Taking a values-centred, deep dive into corporate BS

Ever been in a meeting wondering what “outcomes-centred” or “values-driven” actually means? Are you dubious about “deep dives”? Sceptical of “synergistic solutions”?

If so, you may find plenty to laugh about in Wankernomics: Just Touching Base, a live comedy show (or “all-hands meeting”) created by Charles Firth (The Chaser, ABC TV’s Optics) and James Schloeffel (founder of satirical website The Shovel), that skewers every workplace banality you’ve ever rolled your eyes at.

The show had its origins when Schloeffel was working for a UK company and found himself adrift in a sea of corporate verbiage.

James Schloeffel and Charles Firth follow their North Star. Credit: Jennifer Forward-Hayter

“My boss at the time said something like, ‘Let’s take this offline and synergise the actionables moving forward’,” he says.

“Then, someone else jumped in with, ‘I’ve got a hard stop at three, can we do that later?’ I remember thinking: ‘What have I just walked into?’

“I made it my mission to become an expert in corporate bullshittery, and started taking notes.”

Having toured across Australia and the UK, the duo is now looping back to their key stakeholders (or “audience”) with an extended encore version of the work, featuring value-adds like an audience quiz and a section on document management.

The live show also features an interactive exercise to draft a meaningless and verbose mission statement for a fictional company, pointless on-screen notifications and enough silly acronyms to last a lifetime.

Since they’ve been doing the show, people have started sending Firth and Schloeffel examples of pretentious LinkedIn profiles or jargon-filled job descriptions, including a recent advertisement for someone to run a scrum of scrum masters.

Firth’s current favourite banality is “North Star”, suddenly the buzzy term for a company’s ultimate goal.

“It obviously comes from Europe or America, but the thing that no one seems to think about when they’re sincerely using this term is that in the southern hemisphere, we can’t see the North Star.

“The whole idea of a North Star is to be like a guiding light and direction, so you’ve got to be able to see it!”

Firth also marvels at an audience member he met who worked for a company with not one, but three, separate North Star projects.

“I said: ‘That doesn’t make any sense, you’d need a compass!’ He said ‘Oh yeah, that’s another role, we have a compass project to guide all our North Star projects’.”

When Schloeffel and Firth took their show to the UK, they didn’t have to change a thing.

“This stuff crosses all boundaries; I think we’ve stumbled into a global language,” Schloeffel says.

“The lingua wanker!” Firth quips.

While Wankernomics started life as a book, Schloeffel says there is nothing like the immediate feedback of a live show.

“That’s where this stuff really comes to life. As Charles likes to say, you see the cringes and the grimaces on people’s faces as we’re playing back their workday to them.”

Schloeffel says the project has struck a chord with audiences because there’s something uniting and cathartic about satirising the modern workplace.

“We realised early on that everyone’s got a horrific meeting that they’ve been to, a workshop that they’ve had to go to, or a values session that they’ve been forced into.

“For us on stage, it’s not about laughing at anyone; it’s about laughing along with it and saying, look, we’re all in this together. There’s a lovely sense of camaraderie.”

Wankernomics: Just Touching Base is at Hamer Hall, Melbourne on December 11 and Enmore Theatre, Sydney on December 13

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