A Matter of Style

Maybe it's because I'm a guy in his late 50's and there's this natural gap between my generation and the one starting their career, but I'm dumbfounded by the dress code and consumption patterns of some of our youngest members at the company.

Don't get me wrong, I know it's a natural thing for youngsters to dress differently from their parents. When I started my career in the early 70's, it was okay to wear a tie as large as a small pizza and grow sideburns thick enough for a squirrel to be able to hide inside. Nevertheless, we were dressing for business and regardless of what hues were considered trendy, tasteful choices could help your career greatly. When we were meeting with a client to force a mainframe maintenance contract down his throat, we were not dressed like we were about to climb the Kilimanjaro. Ross Perot had a similar dilemma at EDS back in the days, he could barely tolerate men who dressed with shirts other than white and growing a beard raised suspicions about your political viewpoint.

Which brings me to my point, guys and gals in their early 20's have no dress code boundaries. They tend to dress at work pretty much the way they dress at home. Shirts from The North Face, Merrell sandals, the only thing missing from their outfit is climbing gear. Horrible haircuts are now back for young men where you can barely see their eyes, therefore impeding their visual perception of nonverbal signals during important meetings. What are they thinking? What happened to decency? And don't get me started about piercing, whenever I see a perforated gal or guy in the office, I try to imagine the top career level that this person will ever achieve and the level is usually quite low.

If you want to have a chance in life, keep your skin intact and distance yourself from your grungie friends. Start shaving, and by shaving I mean shaving, not a 3-day look. Go shop at Harry Rosen, if you're not sure about how to wear a tie just google it. And for god sake make an effort to speak in complete sentences, life is not a MSN chat room. I don't care if your job is to maintain a SAN, you should dress like a CEO. Do yourself a favour and ditch that Hyundai shit box and get yourself an old Mercedes for the same price, you can get today a clean 190 for an astonishing price. Larry Ellison from Oracle did exactly that when we was a young stud, and now check what his net worth is.

All this of course won't give you more money from me, but you'll score higher in my mind and that's what's important.

Uptrend Spotted in Shares of CGI Group

Chip says it all, and he's a wise man. Look at the picture above and decide what needs to be done. If your cultural background indicates that the sacrifice of a young lamb might excite the gods of profitable growth, just do it - but don't expense the lamb, I won't pay for it.

Members Column Day: Turning Members Into Numbers

Today let's open the mailbox to find another fascinating message from one of our members:

Dear FakeMike, many of us are questioning the company's way of managing employees for the past couple of years. It seems everything is colder every day, rules are fixed, nobody is having any kind of fun anymore. Directors show signs of mild to severe depressions. What is the place of the human nature at CGI? Celine from Mtl.

Human nature is overrated, Celine, sorry to bring you the news in such a way. If you want to have fun, get yourself a Wii or a dog, although the latter requires recurrent investments for food and vet. If you want to earn your living, medication is part of the package and pleasure is definitely not within the scope of work. C'mon, where is it written that work has to be fun? Employees who are having a good time is a suspicious activity, it means something is not right and that the manager should definitely check into it. When you laugh, you are not thinking about strategies and tactics to reach a higher level of profitable growth.

As for the company that provides your pay check and therefore feed your family, we might not be perfect yet and we definitely consider humans to be important. Important in a soylent green fashion, meaning humans have to be useful and contribute to the company long term goal. It's no secret that human capital is gradually converted into financial capital, and I think this is normal evolution.

Companies like Google which displays a very abnormal company behaviour toward employees are bound to return to a normal state. Don't even think for one second that on-site gym and free massage are sustainable company expenses. WIthin a few years, Google will transform itself into a standard company, and they will start by using a monochrome logo. They'll drop the freaking expensive free cafeteria, encouraging employees to get their food at Togo's or Taco Bell on El Camino like everyone else. Google will of course drop the 1-day-per-week personal project idea, which is completely useless and goes against every practical management rulebook ever written. Google will hire managers from IBM or Ernst & Young to bring order and decency. Even Eric Schmidt will stop acting like a total lunatic or he will replaced by a more sensible manager who will be able to understand the untapped power of IT consulting services. I'd like to see Lou Gerstner or someone similar leading GOOG.

