Funny business and a new book from AGSM alumnus

AUTHOR: Lachlan Colquhoun   DATE: 13.12.06   ISSUE 2, 2006

Rodney Marks, AGSM alumnus from the Class of 1982, has made a career and reputation not through an entrepreneurial start-up or through daring mergers and acquisitions, but as a corporate comedian and sometime impersonator who infiltrates business events with his “hoaxes and jokeses.”

In as many as 170 performances a year, for the past 15 years, Marks has played an array of characters from investment banker Mort Gauge, corporate psychiatrist Maurie Bund to knowledge management scholar Noel Hedge.

His technique is to attend a seminar, mingle, ask questions and establish the credibility of the comic character, before moving to the lectern for a hoax “keynote address” in which he satirises the audience and its industry.

“A little humour can make light work of the daily grind,” says Rodney Marks.

Illustration: Gregory Baldwin

While happily fraudulent himself, he says part of his routine is to warn against fraudulent experts. “Playing my role reminds audience members of the roles they play,” says Marks.

“That recognition, which is sometimes a shock, yields laughter.”

Now, in his most recent venture, Marks has parodied the corporate world yet again with his book “the Management Contradictionary,” which provides definitions of well over 1000 management terms.

Published by Michelle Anderson Publishing and written in collaboration with Benjamin Marks and management academic Professor Robert Spillane, the book is described as a “hilarious business tool kit” which helps readers “defend themselves against the jargon of business and Government.”

“A little humour can make light work of the daily grind,” says Marks, explaining his motivation to write the book.

“Creating and promoting new products and services requires ongoing language development and spin,” says Rodney Marks.

Photo: Rodney Marks

“Creating and promoting new products and services requires ongoing language development and spin.

“Inventing needs and wants, is demands that it is endlessly amusing, not just to me but to people in the workplace,” he said.

Some definitions from the book illustrate his point, and the flavour of the humour.

An advisory panel, for example, is a “pane in the glass.”

A business model is a “reverse-engineered retrofitted abstraction of reality, accurate after the fact, because of the fact.”

A fallacy is “the mistaken view of male superiority” while values are “something to fall back on when the cashflow doesn’t.”

Research, according to the Management Contradictionary, is “shared subjectivity masquerading as objectivity”, while a senior management team is an “oligarchy that thinks it is an aristocracy.”

“Playing my role reminds audience members of the roles they play."

Despite all the joking, Rodney Marks says the Contradictionary “is a real book.”

“Its satirical definitions may reveal more truths through humour than conventional dictionaries do through literal definitions,” he says.

Of AGSM, Marks says his time at the school helped him “understand the world, and not feel paranoid” and also introduced him to “fabulous buzzwords.”

“In 1981, I wrote and directed AGSM’s inaugural annual comedy review, called ‘There’s No Accounting For Taste,’” he said. “I guess my career is just a continuation of that comedy review.”

He also thanks his teachers at AGSM, including Jeremy Davis, Lex Donaldson, Bob Marks, Chris Adam, Dennis Turner, Phil Yetton and Roger Collins.

“What better line-up could one have for both education and inspiration for comedy,” says Marks.

“But I guess that Lex’s karate antics were a stand-out for laughs.”

Check out the Management Contradicitionary at www.contradicta.com and Professor-at-Large to enrich campus culture.

A management alphabet - excerpts from The Management Contradictionary by Benjamin Marks, Rodney Marks and Robert Spillane (PDF).