# To hell with Fish! For Life **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [April 25, 2005, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027 "2005-04-25T14:24:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Bippy\_the\_Beardless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac8455/32.png) [@Bippy\_the\_Beardless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bippy_the_Beardless)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2005, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/81 "2005-05-03T21:25:54Z")
> [@Zebra](#): > > I’d be happier if instead of banning office romances they\* required \* them. BJ’s for productivity. The lowest productivity employees have to ‘bottom’ for the highest productivity employees, it just might work… ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2005, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/82 "2005-05-03T21:38:13Z")
> [@Bippy the Beardless](#): > > BJ’s for productivity. The lowest productivity employees have to ‘bottom’ for the highest productivity employees, it just might work… Now _there’s_ a corporate culture I can really get behind! Or in front of, as the case may be… ---
**Author:** ![Avarie537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/48db29/32.png) [@Avarie537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Avarie537)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2005, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/83 "2005-05-03T23:01:56Z")
My husband’s employer is big on the book “Good to Great.” Apparently, there’s some schleck in there about having “the right people on the bus.” According to him, the WRONG people are always the upper-level management! His office has less than 125 employees, and something like 30 of them are upper- or mid-level management. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_Pearse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/richard_pearse/32/13144_2.png) [@Richard\_Pearse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Pearse)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/84 "2005-05-04T01:12:31Z")
> [@Stonebow](#): > > I completely agree with your point. However, I also want to point out the dangers of the idea that you have to have your ‘dream job’ to be happy with what you do, or that there is only 1 dream job for a person. Yes, good point. One of the things that seems to make some people unhappy is that they feel like they have failed in life if they didn’t get their dream job. And of course, some people don’t have a dream job. Another danger of having a “dream job” is that it can be far too easy to forget about enjoying life while you’re trying to _get there_. Then once you do _get there_ you often find out that _there_ is not quite what you thought it’d be. I think that the most important thing to being happy in your job is having good people to work with. You can get that with any job really, aside from extremely solitary ones. People can also ruin what you might have considered to be your dream job. Fuck Fish! For Life, People! For Life, that’s where happiness lies, in work and elsewhere. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/85 "2005-05-04T01:56:42Z")
> [@cornflakes](#): > > …And once again I want to apologize to everyone who has ever lived for my having once taught TQM. I was young and naive, and I assure you that it won’t happn again. Most of us gubmint folks were required to take that training. Don’t worry about us though, we recognized it for the horse shit that it was 😃 ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/86 "2005-05-04T02:22:34Z")
Possible Hijack. Alert. Alert. We get to suffer through every management fad there is. 1. TQM 2. IQUE 3. Outside the Box 4. 6 Hats 5. Cultural diversity 6. Paradigm 7. Management by objective 8. Competency gap 9. 6 Sigma 10. Empowerment 11. Stovepiping 12. Storefront 13. One Book 14. Sensitivity 15. Deming 16. Just in time 17. Customer outreach 18. Everybody is a Customer 19. Teaming 20. Metrics The same thing always happens. Some “expert” from afar - usually someone with little or no real life experience in our area of familiarity and with no clue about what we do, comes in and sells the Latest Great Idea to the General or Director In Charge Of Everything. It is a HUGE and fundamental change in every aspect of “how we do business”. We get “tasked” to come into full compliance with it immediately. Never mind it is poorly defined, even more poorly flowed down and communicated, and probably has no application. When we ask for direction of better definition, we are told to be “empowered” or “smart enough” to figure it out. Of course, we have to completely rebuild, document, and report everything. Then we get audited by people even more clueless than we are. Then we get the Parade Of Other Experts, who know even less than we do. Each Expert tells us what we should have done. Each Expert tells us the previous Expert was completely wrong. So, we spend about 3 years figuring out just what we are supposed to do. After all the Experts go away, we finally start making it almost work, despite the inherent flaws (after a few years). It is just beginning to settle down and almost work when The Next Big Thing comes along, and it’s back to square one. To aggravate the situation, there is the never ending reorganizing that happens. Quite literally, you end up not even knowing for sure who you work for and who you answer to. The people who dream these things up should be shot. The top level management that buys into it should be drawn and quartered. If you’ve ever wondered just why the government is so damn inefficient and can’t seem to do even the slightest things right, there are the reasons. Instead of **simply letting people do their jobs in the ways that make sense** , there is always yet another snake oil salesman peddling the Next Big Thing. From casual observation, it looks like private enterprise is even worse, since that is where most of these “ideas” came from originally. ---