Gosh I'm getting goose bumps just writing this.

Once people are exposed to the genius behind our service industry and the core ideas of profitable growth, they quickly ditch their ideas about revolutionary products and hardware (yuck). They understand that products are meaningless and risk-ridden, that R&D is a almost a communist idea and humans are just financial resources ready to be put into action.

Celine, I hope you share my grand vision and please report back to your manager immediately if you have any doubt. We may send you back to one of our CGI 101 session to let you adjust your personality to our management philosophy.

I Feel Good

When you're feeling down and out, sometimes you stumble on a situation when your concerns suddenly appear insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Today's such a day for yours truly.

Ever since we announced the lost of the Desjardins account, I've been feeling - let me find the right word - depressed like a Lehman Brothers analyst managing a pool of subprime loans the day they went bust. Not a pretty sight. I could barely eat this past week-end, I was thinking about resigning from CGI and going back to my native Pembroke to raise livestock, something for which I have no experience but somewhat found appealing. Cleaning cows must be fun.

When I opened the newspaper this morning I saw the devastated face of Curly, and my troubles just went away like a snow ball in July. This guy is being torpedoed on a daily basis by problems and scandals of unprecedented magnitude. Muddy liberal party financing tactics, judge nominations dictated by influential party donors, not a day passes without some kind of huge scandal making headlines. The state runs into a deep deficit, and Happy Raymond's budget is still the subject of important resentment from everyone. Water is coming in from all decks, the ship is going down, and there's 2-3 years before the next election, so Curly here is aging fast. He's still in denial mode, at least when talking to reporters, but privately this guy must be gulping Rolaids like crazy. If you were a doctor and the wreck above would check into your office, how much time would you give the man?

So when I think about Curly, I feel good, I feel so light and free of worries. His livid face is a reminder that I'm full of energy, I can double the size of this company if I put my mind to it. I feel like dancing tonight, but don't tell this to CGI members from India.

I need to go now, I'll call a few Wall Street analysts tomorrow and tell them to put CGI on their "Strong buy" list, because we're going to crush the competition just using our will power. Profitable growth will ensue.

Members Column Day: More Crybabies

Dear members, there are days where I wish I'd chosen a career path in the agriculture industry. When you drive your John Deere across the field, you don't hear wheat complaining. When you're in the barn, you don't hear cow talking about getting unions in. Even pigs are happy, and we all know they'd be the first to overthrow the farmer and start wearing Hugo Boss suits.

A knife went threw my heart when I read this CGI bashing on Glassdoor.com:

Cons: Published values not respected from upper management and down the chain. No IT leadership as this company follows the train and is mostly for "body" placement. Very little empowerment of employees as decisions power is kept at the top with little delegation thru the ranks (middle management and employees). Management structure changes frequently. Very weak HR function with few described roles and responsibilities. No ombudsman to enforce sound management practices. Training is hard to come by. On the whole, a large company managed like a small one.

This anonymous coward from Montreal is being tracked right now by our internal intelligence service, he or she will be sent to a dungeon to administer a Lotus Notes server remotely. Nevertheless, it hurts me. Why? It's not because this dweeb is saying false things per se, because as a whole I agree with the guy.

Yes, we're a body shop, we parachute consultants (viruses) in clients site (hosting body) and we bill top rate for whatever skill they have (infectious disease), be it SharePoint, BizTalk, WebSphere, the works. Multiply that action by thousands, and you start talking profitable growth.

Yes, we have no ombudsman because this kind of function is for the weak - get an ombudsman in and next thing you know you hear talk about socialism and unions. The basic idea behind ombudsmen is that they are supposed to act as a neutral position between employees and management. Problem is, my view of the CEO position at CGI is pretty close to this one. Therefore, an ombudsman is of no use and it saves me $100K a year.

Yes, there is no empowerment, this is done on purpose pal because our empire is being driven by a handful of people. Can you imagine the Death Star being run by several committees reporting to Vader? One middle manager trooper might decide to blast a small moon because he had a bad day, and then Sir Darth himself would have to issue a press release saying he's sorry his organization ran amok.

