It’s the kind of nightmare that when you wake up you find it’s really happening.
You are about to join the swelling ranks of the ‘empty-deskers,’ bemusedly toting their boxes from the cathedrals of steel and glass at Canary Wharf.
Welcome to the wide world of, ‘Don’t call us: we’ll call you.’
Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour/the City hath need of thee/She is a fen of stagnant waters…
At least the bastards forewarned you (if not forearmed you).
(‘I hear that Tom’s leaving Diamond Securities.’ ‘Really! does Tom know yet?’) Perhaps Tom is already on gardening leave, planting out new hedge-funds; or toying with derivatives in the wood shed.
Yes, they told you to clear your desk ‘of personal effects’ by lunchtime; which should allow time (allowing for a late lunch) to retrieve the framed set of hunting prints, golf clubs, fishing gear and your remote-controlled toy Lamborghini…
By their possessions shall ye know them.
But there is no way you can get hold of the precious files from your office PC. What this? You enter the password and a sign comes up, ‘Denied Access.’ And they’ve already blocked your all-singing-all-dancing PDA, which contains thousands of precious addresses – along with your platinum corporate credit card.
Suddenly, your PC is no longer your PC. In the old days, you’d just pick up your Rolodex (remember the Rolodex?), or Filofax, and head for the woods. There’s a lot to be said, even today, especially today, for the Little Black Book (LBB).
‘Everything in your life is with the company,’ laments a freshly fired Lehman Bros employee.
Talk about the naked ape. You have become The Naked Manager.
So much for the information age, when information can so easily dissolve before the eyes.
Unless you’ve had the prescience in these tremulous times to back up your data on your very own laptop or memory sticks; as much corporate data as you can download. And perhaps a few recordings of meetings that you made with a tie-clip microphone on your Olympus LS-10 digital recorder. Strictly for insurance (or re-assurance) purposes you understand.
Mind you, it needn’t be so bad.
Perhaps you don’t really care, leaving without a backward glance as you head for ‘early retirement’ in the Cayman Islands: ‘In order to spend more time with my money.’ More productive, surely, than moving on to wreck another financial institution.
Then again, it could be a lot worse.
You could be a middle-management road warrior, without a pension, and your savings stashed under the mattress. And got the news of imminent exodus from your day job in the course of an already stressful business trip.
A major cause (and effect) of executive stress is insecurity. Not necessarily fear of losing your job, but the fact that the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more dependent you are on administrative/political skills you’ve acquired in that culture. The danger is that you can lose your ‘trade skills’ and with them your flexibility.
Security is something we all crave. But it means different things to different people – a golden parachute, or an account in the Cayman Islands. For me it means flexibility, to have what I call, ‘portable skills’ that I can employ pretty well anywhere. An illusion perhaps, but a comforting one. This is why the freelance or the consultant often feels more secure than the corporate man or woman. It’s good to have several strings to your bow; even if several strings are liable to break at once.
Survival is to keep your data bank up to date, develop your contacts, and sharpen your portable skills.