing assignments where everyone pretends. You pretend you’ve “grown.” Your manager pretends they’ve “coached.” HR pretends this whole charade matters. It’s fiction — bad fiction — written under fluorescent lighting. The Self-Assessment Saga The first…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling participant in sticky-note theater Brainstorming is the corporate equivalent of a séance: a bunch of people gather in a room, chant buzzwords, scribble nonsense, and pretend they’ve summoned something meaningful. Spoiler: they haven’t. At best, you get a whiteboard full of “innovative” ideas that will never be implemented. At worst, you…
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By Ken Hollow, reluctant showrunner of chaos Just when I thought Nana couldn’t escalate her influencer empire any further, she announced: “I require a reality show.” Yes, a reality show. Not content with podcasts, livestreams, merch drops, and raccoon uprisings, Nana now wants to broadcast her life in serialized, high-definition chaos. I’m not sure if…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling PR casualty and buzzword hostage Press releases are the cockroaches of corporate communication. Eternal, indestructible, and impossible to kill. Every company insists they need one, even though no one reads them except journalists who skim for quotes to mock and interns forced to format them in Word. But the real crime?…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling gardener of corporate metaphors If one more brand manager tells me to “pick the low-hanging fruit,” I’m going to climb the corporate tree and throw the whole orchard at them. Business metaphors are the empty calories of corporate speak — they sound nourishing, but all they do is rot your brain…
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By Ken Hollow, unwilling event planner and professional scapegoat Corporate retreats are already a nightmare. Trust falls, awkward icebreakers, and “vision alignment workshops” designed to make you cry in a hotel ballroom. But now? Add a fox spirit influencer with a flair for theatrics, and you get the kind of chaos that makes HR spontaneously…
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By Ken Hollow, trapped in an infinite feedback loop of buzzwords If I die young, bury me in an Outlook calendar invite. Cause of death: “Just circling back.” My tombstone will read: “Per my last email.” Corporate jargon has many crimes, but none so insidious as the eternal loop of circling back, touching base, looping…