1. Sit.

2. Check your BlackBerry, but never when someone superior to you in the pecking order is speaking.

3. Draw on the pad provided on the corporation for your take-away.

4. Go to the bathroom, but never while someone on a higher branch of the corporate tree is tossing apples down from his or her great altitude.

5. Eat and Drink. Food will be provided at certain times, and coffee, cookies and berries at other times. Do not eat throughout the day. This will make you feel sick by 2 PM. And watch out for too much coffee, which can produce a variety of bad behaviors over the course of an entire 8-hour session, depredations ranging from overly-aggressive posturing to psychotic need to get out of the room and use the facilities to an extent that is inappropriate and noticeable.

6. Present findings. At some point, presumably, you will have to provide a reason for those in the room explaining why you are there. If you are senior enough, no such rationale is necessary, of course, but for many this will mean taking the floor for a time. So always go into these things with a small agenda for yourself and make sure it gets played out, even if it’s not germane or useful to the rest of the gathering.

7. Feign interest. Options include: nodding, assiduous and ostentatious note-taking, occasional exclamations and eye contact with others.

8. Avoid sleep. This is more difficult than it looks for some of us afflicted with meeting narcolepsy. Solutions include: a sharp pencil in the palm (if overdone, can lead to blood poisoning, which is certainly not sleep but should probably be avoided), the drinking of beverages both hot and cold, the acquiring of foodstuffs and/or implements, strolling around thoughtfully, leaving the room while glaring at one’s BlackBerry to simulate crisis mode, even, when all else fails, light dozing with one’s eyes open, a skill that is mastered only by those with long tenure in the realms of gray.

9. Entertaining use of wireless communication. Many is the long meeting these days that is lightened by continuous passing of digital “notes” to guys in the room as frizzed out and bored as you are. Dangers abound, however. Particularly to be avoided is joke-related sniggering while deplorable financial performance is being discussed by the CFO.

10. Hobnobbing. During breaks, you may have the opportunity to rub shoulders with guys you rarely see outside of these things. Don’t forget to do so. These interchanges may in fact be the actual purpose of the meeting. All day-long sessions have a subcutaneous reason for being — team-building and camaraderie. So laugh and scratch with the boys and girls. You may make a friend. And you know what those are worth these days.

11. Do breathing and stretching exercises. This may include extending your foot to touch that of your neighbor, but only if she is very cute and at least on the same pay and grade level that you are.

12. Collect ALL your “notes,” that is, sketches, rude graffiti, inelegant detritus, etc. NEVER leave your space festooned with evidence of what you were actually doing during the time allotted. I’ve seen quite a few people wrecked after leaving behind a scrap of paper featuring a hilarious and derisive a doodle of the chairman, complete with horns and drooling fangs. People get childish after a while, even at such serious and essential events. Leave no evidence of your inner child behind.

Just a short note today because I’m a little worried about myself. I wonder if you guys out there can figure out this phalanx of symptoms:

• Overall tightness in my neck and upper back;
• Achy elbows, particularly my right one;
• Pain that radiates from my elbows up my arm and downward into my forearms;
• Pain increases the moment I try to push a mouse around;
• Pain begins when I start working my thumbs on my BlackBerry.

The horrifying thought has occurred to me that I have some computer and BlackBerry-related ailment that will cut down on my ability to spew out words and electronic messages without discomfort.

Have I worn out the nerves that run from my neck into my arms? Is this all in my head? What if a person becomes incapacitated not by a work-related accident or a vehicular incident, but is wrecked by the continuous on-the-job usage of muscles and nerves that were never intended to be utilized with the frequency and intensity to which we put them? Do these symptoms ring a bell with any of you?

Is there a doctor in the house? And… on you are my plan?

5 AM in San Francisco and I’m already late. Everybody is in full battle gear in New York by now. By the time I get to LA they’ll be thinking about lunch and the first things that are aggravating me will be history to them. Something good about that.

Pitch black out. A tiny, sharp crescent moon presides over a starry sky. The discrepancy between this peaceful scene and the maelstrom I’m about to enter is heart-wrenching.

