The Hindu Business Line : Getting to know your boss

Recently, as I sat down and did a review of the topics of my columns, I suddenly noticed that I have not touched on a very critical one. One that is of universal significance and yet often neglected at the grave peril of the young manager: `The Black-Scholes Pricing Model'.

This is a pathbreaking piece of work for which Robert Merton and Myron Scholes won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 1997. To put it mildly, the model states that for a derivative, the price of the underlying instrument follows a geometric Brownian motion with constant drift and velocity.

Right now some of you must be saying: "Of course this is provided the realised volatility is constant over the life option, changing neither with time, nor stock price level. Ha! Tried to pull one over our eyes didn't you? We may have no social life, but our economics fundas are sound! Back to Orkut now for serious social interaction."

But the vast majority of you guys are thinking:

"But... we thought you are talking about some real model. You know the type with wardrobe malfunctions and all. You are giving us some finance gyaan! Boo! Boo! Bad business humour columnist!"

I see. So there really is no hope of giving you some real, useful information is there? Alas. Theek hai. Don't say I didn't try. So I will make some minor modifications to today's premise. Today's topic will now be: `Knowing the different types of bosses and using this to your benefit.'

Now, we all know that there are three or four types of young managers:

The career-focused

The hard working

The morally and ethically upright

The rich and successful

But what some of you might not know is that this type of broad classification of people is also applicable to top management. It is easy to say with a shrug of the shoulders: "All bosses are morons!" Possibly.

But with a little diligence, you will soon see that there is more to them than just that. They too have personalities. They too have their own quirks and whimsies. And once the young manager is able to identify the nature of his own boss, it is a cinch to use this knowledge for rapid personal gain.

Today, I will list a few broad boss types. And then next time, I will tell you how to manipulate each type successfully and systematically. What you can do in the meantime is to observe your boss carefully and try to bracket him into one of the classifications you will find below. And so here goes:

The Photosynthesizer

He has all the action, energy and drive of a potted begonia. His meetings are tortuous and summer interns reporting to him are routinely known to spontaneously pass into comas during project reviews. The ones that do not are immediately picked up by the Indian Government to negotiate the Kashmir issue.

However, he is very successful at getting business. This is because clients scramble to do work with him just to get him to stop making the 134-slide marketing presentation. "No we don't care what your company is called and what you guys are quoting. Take the business! Just let us go home," they sometimes say after his four-hour icebreaker joke.

The Social Animal

And by animal I mean disgusting leech. He loves interacting with people and is always running around the cubicles socialising. Pity he can't remember anyone's name though. He thinks his employees love his open and fraternal approach. They do, as much as they adore the Ebola virus as a family friend or squash partner.

He organises office parties every other weekend and has a great time with the people present, often saying "My, I never knew you worked for me at all," not knowing that each one is a hired actor making ends meet.

His birthdays are celebrated with great fanfare, with gifts for everyone including bookmarks and gift vouchers for the staff, paid holiday for the secretary and a Toyota Camry for himself. He also seems to think that the more people love you, the harder they give you birthday bumps. Which is a good thing for everyone else in the office though.

The Wikibossia

No information is too insignificant for this fellow. His commitment is so high that if there is potential to add one more tiny titbit of information in a report, he will himself go to the greatest length possible to find someone to go find it. His PowerPoint presentations run into several gigabytes and meetings routinely adjourn for tea and biscuits between slides, while waiting for graphs to load.

He once famously explained the annual marketing expense in so much detail that during the course of the meeting he rediscovered the Black-Scholes Model entirely by accident.

The Parasite

He is the ultimate opportunist. Give him an inch and he will take a light-year. His career growth has been astronomical. After all, he walked in one day to repair the photocopier and today he is Head of M&A. He has quickly overtaken his peers. That is because one was found beaten to death with a Xerox toner cartridge in the boardroom, another was bludgeoned to death with a stack of copier paper on a weekend when no one else was around and two others suffered freak electric shocks from the Xerox machine.

People who work under him are set stiff targets for promotion including: "Increasing sales by 15 per cent, achieving world peace in the second quarter, colonising any sub-asteroid belt planet by FY '08 and supporting Tendulkar in a public forum." All promoted employees must take three copies of the promotion letter themselves. Right away.

The `Air up there' boss

He is one of the great mysteries of the company. No one knows how he reached where he has. This is primarily because he has the mental acumen of a paper clip. However, due to the mysterious vagaries of corporate policy, he is today the Vice-President of Complex Stochastic Research. When recently asked about the financial implication of Swaps in the current financial scenario he replied: "Well, as long as both partners are willing I really don't see the issue if you honestly ask me."

The Thesaurus Rex

Where one word can be used, our fellow uses a paragraph, with footnotes. He loves using long and complex jargon that ostensibly reflects his scholarship and grasp of the subject. One of his recent staff e-mails about dress code was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. "Scintillating, full of emotion, classy," were some of the words they used to describe him.

After the dreadful `mass cerebral haemorrhage and some self-strangling' incident of 2004, they no longer let him speak at company meetings. He likes to call it the "Black-Scholes Pricing Human Apparel Sales Promotion and Depiction Individual Agent Concept."

The Divine Boss

This boss is the one who is never wrong. He is infallible. At least if you go by what he thinks. While in most cases he is so off the mark that the mark is literally in another time zone altogether, he always finds a way to redeem himself.

He also once famously insisted that Porter has only talked about three forces. When they finally showed him the book he grimaced and remarked that he was talking about the other Porter. "Which one?" they asked him. "Err... umm... Parthasarathy Porter. Close friend. You haven't heard of him."

The Picker of Nits

Our final boss is a perfectionist whose attention to minute details makes you want to stand up and shout: Heil! Since he completely lacks perspective, he will often spend long hours explaining to a colleague the pitfalls of using Verdana as a font in company reports and documents. "You must always use Arial. Or at least Tahoma," he will say. "Yes, but must we discuss this during my exit interview?" the colleague will ask.

However, in his perfectionist zeal, he will overlook some important details. "In your report on the recent incident where we lost market share by 93 per cent," he will write in an e-mail, "I noticed the use of two independent clauses which are not joined by a conjunction and/or a semicolon."

Next week more on how to tame these bosses.

(The writer, an alumnus of IIM-A, was a management consultant before quitting to work as a freelance writer, author and general handyman. He blogs at http://sidin.blogspot.com)