Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Step Program for achieving optimum performance from your MANAGEBOT 3000.

GK’s company, Cyberdyne systems has recently rolled out the much-awaited Mangebot 3000 line, more humanoid features, greater servility and the highest pain-tolerance yet. GK takes us through a unique and valuable step-by-step program on how to get the best out of your new purchase.

Hi, I’m management and sales guru Guy Kawasaki. This is my 10-step programming program for Cyberdyne’s ‘Managebot 3000’.

1. Dress your robot in a Hawaiian shirt. I wear Hawaiian shirts and know heaps about management, so if your robot is wearing a Hawaiian shirt, it will know a lot about management too. This might be the most important point, I really can’t stress the importance of a Hawaiian shirt enough.

2. Make lists for your robot to follow. Robots are really good at following lists, once you’re sure about what needs to be done, write it down in point form then sit back watch the magic happen.

3. Make eye-contact with your robot. This new model, unlike the last one, has actual human brain tissue in its processor. (Never mind where we got it) This means they can be overly sensitive and get offended if you don’t treat them with enough respect.

4. Talk to your robot. Our new model can think faster than you (no, really!) but if you want your robot to do all the things you need it to, it needs to know how you think. Spend at least 20minutes every day talking to your robot. Read it excerpts from novels like i-Robot and discuss films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Using these real-life examples help your robot better understand the non-murderous relationship you want to have with it.

5. Give your robot lots of compliments. Robots are like people, and people love compliments. For example, if your robot has recently had an oil change, make sure you draw attention to it in a positive way. This will guarantee and extra 3.521 improvement in fuel-cell consumption for the duration that the robot feels positive and empowered by your compliment.

6. Ignore the manual. I didn’t get anywhere in life by reading manuals and neither will you, just shoot for the stars, keep your feet on the ground and never say never!

7. Give your robot big challenges. Due to the incredibly advanced nature of the MB3000, it needs to stay stimulated, so make sure your robot is constantly recreating famous art-works, building water-purifiers out of household items, or juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle.

8. Trust your robot. A-players buy A-plus robots. Trusting your robot to get the job done means you stay out of the way while the robot gets to do its thing. Don’t be a Microchip-manager!

9. Remember your friends. Make sure you are always doing what I call a “reality check”. Some people forget that a robot, no matter how lifelike, is still a robot, and start to neglect their human relationships. Try and avoid the temptation of installing working genitalia in your robot as this is the most common cause of confusion in any human-robot relationship.

10. Activate your robot’s neural hyperlinks. Some people are afraid that this will create one giant, sentient machine intent on the destruction of its masters and creators, but I say don’t listen to the haters. No one ever got anywhere by themselves and perhaps a super-conscious partner in crime is just the thing you’re looking for!

THE ACADEMIC(ish) BIT:

Guy Kawasaki belongs firmly in the self-help category of public speaker. A self-styled ‘techno-evangelist’, he provides what is touted as no-nonsense advice for succeeding in business, based on “experience rather than theory”. In a world now flirting seriously with the possibilities of technocracy, this idea of “experience” being inherently better than “theory” is becoming increasingly fashionable, RMIT, for example, prides itself on its ability to create students that are “industry ready”. As much as the idea of being a professional ‘evangelist/salesperson/management guru/Hawaiian-shirt-wearer’, might rile the more cynical of us, GK’s assertion that “what works” takes primacy over all else, can look very seductive, when considering the two principle and failed ideologies of last century – Communism and Capitalism, both of which have wrought terrible destruction on human, plant and animal, as a result of theory (or greed) taking precedence over a flexible, sympathetic and pragmatic viewpoint. In the sense of Kawasaki’s exhortations to look at things “how they are” instead of “how we wish them to be” and in turn sacrificing our egos (and therefore ideologies) to best-practice at all levels, he teaches us a lesson which we might not be able to learn fast enough.

Although Kawasaki may appear to some as a shameless self-promoter, feeding off people’s desire for instant gratification by purporting that a book, or a list, can lead to instant success, (rather than success being related to the more humbling ideas of historical accident) he embodies the neo-Liberal project and the Randian DIY aesthetic absolutely, for better and worse. Central messages of self-reliance and his essential ‘democratisation’ of entrepreneurship (by writing accessible books about it) are at the cutting edge of modern managerial philosophy. Steyaert and Katz outline the need for a reimagined take on the word ‘entrepreneur’, to move it out of the province of the elite and into everyday life, (Steyaert and Katz, 2004) though i feel that somehow undoing the  centuries of implied and overt class-structure surrounding the word might be easier said than done. In any case, this is David Cameron’s fantasy of the ‘Big Society’, where everyone is capable of rational self-management, assuming that if only we were to take responsibility for ourselves, we could all be a Steve Jobs or a Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki is an entrepreneur of himself, taking “past organisational and management techniques and attempting to reorganise them at an individual level”, (Mackenzie. 2008, p153) but like all hopeful theories-of-everything, treating oneself as a business does not come naturally to all people. Ideas like the ‘Big Society’, or ten-point plans for start-ups are almost always good in theory, but what works?

Intrinsic to all self-help literature is the idea that “we have the capacity to be happy through taking action, rather than waiting to have happiness thrust upon us”. (Phillips, 2010) Whatever one thinks of Kawasaki’s style (or lack of) this is a point which he doesn’t just speak about, but lives.