The Golden Gate Bridge rears up in the darkness, ridiculously picturesque. Across the Bay, the city is still asleep. Deceptive placidity. Under the blanket of early dawn, traders are whacking away at their laptops, talking with Wall Street and Asia, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are sitting at their kitchen tables checking out their net worth.

The West Coast has a pretty good deal. Sure, they have to be up at dawn to impress New York with their industriousness. On the other side, they know that by, say, 3:00 PM, they can put their feet up and think about throwing that Frisbee around, because Mom and Dad back on the right coast are heading home in the snow and ice.

Things to do this week: Not lose heart; keep on trucking; drink with my head, not over it; don’t let the bastards get us down; let a smile be my umbrella;  buy low and sell high;  touch all the bases and make it home.

That’s all for now, sports fans. There’s only just so long you can make your thumbs focus on any single e-mail. If you’d like to start a chain, of course, that’s always all right with me. I’ll be back in the pocket tomorrow. Until then, sayonara from me and my Blackberry (RIMM). May all your meetings this week be short and sweet.

Sometimes my gut absolutely mirrors the Market. Yesterday I was all freaked out. By the end of the day, I felt better. Now I actually smell a little bit of hope in the air. Things are marginally back to normal. The sky did not fall. The sun will come up tomorrow. If every cloud does not yet have a silver lining quite yet, there are patches of blue among the gray. So I think I’ll get back to business and usual and do what I said I was going to do last Friday and offer 10 things you can do if you’re too busy.

1. You can cancel all meetings with aggravating people right now unless they are your boss. It’s amazing how many meetings we create with people we’d rather not see for reasons that, once we are at them, are unclear. I believe many of us whip up activity to prove to ourselves and others how non-fungible we are. A little fungibility never hurt anybody, particularly the terminally busy who are already essential in quite enough areas, thank you. Be less fungible. Share your funge.

2. Never write a long e-mail if a gnomic BlackBerry message will do. It’s incredible how many chunks of work can be tossed over the side with a short electronic piffle like, “OK, let’s do that. Can you handle?” If you’re a big player, that’s called delegation. If you’re not, it’s called passing the buck. Either way, it results in less bussitude.

3. Close your door and tell your assistant that you will only be disturbed by a) your boss or b) somebody who is bringing you a hot pastrami sandwich, and nobody else. Your door has to have meaning if you are not to lose your sanity.

4. Take lunch. You won’t be less busy, but you will FEEL less busy. Let me ask you a question. When you eat lunch at your desk, do you end up with less to do after lunch? I’m betting the answer is no. So if you’re going to be screwed up anyhow, why not enjoy a nice, peaceful hour away from the office? Have somebody join you that presents a legitimate opportunity to use your expense account, if you have one.

5. Don’t go on conference calls unless your boss is on it. Isn’t there somebody junior to you in your area? Somebody ambitious, who still believes they get some kind of juice from being on a big ratpack event? Put them on the call. They can be the ones who sit there and twiddle their thumbs while you’re out generating non-fungibility.

6. Schedule an occasional offsite for yourself. Every city has conventions, gatherings, symposia about new technology and other BS you can glom onto. “Where’s Ambruster?” people will say. “Oh, he’s at the global streaming thing at the Hilton,” will come the answer. Smart Ambruster! To be interested in such an arcane issue!

7. Don’t be so friggin’ reachable. A few years ago, I noticed that everybody in LA starts calling New York at exactly the time when we all want to go to lunch. For a long time, I answered their calls and upset my circadean rhythms. Then I thought, “The heck with them,” although perhaps not precisely in those words. “I’ll return their calls tomorrow morning while they’re in the shower.” The bottom line is, just because your phone rings doesn’t mean you have to answer it. CONTROL, guys. It’s the sense of losing it that makes you lose it.

