As Luck Would Have It Read Free Page A

demand ed that they receive the same level of competent service that larger clients command ed .  What I was actually doing for the past two days was reading the Wall Street Journal and posting blogs on Facebook and other websites.
    My boss, who was too timid to confront me directly, kept inquiring by email as to when my already overdue report might be ready.  I’m working on it, was my canned response, though in truth I had not even started working on it.  What I was aggressively working on was the vacation that Joseph and I had been planning to commemorate our 60 th birthdays.  Hopefully, if both of us could pull off the needed days away from work without putting at least one of our jobs in jeopardy, we would leave on December 8 th for a cruise to the Caribbean.  We were going to Florida first, since I wanted to spend some time in St. Petersburg and Joseph in Fort Lauderdale.  So I was working out the logistics and timing because Joseph actually had a lot of work to do w hile at work, which left me with the more serious responsibility of planning the details of our long awaited vacation.
    I was at my desk searching Travelocity when Mr. Finnernan, having lost patience with me, finally asked what I was doing.  I lied and said that I would have had the report done by now, but I was waiting on financial records that had been requested but had not been forthcoming.  No one would accept that bullshit response; the materials that I was disinterested in reviewing were actually stacked on my desk right in front of his eyes.  But my boss slithered away shyly, accepting my lame excuse rather than having to confront the unpleasant reality that his employee was not only lazy, but a liar as well.
    I booked the hotel and plane reservations in the next half hour and feeling guilty for making my boss look bad, I emailed him and said I thought I had enough information to finish the assignment and that I’d have something to him the next day.  In the end, I spent only a few hours reading the statements and producing what even I knew to be a piece of crap for a report.
    You would think that there would be a reprimand or some other consequence for such blatant incompetence, but nothing happened.  I went back to my reading and web surfing as if the work related interruption had not occurred and never even bothered to inquire as to how the client had responded to our recommendations.  Guilt or remorse or some other emotion that might have served to motivate me in some future similar situation did not surface.
    From my many years of experience as a manager, I've learned that people tend to perform down to the level of expectation that others have for them.  The majority of people will exert an effort that is more or less congruent with the expected result, or in the alternative, the perceived value of the reward or punishment.  This expectancy assumption regarding workplace behavior can be quite useful to managers, however they need to recognize that this does not work in every situation or apply to every employee.
    For some reason, which defies explanation or even a workable theory, there are those people who if you put them in an office and pile the work on them, will work hard regardless of the consequences, seemingly oblivious to subsequent rewards or punishments.  These are what we refer to in business as self motivated employees.  Perhaps you are one of those people , though I doubt it.  More likely, you have come across one or two of them where you work, and if so, you probably wish you could squish them like a cockroach, but it is actually a good thing that you can't because when you stop to think about it, they are in reality a help to you, not an obstacle, because they do a lot of work that might otherwise wind up in your lap, and they don't necessarily get, or even expect a bigger raise than you got for not doing it.  That’s the real beauty of the expectancy theory of work behavior and I’d love to meet the guy