Rethinking motivation

Balanced at last

R&D chief Comrade Carl Marks returned to work today after a two week vacation in Crimea. That at least is where he claims he was; I think he was at home, having had his medications adjusted.... after feigning a Russian accent led his doctor to believe he was having a breakdown.

Comrade Carl apparently still pays no heed to the fact that our new product release has been uninstalled by key customers, and remains only partially functional for those clients who have not gone the "uninstall route". Carl believes that HR "needs to hire a service manager who can solve the so-called product issues with big data enabled by a cloud."

My Dad Pierre Eliot, used to say "there is only so much drugs can do". Dad was referring to my mother Constance who constantly popped Valium for one reason or another.

Comrade Carl came into my office in the morning hours and said that he has "rethought the motivation issue". Comrade Carl says that HR needs to put together a motivation program based on mild religious beliefs Erdogan style,  a sense of absolute truth a la Netanyahu, and "an Obama-like conviction" of "don't f--k with us".

Carl then added, "Wrap this all up in a Putin delivery mechanism, and you have the perfect motivation and engagement plan, Glo".

To my astonishment, after Carl used the term "Putin Deliver Mechanism", he started once again to drift into a Russian accent. After 2 hours of rambling, Carl blurted out- ``Yobt tvoyu mat, I`ve given up on HR.``

Who is Ed Wan

Aligning with common sense

HR's role is to maintain a civil dialogue in English and ensure sanity.

The fact that our newest product is not "stable" is causing a non wow nightmare. Our product has 30,987 revenue impacting bugs. Most of our treacherous client base wish to uninstall it.

Chief nerd Comrade Carl Mark's personality was never all that stable to begin with. This crisis has made things worse. Comrade Carl Marks claims that product bugs are a result of rumor mongering, not big data.

And Comrade Carl  is convinced that the lack of product stability is a service issue, not an engineering problem. 

There is also a linguistic problem in R&D which impacts product quality, if you ask me. Carl's staff is 39% Russian, and the rest of the engineers are Indians, Chinese and Middle Easterners. Very  people actually understand the English language product specs.....and this explains a lot of product issues, from an HR perspective.

Two hours each day, Comrade Carl has been seen reading a book on the Mossad, which is a foreign version of the infamous and evil KGB, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the defunct Scorpions, and the beloved CIA. Comrade Carl apparently believes our clients can be "convinced"  into believing our product is "a pearl".

Our CEO Stan believes that an HR intervention is needed to "straighten Comrade Carl out" so that he will not wait for miracles, but fix the bugs! Stan instructed me to hire more English speaking engineers because he believes that "people who speak English well generally have more common sense." Hugh White (a white heterosexual) from Diversity disagrees.

The ladies of HR and Hugh White from Diversity started enforcing our global "English Language  Only" policy in the cafeteria, to get more traction around aligning ourselves with common sense.

I may need a vendor with a background in psychiatry and appreciative inquiry, who works pro bono.