It hurts me so much to hear members take positive aspects of the company (no empowerment, no ombudsman, company managed like a small one) and turn them viciously into sleazy comments. People have no respect for profitable growth, I'm telling you.

Now get back to work you sissy, enlarge your BU revenues for a change.

Back in therapy. Sigh.

With the sour announcement this week that Desjardins is kicking CGI's ass in April 2011, I am feeling awfully depressed - I tried watching a game of curling but it didn't cheer me up. I played bridge on my computer but that didn't do. I even tried listening to favourite tunes from Slim Whitman but even that didn't cheer me up. So I called Paul my therapist and asked if he had some time for me this week-end. Sure, he said, as long as you can pay me you are always welcomed.

So I go back to his office on Saturday, drops of rain were hitting my Mercedes like to punish me even further.

So how are you feeling Mike, my therapist asks. It's been a long time since I billed you.

I go, terrible, just terrible. I mean, you read the news, right? Desjardins is throwing us out the window, like an unfaithful husband after 10 years of marriage. CGI doesn't deserve this, I don't deserve this, GIB lost 3% on the TSX, Serge is calling me every hour to lecture me on how I fucked a profitable relation that he carefully put in place when he was the CEO.

Paul pulls out his iPhone and checks the stock chart for CGI. I see, this is really bad, Mike this is really bad, I gotta dump some at market price Monday morning. But let's get back to you feelings Mike, what do think happened?

I sink even further in the leather couch. You know, Desjardins is going through a major reorg and they want to move away from the mainframe platform. They say they burn too much money in IT, they want to cut 900 positions and save over $175M. Sure, there's a lot of bacon fat in IT but that's not a legitimate reason to put CGI in the garbage can, you know?

Paul grabs a copy of The Globe & Mail and scans one article about the CGI / Desjardins news. He goes, would it be possible that Desjardins' conscious desire to restructure their company is causing them to reconsider all prior decisions, even good ones? I see that in couple therapy, guy dumps the wife and then buys a new car even though the old one, the car I mean, was perfectly fine. It's called projection. You transpose your frustration into other entities.

Well, I go, I think we might have pushed our client toward bad decisions just to keep the gravy train rolling you know, the money was just too sweet and we never recommend a client to reconsider things like a mainframe or other goodies that keep the juicy contracts going. A mainframe is like a 24-hour rainbow with a pot of gold constantly replenishing itself, from the IT outsourcing standpoint that is. We don't want to kill the rainbow. We have loads of IT people specialized in mainframe technology.

Paul goes, so what are you going to do with those mainframe people when the contract will be over in April 2011?

I will fire them of course, what else could I do? But that's not the real issue. People are expendable. What matters is profitable growth, FY2011 will take a direct hit unless we find a mother load of outsourcing contracts in Poland or God knows where. Our company is structured for the investor to be happy as a clam, clients and employees are second-ranking beings. If I proceed with my accelerated path to profitable growth, I'll have to suffer the wrath of money managers everywhere.

Time's up, said Paul. Same time next week?

Sigh. Of course. Send me the bill.

We screwed up

Your humble servant is writing you today with tears in my eyes and red ink in my spreadsheet. We lost a major outsourcing contract with a long-time client, one for which we sucked about $1.2B in revenues during the past 10 years. Yeah, these things happen.

I gotta tell you, a 10-year outsourcing contract is like a marriage. The first year you cater every possible need of your wife, you buy her expensive gifts and you go the extra mile every day. After 10 years you spend most of your nights in strip clubs pretending you have important business meetings. It's the same with a client. After a few years you start to ignore complaints because clients whine all the time. You then become so integrated with the client business that you think you ARE the client, and the real client is just an obnoxious bug flying around you. The client complains that he's been stuck with Explorer 6 for the past 10 years, and you list all your other clients that are still using IE6 and are quite happy ignoring that there are newer versions out there.

The most insulting thing about the Desjardins story is that it happened in our own backyard in Montreal. Worse, these nitwits publicly said that they are only considering IBM and HP to replace their beloved CGI. Like that's gonna solve a problem.

Roach out, talk to you soon.