Humorous Satire Reveals Truth About
Corporations
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By George Randall
|
If Niccolo
Machiavelli were alive today, he would be the first to endorse Ed Rychkun's laugh-out-loud
satire How's Your AQ Today? Corporations Stripped Naked. According to the author,
AQ stands for "Asshole Quotient," and he maintains that any employee who wants
to work his (or her) way up the corporate ladder and succeed in business must not only
become an asshole, but also cultivate his asshole quotient and view his fellow employees
as assholes.
At the outset
of the book, Rychkun makes it clear that he bases his information about the corporate
world on his own personal experiences and how he "climbed the ladder of success"
to positions of power in major companies, including IBM. He also informs the reader that
although he is poking fun at the corporate world and satirizing its power structure, there
is truth to almost everything he says.
In the first
chapter he sets the stage with his "Eight Laws of AQ'ism." The first law states
categorically: "There exists a natural tendency within any corporation for any
individual to classify another as an asshole." The remainder of the laws illustrates
how in time any corporate employee learns to accept, cultivate, and ultimately maximize
and exploit his AQ. Throughout the chapters, the author substantiates his claims by
offering numerous examples, charts, and cartoons illustrating the inevitable progression
to perfect one's AQ.
Along the way,
the reader is treated to a pantheon of corporate stereotypes with names like Franklin
Hardass, Angus Steadfast, and Slink Whirlwind. Hardass represents the most successful of
the stereotypes not only because he is intellectually and emotionally well suited for
success in a corporate structure, but because he follows the Eight Laws of AQ'ism without
recrimination or self-reflection.
Unfortunately,
this Machiavellian formula for success is not without drawbacks: "High AQ's have a
tendency to become more destructive over time. The absolute extremes include a
dictatorship with power or a babbling idiot without power. Even worse is a senile old
has-been with power. As mentioned before, through the phenomenon known as inter-assholism,
any company can ultimately achieve a state of asshole saturation, where everybody thinks,
infers, tells or treats everybody else as assholes."
To be sure,
anyone who has ever worked in a corporation will be able to identify with this phenomenon
(as well as almost everything else in the book). And although the author gets us to laugh
at the absurdity of it all, he also makes a very serious point about the ruthless and
destructive nature that has become part and parcel of profit-driven corporations in
today's culture.
Check out
Ed’s interview here:
See BUFO RADIO Interview http://www.burlingtonnews.net/interviewsrychkun.html