Last week I had the pleasure to watch Illumination Entertainment’s Minions, the movie about the yellow pill-shaped creatures that was accompanied by an aggressive marketing campaign.
I found that the movie, which shows the Minions from the beginning of time to the time they meet Despicable Me‘s Gru, to be hilarious from the the Universal logo at the beginning to the end (tip: stay until after the ending credits). Due to a series of events, which I won’t spoil, the Minions find themselves in the position of heads of a government. This made me think of a few reasons why hiring Minions would help improve public administration.
1) They are objective oriented and relentless. Once they have a goal, they pursue it to the end. They need to find the evilest, most awful boss in the world, and they would do anything, including risking their own civilization, to pursue that goal.
2) They are long-term thinkers. Well, from the Proterozoic eon to today, they have always visualized what their life would be while serving the perfect villain. They dream – sometimes too much – of a better life for their whole community and act in order to realize their dream.
3) They are optimists. It takes them centuries to go from being extremely happy to being sad; however, they need just a spark to fire back to happy-mode. They also need very little to have fun, such as a bouncy bed or a musical instrument which is even better if in the company of a villain.
4) They understand the needs of the community. Whatever they do, they do it for their community. They stick together, they help each other (unless a banana is in sight), and they can lead the charge whenever necessary.
5) They communicate well. Let’s admit it, a good portion of what they say is not understandable by anyone. However, they communicate with perfection amongst themselves. We all find ourselves excluded by jargon, communication, and TLAs at one time or another. Even worse, we all know that different departments within the same organization use words in different ways. They don’t. What they say is what they mean, always and without exception. The only problem being that only they understand what they’re saying. However, as sad as it sounds, this is already an improvement for many organizations.
6) They are committed. Whenever they find a job with a villain, they will pursue to the end. They try to satisfy their master’s requests, but unfortunately more often than not they end up being in trouble.
7) They are fun. No explanation is needed; as soon as you see them, you can’t resist laughing.
So, are you ready for the Minions to take over the world’s bureaucracy?
Thank you for a great article. So true about the American Public Administration. But you cannot change their mentality because they don’t have the homogenous disciplines like the Western European people. They never will!
Great article!