Demotivational Speakers On The Rise Nationwide

'Accelerated voluntary attrition' the best way to make the most of companies' hiring freezes, analysts say

By B.L. O'Harde
Democratic American Motivator Magazine

They can only admit it privately behind closed doors, but the message is clear: Corporate executives across the land would rather their employees just quit.

The economy is spiraling. Shareholders are angry. Horseshoe-haired heads are on the chopping block.

Enter: the demotivational speaker.

With hiring freezes reaching sub-zero temperatures, companies are learning that crushing, corporate-wide employee cynicism is a weapon to be wielded, not a phenomenon to be feared, says Dr. Dan Douner, head of the National Demotivational Alliance, a consulting firm that is considered a pioneer in the field of demotivational speaking.

Key to the alliance's strategy is an initiative known behind closed doors as "AVC."

"We're incredibly honored to help companies downsize through what we call Accelerated Voluntary Attrition," Douner said. "Most executives these days are Baby Boomers who see outright firing or laying off employees as hypocritical to the worldview they held 30 years ago."

The program rests on the notion that employees effectively stripped of motivation will be encouraged to surrender their jobs, allowing salaries to be absorbed, Douner explains.

The process, however, requires a deliberate, concerted effort to target the most-appropriate employees to encourage to quit, he says.

The core of the program rests on training seminars designed to identify those best to keep and those who "would be best served to realize that we appreciate their past service but that we no longer have a place for their favorable performance and, more importantly, their competitive salaries," Douner says.

Among the seminars:

-- "Ask not what you can do for your company. Ask what the company likely believes you should avoid doing."

-- "The change will be painful, but we'll succeed as a team -- even if we fail."

-- "How not to blame the person who screwed it all up and still come out on top."

The cumulative effect of the seminars -- designed with intense sessions constructed to push the normal psyche into a state of survival mode -- provides insight necessary to identifying and classifying current employees, said Fuller Bolschitt, a leading demotivational trainer.

On one hand, Bolschitt said, a number of employees quit because they see the training seminars as metaphors for how the workplace has become a toxic environment.

These people -- labeled "unfortunate relics of constructive institutional insubordination"-- are immediately targeted as the main focus of the demotivational purging effort.

Meanwhile, the training helps retain those employees who have been identified as having superior passive-aggressive skills -- skills that will serve to further foment resentment in the workplace and alleviate pressure on actual decision-makers, Bolschitt says.

"Those employees are the lynch pin of an organization," he says. "Corporations keep them demotivated on the promise that their skills will lead them to the ranks of middle management, where petty power struggles will invariably force more people to quit and reverse-motivate themselves to protect their jobs."

And along the way, Bolschitt said, they will periodically force one another to quit, leaving vacant a frozen middle management position in addition to the lower-level job they had vacated that also is now frozen.

"In the short term, we have to increase management positions, which helps us give the impression that the tenets of our demotivational campaign are virtue" he said. "After a while, however, they end up hating one another and not the company and fail to notice the subsequent cuts in their management field."

That, he said, helps the company maintain the image that only the most-talented are allowed to continue working, giving them the foundation to rationalize carrying more workload and in turn keeping the company's most-basic functions operating.

"In all of this," Douner says, "we have to remember that everybody wins -- except those who lose."

To schedule a seminar, Douner suggests visiting the alliance's website or calling 1-800-INVECT.

I Really Need To Unplug That TV Outside

Shouldn't the show's title be ... "Are You At Least As Smart As A 5th Grader?"

Because nobody's won the million yet, and even if they had, who's to say the kids couldn't answer questions above their grade level?

Or maybe we can only know if a contestant is smarter than a 5th grader if one or more of the 5th graders fails to answer the right question.

And how many questions would the kids have to get wrong -- and how many would have to get the questions wrong -- for the contestant to quantifiably be smarter than a 5th grader?

It seems like the show's rigged so that the kids' feelings never get hurt.

Even if they get it wrong, they can take solace that you wouldn't do any better. And they wouldn't recognize otherwise if you were.

Unless you win the million.

Let's see how a "Jeopardy" champ would do.

Or maybe the champ would freeze given the chance to lose more than $100,000 if he's wrong about whether the sun is 10,000 or 1 million degrees.

Which I was.

They Call It Feeling Brown

The summer sunsets are descending in a cloudless haze.

Barely clothed like the dry, barren hills they slip behind, a disparate aura surrounds them.

A brown glow of desolation obscures the lines that draw where each little thing is supposed to end and begin.

It radiates a something that almost feels like a nothing.

Almost.

It would set the world on fire.

If only it could.

Until something lasting comes to wash it all clean ...

How Digital Foiled The Finals

I guess I want the Lakers to win tonight, even though I want the Celtics to win it all.

Why? Because it's another night I can sit on my porch with my pre-historic television struggling to pick up the ABC airwave signal all the way from across from the Carolina state line and the Blue Ridge mountains.

Ever so slightly, with most minimal shifts in the wind, the stark contrast of the green shamrock against the flamboyant Laker yellow and purple will shift to black and white.

That makes watching television a true interactive experience.

This year, like other early Junes before them, since NBC handed over the torch to ABC (and with its broadcast rights, a far weaker signal), the use of tin foil has been vital to the tradition.

For without the tin foil scrunched onto the anntena rabbit ears, it wouldn't look as good as it does nor feel as industrious an endeavor.

It feels like you're tapping into something natural (though it's not) and yet at the same time have created your own technology with each sheet of foil you tear and crumple.

But ... they're going digital in 2009.

Who could forget with all the reminders to the (old) folks who use this as their primary source of having the bejesus scared out of them by the 11 o'clock news.

And it's OK, kind of. The government is going to help the people who like how it's done now to buy the digital converters to keep their crappy televisions functioning.

But for me, I'm losing something, even if I were to upgrade my TV.

Gone will be the satisfaction of twisting some tin foil on the edge of a prehistoric anntena and feeling like I personally am responsible for bringing to the porch enclave the Celtics 24-point comeback in Game 4 or the Lakers stumbling there way from elimination in Game 5.

I could convert the TV, but the point isn't pick up a digital signal.

The point is to manipulate are far simpler code with the use of a simple household item.

I don't really like the Lakers, but I want at least another night of grilling some food, drinking some beer and sitting with my son as we scrunch the tin foil ever-tighter and ever-pointier.

A view that we earned, not bought.

It's almost like sneaking into a live game.

If it goes to a Game 7, maybe I'll celebrate and buy another box of tin foil.

'I Love You Jesus 'Cause You Understand, How Hard It Is To Be A Man'

That's what we all are.

Fingers and arms exploring what we can build or destroy, legs moving us around to do what it seems like we should do in the only we know how to get it done.

Breathing in and out some invisible gas that keeps this awkward, temporal collection of action together.

People.

Humans.

Always being cool.

Sounds like a religion.