Getting Drunk in First Class

One of the most puzzling questions that has baffled mankind since the beginning of time is:

What do fat chicks and extremely large organizations have in common?

Today is your lucky day; it turns out they have a lot in common. But first, to effectively answer this question, we need to discuss the common misconception of how it is thought that large companies are organized today.

Traditionally, it was thought that the CxO’s define some sort of initiatives through some vague corporate strategy plan that a really expensive consulting company put together for millions of dollars. This plan is then passed on to VP’s who hand it off to middle management. Middle management is stuck with the job of making sure that the workers execute whatever it takes to shoot towards meeting that strategy.

As you can see, any initiative in a large organization starts out at the top. Slowly but surely, it trickles down the pyramid to the people who actually make the work happen. A recent shocking discovery, however, has determined that organizations are far more complex.

There is much more to an organization then just Strategy trickling down from the top, through middle management, and onto the workers. Oh no, its far more complex than that.

As the old organizational structure illustrates, strategy starts at the top at the CxO level. The strategy then trickles down to vice presidents, who pass it on to upper management.

Upper management then calls a long series of drawn out meetings that involve various stakeholders and the infamous steering committes. Finally, political lines are drawn by upper management by picking out their “Bitches”, or in business terms, middle managers.

The middle managers then take these orders from upper management, call an even longer series of meetings and try to figure out a way to implement the orders they were passed from upper management. Finally they get around to handing off some vague, worthless documentation, usually consisting of meeting notes that some intern took to the “project managers”.

This is where the line blurs because it seems like these days that everybody is a project manager. It makes perfect sense though, there’s a lot of projects to be managed in a large organization. Unfortunately, project managers have a tough job; they have to mind the upper and middle management politics without really knowing where any of the lines are drawn. A project manager will inevitiably cross some of these boundaries and cause some major turf wars which will result in more “He’s my bitch!” meetings from upper and middle management.

The project manager gets to sit around and make phone calls to other people within the organization; but most of the time they won’t be able to get anything done so they have to resort to contractors. This results in even more meetings, but by this time, the original strategy is so screwed up, nobody has any idea of what they are doing.

Finally the contractors start doing the actual work based on what the project manager has told them. Notice how there are very few people at the bottom of this organizational structure who actually do the real work.

In the end, the CxO’s consulting company should have just passed the vague strategy documents off to the contractors; they would have ended up with slightly better results.

Empirical evidence suggests that the shape of such an organization is strikingly familar to that of a fat chick. By utilizing the magic of the Getting Drunk in First Class special effects artists, we are able to bring to you this sequence of images that proves the point once and for all.

The middle part or any large organization is big and ugly, just like this chicks nasty ass. In most organizations, all of the shit can be found in the middle, again, like this nasty cottage cheese infested ass. I’ll bet it even smells are the same between the two.

So remember, next time somebody wants you to create an organizational chart for their large enterprise, think fat nasty chick and proudly present them with a picture of this fat plump ass.