Seventy-five percent of the workforce thinks that some of their colleagues aren’t pulling their weight.



They are dead right.



Author Steve McKevitt describes how it has become possible to have a successful career without ever being involved in a successful job or project. And literally thousands of people are doing that. These are the City Slackers, a new breed of employee who is taking over the world and cramming it full of things no one wants.



This book explains with wit, humour (and with all seriousness) how to win the corporate game and how the mediocre can inherit the business earth. It takes a sharp-eyed and witty look at the modern workplace and delivers an unflinching analysis of City Slacker syndrome: no industry survives unscathed.

One of the most striking things about today’s corporate landscape is the fact that it is set up to reward not success, but failure.

The objective of simply delivering shareholder value can lead companies to become obsessed by their market cap, while equity schemes lead key members of staff to concern themselves with their own personal exit schemes: How do I get my money out?

The share price often has very little to do with company’s actual performance and this situation and accompanying rational has created a corporate culture that rewards image over substance: many successful careers are being built not on competence, but on an individual’s ability to successfully market him or herself. To succeed you don’t have to do your job: in many cases it’s better not to, you just have to look like you’re doing your job. And if you can make it appear that you’re doing it well, all the better. This is obviously a much easier option, which is why so many people are doing it.

It’s inevitable that some will misconstrue this central argument – through misunderstanding or mischief – but in attempt to mitigate the inevitable brickbat I’d like to make the following point in big neon letters: not everyone who works in big corporations is a city slacker and not every city slacker works for a big corporation. But in the way that light – an intrinsically good thing – is very good at attracting moths, so big corporations are especially good at attracting city slackers.

As companies have become more bloated, and the tasks they are charged with have become more difficult to solve, there are plenty of people coasting through their careers without actually having to contribute, let alone trying to contribute, anything.

The problem for businesses is that a city slacker is virtually indistinguishable from a conscientious employee in a similar position. Moreover the art of being a successful city slacker requires relentless mendacity so it should come as no surprise that many slackers are in denial about the real motivation behind their working practices.

So how do you spot a city slacker? It’s not easy. In the olden days you had to be good to get to the top, everyone knew that. Careers were built upon success: product innovations, successful marketing campaigns, finding a gap or niche in a sector and launching into it. People had clearly defined responsibility and they were accountable.

The move from corporate hierarchical structures to more flexible project teams and outsourcing services to third parties has brought with it a world of ambiguity. Audit any medium sized organisation today and you will quickly find a surprising number of people who command a great deal of authority, but no have genuine accountability for anything. The edges have been blurred and as a result nobody is quite sure where the buck stops. For city slackers this is a very good thing.

One of the first jobs I had after leaving university was as a temp in what was then called the Department of Employment head office. The office was open plan and seating was fiercely non-hierarchical (even if nothing else was), which explains how I found myself sitting opposite my line manager’s line manager, Terry. Terry was a higher executive officer (HEO). Away from head office this position carried a lot of responsibility. In the field, HEOs would be running unemployment benefit offices and Job Centres with dozens of staff reporting to them. Here at head office, however, Terry was responsible for… well, I was only there for six months so I never found out, but I think it might have had something to do with binding.

There were many things to admire about the way that Terry conducted himself, not least the shameless way that he took a post-prandial, 20-minute nap at his desk every afternoon. Terry spent the remainder of his day writing down interesting facts in his “big book of facts” (I’m not joking). He was a keen pub quiz player and, he explained to me, every time he heard a fact he’d never come across before, he wrote it down in his big book so that it could be recalled whenever needed. The only break in this rigorous schedule came on a Friday, when he arranged his weekend’s rambling activity in the Yorkshire dales. What Terry never seemed to spend time doing was any work. Organizing an attempt on the Pennine Way, yes—work, no.

Amusing though Terry’s story is, he and people like him are not city slackers, they are just lazy sods. Everybody could see that Terry was a skiver, so no one took him seriously. Had he behaved like that in the private sector he probably would have been fired, but he got away with it, largely because nobody could be bothered to do anything about him.

The city slacker is a different animal altogether: loyalty-free, utterly self-serving and in fact about as effective as Terry on an off-day. But the perception of the city slacker among peers and seniors will be very different indeed. The ultimate company man, first in and last out, you can depend on him to burn the midnight oil putting the finishing touches to an important strategy document or vital presentation. It’s not unusual to get emails and telephone calls from him late at night or over the course of the weekend. Often he’ll be the first to volunteer for projects outside his remit or at least be ready to offer insight, support and good advice.

The moment the city slacker actually starts doing the job, they run the risk of exposure. In a society where presentation is everything it’s no longer about what you do: it’s about how you look like you’re doing it.

The new breed of urban professional might appear to the ultimate ‘yes’ men and women; never challenging superiors, always putting the company first, but be on your guard - these will be always be cleverly undermining the boss, because promotion can’t come soon enough, and it literally pays a city slacker to keep moving.

They will be armed with all the latest industry buzz-words, which will be rotated regularly to make them look well informed. The city slacker is big on ‘strategic re-alignment’, ‘corporate re-branding’ and ‘brand re-positioning’ - anything with ‘re’ at the front is good, it means he doesn’t have to innovate. You will usually find mature versions “up to their neck” in a soft project with high visibility and no real chance of evaluation, for example, leading the team charged with redesigning the company’s logo. This is a highly visible project, which will elicit a strong emotional response internally, but will have zero impact on the performance (for good or ill) of the business. For the slacker, this is perfect.

Many companies will believe a city slacker is their biggest asset: a rising star who’s never put a foot wrong, but the truth is they will never have delivered anything.

They might be big on the conference and networking scene, but that’s because they’re looking for their next gig. You will find city slackers appearing regularly in the pages of your trade press, but that’s probably because they’ve charged the company’s PR agency with boosting their own profile, rather than the CEO’s – who will be oblivious to this and simply lap up the great coverage.

A city slacker is always busy. Everything about them will seem to have a sense of urgency: holding folders wherever they go, always on the mobile yet, ironically, virtually impossible to get hold of because they’re always in meetings. If you work alongside one, you will find they are a great source of ideas for your project: the kind of person you can expect to send you and email outlining a few ‘blue-sky ideas’ at 11.00pm at night or slap in the middle of the weekend. You know they are always thinking about the company, even when they’re asleep.

The reality is very different. The folders are no more than a prop; the city slacker carries files home every night. They are never opened. The mobile calls will be mostly personal, but they may concern the organisation of an out of hours social event or may even be some ‘consultancy’ for a competitor. Those great ideas, as we will see later will be carried out at your own risk, to be immediately reclaimed in the unlikely event they succeed (usually by sending a congratulatory email to you that is cc’d to the boss with the initial idea attached to the bottom as evidence). Those late night emails are most probably the result of a few subtle changes to his internal PC clock and mail set up, courtesy of a helpful soul in the IT department.

The cost of city slacking can be measured in billions. Taking the UK IT sector alone, last year £10 billion was wasted on products that either never saw the light of day or were unfit for the purpose intended. It’s certainly paying many people to be busy doing nothing.



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About the author
Born in Liverpool in 1966, Steve began his career in the music industry in the 1980s. He is a business and communications expert and has worked all over Europe in the entertainment, video games, media and consumer electronics sectors.

He now lives and works in Sheffield where he runs the communications consultancy MK Ltd.