Corporate Personality Types -- The French Rock Star

Warriors, every once in a while, even at the most boring business conferences, you sometimes see a presenter so shocking, so absurd, so French, that you just have to say, “Whoa, what the fuck is the guy wearing? Oh yeah, I’m in Europe. I forgot.”

I am in Europe and I am at a conference, and I did see such a person, a person who quite seriously stood up in front of 50 important people working in offices around the world and presented in a serious and, except for his clothes, boring manner.

He’s the kind of corporate type I call, in my book White Collar Warrior, The Rock Star. A Rock Star I define as someone who dresses for the business day like he’s going to gather up his band and open for U2 right after work.

The French guy I saw today was a peculiar European flavor of Rock Star.

In front of an audience dressed conservatively in slacks, sports jackets and the occasion pair of expensive jeans, French Rock Star went with this look…

1. Thin white T-shirt, cut low around his neck with a thin collar, looking vaguely like an antique undershirt. He seemed to be trying show off his collar bones. And as he was rock star thin, why not?

2. On top of the T-shirt was a blue sports jacket. That conservative garment seemed to be arguing with the T-shirt, the formal versus the informal. On anyone else (me for instance) that combo would have looked like a dress shirt had been forgotten during the rush to get dressed, perhaps due to jet lag or drunkenness or both. On French Rock Star, it was a look, carried out with panache, like it would have been shameful to hold back his coolness with a mundane dress shirt.

3. His hair was full of product, spiked, pointy and offering a swirl of dark across his brow that constantly threatened to drop into his eyes.

4. His beard was about a quarter inch long, just passed “unshaved” and just before “full beard.” You know what’s between those two beard lengths? Something the ladies call, “Oooo, you’ll be all scratchy if I kiss you.” I remember being able to wear that length. These days, if I grew my beard for a few days in the hopes of enhancing my sexiness, I’d just get to the length called “looks unemployed and potentially homeless.”

5. And the shoes, ah those Italian shoes with pointy toes. They curved upward, like elf shoes. They didn’t quite have a swirled point that you could hang little bells from, but they were clearly pointing to a place no self-respecting American shoes would ever point.

Warning Warriors, when you encounter a Rock Star in your journey through Cubeland, do not, I repeat, do not, try to dress like him. Unless, of course, you are under 30, and are rock star thin, and have particularly handsome collar bones.

Great Moments In Corporate Jackassery

Warriors, if there is one almost completely sure fire way to get a project approved, it is this…
Pitch building a mediocre product with half the budget it normally takes to build a mediocre project.

Do NOT, unless you are James Cameron, pitch an amazing product that costs more to build than a merely good product.

Quality doesn’t count. Costs do. Remember that.

The soulless, visionless, blue-suited zombies who run large corporations have had all willingness to take risks beaten out of them. The chance of a failure on their otherwise pristine records keeps them awake at night cuddling their teddy bears and popping Ambien.

Case in point…The TV show Southland, which just had its second season premiere on TNT. Amazing show. A clear candidate for best show on TV. I was watching it last night and thinking to myself, “Oh NBC, you couldn’t make this show a hit? Great acting, masterful writing and compelling characters that you love rooting for, while also dealing with troubling social issues of the day – You couldn’t figure out how to get people to watch that?”

The answer is no. Instead, they took five hours of prime time TV and turned it into something you could maybe see on a cable access channel, but with better furniture. Why did they do that? Why was Jay Leno occupying valuable prime time slots, where he was busy losing ratings to Seinfeld repeats every night?

Because someone at NBC thought he had a brilliant idea. Instead of trying to make high quality shows, which are expensive, it would be better to make a mediocre show for less money than it would take to buy a toupee for Jeff Zucker. Mathematically, it made perfect sense, even though the equation used to make that decision probably didn’t include NBC becoming a laughing stock.

That guy probably got a raise and a promotion. That guy is probably going to continue to make decisions like that, and he will always have an apartment on Manhattan’s West Side, a brand new BMW in the garage and his wife will always be hotter than yours. That’s what embracing low-cost mediocrity will do for you.

Meanwhile, watch Southland, before someone at TNT has the bright idea to cancel it and start running a puppet show.