**Author:** ![DoctorJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doctorj/32/2904_2.png) [@DoctorJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DoctorJ)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/87 "2005-05-04T02:54:34Z")
> [@](#): > > A few years back, we were pulled off the floor and from the pts in order to be taught how to properly answer the phone. Now, I figure most of us know to say: XXX unit, may I help you? or at the least, “hello?”, but that is NOT the way. They gave us a spiel that no lie, took approximately 30 seconds to say. Our nurses started doing something like this recently; it didn’t last long, since the one thing doctors really fucking hate is spending extra time on the phone. > [@](#): > > There was also the time when were supposed to rat on our coworkers by confronting them with the strange phrase:“that’s not a 95” when they had not met an arbitrary standard set by a consultant. (95 referred to the percentile that the hospital wanted to achieve in pt satisfaction). I always point out that if we really wanted to up patient satisfaction on our service, we’d send every one of them out with a bushel basket of Percoset. > [@](#): > > Then there was the time when I was supposed to say to each pt, “do you need anything else? I have the time.” It became screechingly obvious to all (and some pts commented on it) that I did NOT have the time–or the help. There must be a big book of this shit for nurses somewhere. I remember some nurses complaining about this one a while back; the idea was that many patients had complained that the nurses were stretched too thin. One of them pointed out that rather than do anything to correct the reasons behind this (entirely correct) impression, they’re trying to fix it by giving the nurses yet more shit to do. ---
**Author:** ![DoctorJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doctorj/32/2904_2.png) [@DoctorJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DoctorJ)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/88 "2005-05-04T03:20:22Z")
Our hospital recently got Magnet certification, which appears to be in this same general class of bullshit. (We weren’t really involved; they know better than to ask residents to do anything else.) The worst part about it was that all of the halls had to decorate. Imagine tons of streamers and inspirational messages in big sparkly letters assaulting you on your way in to see your dying husband in the medical ICU. The rumor is that we were not actually eligible for this elusive Magnet status due to some aspects of our size or structure or something like that, but that large payments of cash led to these deficits being overlooked. It was clearly very important to someone that we qualified for this designation; I have to wonder who takes seriously any distinction that apprently depends on decoration of hallways. Thankfully, residency programs (at least mine) don’t get into this sort of bullshit. ---
**Author:** ![Rick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/9f8e36/32.png) [@Rick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 5:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/89 "2005-05-04T05:34:36Z")
> [@cornflakes](#): > > …And once again I want to apologize to everyone who has ever lived for my having once taught TQM. I was young and naive, and I assure you that it won’t happn again. Don’t apologize, TQM was the best 15 minutes of my working life. I could actaully ask for a tool I needed to do my job, and have a hope in hell of getting it. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 5:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/90 "2005-05-04T05:40:52Z")
Okay, what’s TQM? ---
**Author:** ![Frank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frank)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/91 "2005-05-04T05:42:36Z")
> [@Rilchiam](#): > > Okay, what’s TQM? Total Quality Management ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/92 "2005-05-04T06:10:38Z")
I see. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![5que](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/5/3bc359/32.png) [@5que](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/5que)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2005, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/93 "2005-05-04T13:10:59Z")
> [@SteveG1](#): > > The same thing always happens. Some “expert” from afar - usually someone with little or no real life experience in our area of familiarity and with no clue about what we do, comes in and sells the Latest Great Idea to the General or Director In Charge Of Everything. We sometimes call it “Management by Inflight Magazine.” They read about the latest bullshit on a plane and decide we want to do it. We are moving into a new building in two months, which cuts down the number of offices for all but directors and senior managers. But there are four, _yes, four_, offices reserved for consultants. ---