8. At about 4:15, take a look at your To Do list. Anything on it that can be put off until tomorrow? Hold on! Can’t, like 80% of it be put off until tomorrow? Or even the day after tomorrow? That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. It’s called procrastination. It’s divided into three parts: PRE-crastination is all the things you do before you start your serious PRO-crastination which comes right before a good session of POST-crastination. Then you can do whatever it is. Or not.

9. Schedule a meeting with your boss to “go over things.” Anything you do with your boss supercedes in importance anything else you could be doing. If your boss is going out to play golf, accompanying him or her is actually “working” smarter and harder than constructing that spreadsheet you’re supposed to be showing to the Controller next Tuesday.

10. Work faster. Concentrate harder. Clear your platter aggressively. Then rest. Rest is work, too, particularly for those who take it seriously.

By the way, the picture you see at the top of this posting is of Mike the Headless Chicken, who lived for eighteen months with his head cut off between 1945 and 1947. Proving, I guess that our kind of lifestyle can go on for a while, but in the end does take its toll.

I’ve read in a number of places recently that New Year’s resolutions are tedious and passe and pretty much purely the province of journalists, bloggers and the like. I disagree. I believe that, while smirking about them a bit, at some point during the first few days of a new year everybody secretly takes a little internal inventory and makes a couple of very soft, very tender promises to themselves about the year to come. Maybe they don’t tell anybody about it. Maybe they do. I tend to think that the unspoken and unwritten ones are the most serious.

So in that vein, I’ll tell you my New Year’s Resolutions of 2008. I believe that every single one I will be able to keep.

I resolve not to look at my BlackBerry during meals, or certainly not unless it’s really, really necessary and in no event more than four times a meal, mostly when nobody is looking, unless it’s unavoidable.

I resolve not to give any sub-prime loans to anybody. This unfortunately makes it impossible to lend any money to anybody I know, pretty much.

I resolve not to accept an excessive exit package if for some reason I am terminated from my corporate job.  That’s easy to say, of course, so I’ll be specific. I consider any amount more than $100 million in cash and future options that vest in the next three years to be highly questionable.

I will not use my cell phone to tell people where I am. “I’m at the corner of Lexington and 53rd now… okay, now I’m at Park.” That kind of thing. It’s amazing how many public conversations you hear involve discourse of that depth and sagacity. I’m not doing that.

Nor am I getting a little bluetooth thingie to put in my ear. I am by nature dorky enough and don’t need any additional dorkitude to augment mine. So that’s out.

I resolve to eat any macadamia nuts that are in any minibar that is in any hotel room that I inhabit on company business, and attempt to expense them.

I will not use PowerPoint, except in jest.

I will not, during this year, get any drunker than the drunkest person at any table.

I resolve to be kind to my subordinates, whenever possible, and to not lose my temper, except when absolutely unavoidable. If I do get angry, I will try not to yell. If I do yell, I will apologize for it afterward. Unless I really don’t want to.

I resolve to be kind to my bosses, whenever possible, and not to lose my temper, except when absolutely unavoidable. If I do get angry, I will try not to bite my tongue. If I do bite my tongue badly enough, however, I will take off work early and have a drink.

I resolve to attend no meeting that I don’t have to. Further, I will do everything possible to destroy meetings that take place for no reason, even if I am not invited, since things may transpire at those meetings that do not meet with my approval. I will always be punctual to any meeting that I do attend, as long as there is food.

I will upgrade my computer situation at least twice during the year. I’m not sure how. But I need something new every six months or so or I feel like I’m missing something. I will get any gizmo that seems too sexy to resist also. Unclear right now what that might be. But I am resolute.

Finally I resolve to read every single one of the comments that come into this page all year, every day, even the person who keeps sending me insulting comments under my own name, and post all but the most egregious, and even then I may post those if they are relatively clean and funny. I will continue to appreciate all of you for being here, without getting all mushy or anything.

And oh yeah. I’m going to try to look on the sunny side of life a bit more in ‘08.  Of course, some resolutions are easier to keep than others. We’ll see, huh?

