Haught

Purveyors of fine sarcasm

Category: Benign to Five

The Haught guide to small talk

What should be the subject of the mandatory conversation you strike up with odious or uninspiring colleagues? Here are a few aces to put up your sleeve…

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The Haught guide to work toilet banditry

If you’re reading this and have worked in an office with mostly upper-middle class colleagues but never encountered the sort of lavatory foulness you’d associate with a cholera-infected Mumbai slum you’re in a tiny and very lucky minority.

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The Haught guide to fudging your resume

          The lord of the white lies I once told a lie. It was many, many…

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The Haught guide to office dating

Friends have informed me that the internet dating scene is moribund. Realising that traditional partner-finding avenues are now back in vogue, I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s column to office prowling tips.

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The Haught guide to snake oil salesmen

The worst mistake you can make as a citizen of the 21st century is believe that the age in which it was possible to quit one’s job and take to the road selling a miracle tincture made of tree sap, rancid avocado juice and buffalo urine is long past.

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Benign to Five on networking

The official Haught guide to effective, strategic, synergistic networking, going forward.

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How to write a mission statement

Today, the corporation fills the societal role once taken by knights and other masked crusaders. Primarily, it exists to undertake acts of great altruism, selflessness and civic good, so it’s guided not by an “objective”, but a “mission”.

If you’re granted the great privilege of crafting this superheroic manifesto, don’t waver: your mandate to be bold and colourful is contained in the document’s very name: mission statement. If they didn’t want it to be breathtakingly inspiring, they would have called it an “aim summary” or a “goal list”.

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The Haught guide to change managers

  Every single word I write on these pages and in the pages of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald is true. If…

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The Haught guide to “moving forward”

“Moving forward” (aka “going forward”) seems as popular today as when it first burst on to the corporate scene like an alien out of an unimportant character’s chest.

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Benign to Five on “When I grow up…”

What do you reckon Alan Jones wanted to be when he was growing up? What about Kyle Sandilands? Or Pat…

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