**Author:** ![SteveG1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bb73d2/32.png) [@SteveG1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SteveG1)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2005, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/94 "2005-05-05T01:55:49Z")
Uh huh. And here’s how it will go. The consultants will breeze in, making grand pronouncements and vague fel-good generalizations that have no basis in fact. Management will decide it sounds cool and will go with it. Then they will claim they are showing Leadership. Never mind they have no clue what they are talking about, or the waste of time and money it will cause. They will have “done something” yet when it crashes, they can blame someone else. When the whole thing falls flat, it will be YOUR fault. Everything will go to shit, the consultants will get paid, and you will be “directed” to get with it and clean up the mess too. I wish there was a bounty on consultants. I’d have lots of hides curing on my back fence (grumble grumble). ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2005, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/95 "2005-05-05T02:54:10Z")
> [@This Year's Model](#): > > Total Quality Management Okay, what’s Total Quality Management? ---
**Author:** ![Frank](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Frank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frank)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2005, 3:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/96 "2005-05-05T03:26:29Z")
> [@asterion](#): > > Okay, what’s Total Quality Management? _sigh_ Damn SDMB. People ask for knowledge all the damn time. _sigh_ I knew this would happen. TQM is basically an absorption of how U.S. consultants perceived the Japanese management style of the 70’s and 80’s. I just googled a bit (I’m not an expert on this stuff) and found [this](http://www.hrzone.com/topics/tqm.html#overview): > [@](#): > > The TQM philosophy of management is customer-oriented. All members of a total quality management (control) organization strive to systematically manage the improvement of the organization through the ongoing participation of all employees in problem solving efforts across functional and hierarchical boundaries. > > TQM incorporates the concepts of product quality, process control, quality assurance, and quality improvement. Consequently, it is the control of all transformation processes of an organization to better satisfy customer needs in the most economical way. Total quality management is based on internal or self-control, which is embedded in each unit of the work system (technology and people). Pushing problem solving and decision-making down in the organization allows people who do the work to both measure and take corrective action in order to deliver a product or service that meets the needs of their customer. and [this](http://home.att.net/~iso9k1/tqm/tqm.html): > [@](#): > > Total Quality Management (TQM) > > Total = Quality involves everyone and all activities in the company. > > Quality = Conformance to Requirements (Meeting Customer Requirements). > > Management = Quality can and must be managed. > > TQM = A process for managing quality; it must be a continuous way of life; a philosophy of perpetual improvement in everything we do. As with all of this sort of thing, it is a combination of common sense and paradigms that could be very helpful and usefull if actually followed by _all_ members of the organization. ---
**Author:** ![pokey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@pokey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pokey)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2005, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/97 "2005-05-05T03:39:52Z")
The reason Fish makes me mad is that you’re supposed to choose your own attitude but it can only be the attitude that your job is fun. That’s I think what they call a little bit of a Hobson’s choice if Lemony Snicket is to be believed. I do think my job is fun, but that’s because I already learned about pretending to have fun when I took a little class called GYM for my whole entire childhood. That was the class that taught you that you the concept of losing points for not smiling while you do exactly what you were asked to do. On the other hand, I do love my job and I thought Fish was okay for teambuilding in the sense that everyone united in the creative pursuit of entertaining each other with sarcastic mockery. I thought that might be the secret agenda behind Fish. Instead of having all your employees united in hating YOU, they can unite in hating a book. It helps them bond, while protecting the boss from more direct and personal scornful derision. Win-win. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [May 10, 2005, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027/98 "2005-05-10T02:04:55Z")
> [@Maus Magill](#): > > Sounds like **Evil Captor** has a case of the mondays. > > Perhaps if he had change for a paradigm[1], his outlook would be broadened. Just utilize your medium, and work towards success! > [1] WTF does “change for a paradigm” mean anyhow? How the fuck can change be a specific model? That expression is dumb because it’s a pun that sacrifices meaning. Everyone knows the proper motto is “shift the dominant paradigm” which means " This is the new way the fuckers in charge say we’re doing shit, so play along or get the hell out." See? That one makes a bit of sense 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/to-hell-with-fish-for-life/301027.md?page=4)