You’re just a click away from another batch of answers to questions you’ve tossed over my transom in the last weeks (and to tell you the truth, months). I’ve got hundreds of pages of your questions and darn it, I intend to answer them all before I dematerialize from the form I now occupy and reformulate in a different time/space dimension sometime in late 2011. Today’s are a good sampling. I hope you enjoy them.

Me, I’m headed off on another insane, frenetic, inhuman whirlwind tour of one of our business locations. Get this. Tonight at 9, I head off for London. I’ve got my passport this time. We land around 9 AM, Greenwich mean time. Why they’re always on mean time there I have no idea. Usually we’re not like that except on Mondays and the occasional earnings day.

Anyhow, myself and young McTavish will then repair to our hotel, where we will freshen up and await our first meeting. In this case, “freshen up” means to collapse into a pulsating ball of hair and gristle while our bodies attempt to ascertain in which time zone they are attempting to exist.

At 2 PM local time, we have our meeting somewhere. At 5 or 6 PM, which is around noon in our regular universe, we will have a bunch of drinks and go to dinner with some other dudes, or in this case blokes, at about 8 PM. Dinner should be over by 11 PM local time, at which point we will go back to our respective hotel rooms and faint. We’ll be up at 2:00 in the morning New York time to have breakfast and take a tour of London operations. At 4 PM at Heathrow, I’ll head back home, landing when it’s 3:30 AM on the Thames. By then, it will almost be Friday. Friday!

I’ll try to blog at ya while all that’s going on. If I don’t, have a ripping good week, mates.

Today I have eight meetings. There was one at 8, then 10, and pretty soon my 11 will pop up. That’s a long one. Goes up to lunch. Then there’s lunch, which I have to eat in public, and then back for meetings again about financial stuff. This is the time of year when finance goes around holding our guts in their hands, sort of hefting them back and forth in an affable fashion. Bleh.

I can’t think. Thinking and meeting are mutually exclusive. You can prioritize your plateful of agendas. You can run ideas down to the red zone and see if anybody can push them over the goal line. You can take a couple of swings at issues in your wheelhouse. You can take strategies, field strip them and see if they’re ready for combat. But think? Nah.

I gotta go. Write me if you feel like it and tell me a few things:

• How many meetings do you have today?
• Why do people call meetings?
• How many of your meetings are necessary and how many are held just to honk somebody’s horn?
• Do you hate meetings? Love them? Both?
• Do you have trouble staying awake in meetings? What do you do about the problem of meeting narcolepsy?
• Do you use your BlackBerry to entertain yourself during meetings?
• Do you love/hate Powerpoint?
• Do you think presiding over meetings is a way executives to goof off?
• How much of your writing pad do you cover with doodles during a meeting?
• What percentage of the meeting is occupied by your boss talking?
• Anything else you’d like to tell me about meetings.

I’ll see you guys later. I’m bummed. My idea of a great day is a blank calendar and a blue sky out my hermetically-sealed window. This is clearly not going to be one of those. And that first martini is at least eight hours away.

A happy Monday to you. It’s a stop and smell the neurosis morning. The sky here in New York is a deep and trusty blue, the air has the tang of autumn soccer in it, and the first leaves in the park are starting to turn. It’s days like these you want to open your window, lean out and inhale what is probably the best air we’re likely to get for a while. Too bad they don’t open – our windows. The best we can do in this particular corporate tower is peer out at all the little people in the street enjoying the weather. My, they look happy.

Quite a few of you wrote in to either spank or thank me about my little tale of BlackBerry autism I offered last week. My favorite came from Michael in London, who writes:

Hi Stanley, had similar experience on flight from Dubai to London except in my case I was treated to all the emotions that your bloke didn’t seem to share. Before we had even received complimentary drinks, we heard the roars of good news I assume, followed by hmmmm, wonder what was next, it came just as we left the tarmac, it was “oh b**ger”, when I looked at him he didn’t even muster up an apology or some flippant British comment, instead he met my gaze then looked straight back down. So on we go, through the turmoil of mutterings of oh I know better, all the way through to pain. The good point came for me when as I was getting ready to prepare to stand up he practically pushed past me, being never the quiet one, I asked him if he had left his manners in Dubai to which he was amazed and said “sorry boy I didn’t see you”. The only possible sweet & sour of such a story would be that as I picked up my baggage he was still standing hovering over his blackberry oblivious to the world passing, so there maybe an advantage to these anti-social devices after all!!!

