Weak at the Top: The Uncensored Diary of The Last Cavemanager. This item is unavailable.Weak at the Top: The Uncensored Diary of The Last Cavemanager

Monday

Recruitment week! This is where I play God and toy with other people’s lives. Rigorously pre-sorted CVs. Photos first - don’t want any swamp donkeys scowling round the office. Then checked interests. I will not work with anybody who thinks rambling is interesting. Found one with skydiving under interests. Crossed him off – can’t have employees who are more interesting that you are. Hayley my PA asked if she could go on self-assertion course. I said no for the hundredth time.

Tuesday

Working from gym today. Told Hayley I need to spend more time looking at the figures. Have diverted all calls to our Customer Careline where they will be patronised to death by a recording which says they’re held in a queue and we value their call very much. We don’t tell them we value their call because we’re charging them £3 a minute for it and the queue they’re held in is a circular one.

Wednesday

Got in so late I hardly had time to bin post, delete e-mails and cancel meetings before lunch. In the afternoon called in top totty Emily Reimbold and gave her a quick 360° appraisal (if her skirt was any shorter it would be a collar). Asked her if she’d like to have dinner to discuss a more hands-on management style. She declined but I assured her my door was always open (the one marked ‘Bedroom’).

Guy Browning is a business consultant and writer. The man behind the Office Politics column in the Guardian for four successful years, Guy then moved on to the ‘How to’ column, showing how business principles can be applied to home life (and ‘how they don’t work there either’). He also writes Under the Seatbelt for British Airways Business Life magazine, and Weak at the Top for Management Today. In his spare time he runs a very successful innovation consultancy, Smokehouse (www.smokehouse.co.uk).