p.s. the world goes on when you are in the sky, sleeping and driving so please don’t try to alter it, business was here before you and will be here when you’re long gone, enjoy the journey and look around, the girl/boy of your dreams or a perfect network opportunity may just pass you by otherwise.

Thanks, Michael. It may be, in the future, that there will be two types of people: the wired and the unwired. The first will quite literally be just that, outfitted with subcutaneous nano-filiments and micro-implants that make pocket devices unnecessary and render each person a walking bluetooth pod. The second group will have made the conscious decision NOT to join that new subspecies of homo sapiens, choosing instead to concentrate on the sapiens aspect of their makeup than their electronically enhanced counterparts.  

I know where I’ll be. How about you?

Last week I did my usual drill and flew someplace. It was a long flight, but I got my upgrade and things were okay. There was only one glitch, something about a battery charger that needed a switch-out of a power pack back at the gate. We taxied out. We taxied back. I was convinced, of course, that we were back at the terminal to stay. It’s happened to me so many times lately. Taxi out. Taxi back. Sit in the airport for six hours. Take off. Land at dawn. That kind of thing.

But this time, no, the captain was jolly and reassuring, the powerpack was switched out, we rolled off and landed pretty much on time in New York. So no complaints there, for a change.

In fact, no complaints at all, really. Just a scary experience. It was the guy in the next seat. Sometimes you get a chatty one, and that’s not so good. Other times, mostly in Coach, you get babies and entire families eating salami and cheese out of a Baggie. This time, the guy sits down, he sort of looks like, well… me. Blazer, which he has the Flight Attendant hang up. Casual slacks, this being a non-work day. Collared shirt. No tie. Concerned expression.

He’s in the window seat. And here, over nearly five hours (six if you count tarmac time) is what he did:

• Dozed (20 minutes, total);
• Worked on his BlackBerry, which was not in a two-way mode by which it could receive or send mail (3 hours, 50 minutes);
• Looks at a print out of a PowerPoint presentation (30 minutes).

Here are several things he did NOT do during the time we were confined together:

• Talk;
• Smile;
• Respond to polite observations (”I wonder how long we’re going to be on the ground here”)’;
• Get up, even once, to stretch his legs or use the restroom;
• Watch a movie or use the personal in-flight entertainment system;
• Eat the in-flight meal, although he does have a few hot nuts;
• Drink anything except water with a bit of cranberry juice in it.

I don’t care that the guy didn’t talk to me. I am generally silent throughout a flight. But the non-response thing creeped me out a little. When somebody says to you, “Oh no, not again,” as the plane is pulled back to the gate, it is customary to say, “Yeah, this stinks,” or even, “Uh-huh.” But this guy? He just kept working his BlackBerry and catnapping.

Finally, I guess, it was the BlackBerry thing that was the weirdest… the fact that all human interaction or behavior resolved itself down to intense fascination and activity on that device, which was disconnected from the web and therefore nothing more than a dumb terminal to be worked with one’s thumbs.

I don’t think I would have had the same reaction if the guy was on a laptop. Lots of people honk around on their laptops during a flight and I think nothing of it. But there was something about this that gave me the willies.

Wherever you go these days, people are not there. Their bodies, perhaps, occupy the space near us, around us, but they are somewhere else, on a phone, checking in on their messages, essentially Not Here. Sometimes you can go through an entire city block and not see one person just walking through analog space, occupying the moment in real time.

And then there was this guy in the seat next to me, almost non-corporeal, with no physical or personal needs other than to work his BlackBerry and get a little shuteye now and then. His hair was gray. His slacks were gray. And in my mind’s eye now, his skin is gray.

There was a grea