This can be found here. I have heard a number of these in the last 10 years, over here in the USA.

I have now being working on offshoring initiatives on and off for 3 years now. I have worked on defining processes for moving work from one location to another location, recruited offshore resources for a testing team, and managed that testing team on a daily basis.
Offshoring initially developed as a cost arbitrage policy for shipping work from high-cost countries to lower-cost countries. Despite the industry and employer spin of using Orwellian phrases like "Best Shore", the reality is that work is being moved from countries that are perceived as having a higher cost base to countries with a lower perceived cost base.
I believe the whole approach ignores the reality of the immaturity of the I.T. industry, which is really only 40 years old. Those of us with more than a few years experience know that the industry has faulty institutional memory, a terrible track record for learning from mistakes, fundamental blindspots that it seems unwilling to address (like using natural languages to try and define Requirements) and a woeful inability to manage delivery programs and projects to stay within budget and deliver promised benefits.
At the same time, the preferred offshore locations (India, China and Eastern Europe) are even more immature, with no long-term track record of supporting I.T. solutions, and a large number of enthusiastic, talented but inexperienced software developers and leaders. Just one example: when I was trying to assembled a software testing team last year for a U.S. client, I interviewed nearly 20 people from our India subsidiary. The oldest resource I interviewed was born in 1976, and only one candidate had more than 5 years I.T. experience. When I asked them about what they would do if a testing project fell behind schedule, their whole mindset seemed to be predicated on working more hours when issues were discovered, rather than trying to work smarter. Not one candidate talked about reviewing processes to determine if they could be made more efficient or effective.
Under the current offshoring model, we are shipping work out of one immature industry context to an even more immature context in a geographically distant country. If you performed a properly structured Risk Analysis on that proposed action, what do you think the results would be? Right now, the decisions being made are being based largely on cost arbitrage (day-to-day running costs) and fashion.
The sad reality is that Account Teams in I.T. Service corporations may also be conniving in this race to the bottom, by agreeing to contracts that require ongoing cost reductions within the framework of equivalent service. Are those cost reduction profiles supported by any empirical evidence that shows they are achievable, or is this based on the "we'll find a way" school of unsupported optimism? And are we simply following the herd? If we are, we are indeed condemning ourselves as a corporation to perpetual mediocrity. If you are a technical I.T. contributor, the bottom line is that the Account Team in most contexts no longer looks like your friend. They almost look like an extension of the customer, working for the "other side". This is terrible for corporate cohesion.
Anecdotally, a lot of offshore support teams are marginally capable of supporting solutions. Their overall lack of I.T. experience leads to a lot of onshore hand-holding from US-based staff. However...with the current US recession, this additional work is being largely hidden from view by requiring staff in the US to work "as many hours as is needed to get the job done", with the unspoken implication that team members who do not sign on to that work ethic will be removed and replaced by people who will. When the recession ends, this excessive rework and supervision may become more visible, as I.T. staff push back against working 14 hour days by changing employers. However, right now I believe that the negative issues associated with offshoring are largely being papered over by corporations whose leadership narrative is powerfully based around offshoring to save clients money. Any competing narrative that conflicts with that story will be unwelcome. Personally, I have been informed once already within my current employer by my leadership chain that messages from below to leadership that there are issues with offshore delivery and support are likely to be tuned out.
While discussing these issues with a fellow architect, he postulated that one idea that corporations should be looking at is to set up and nurture onshore "Dream Teams". We jointly defined a "Dream Team" as a small, highly skilled and experienced collection of highly motivated individuals, using extensive automation for software requirements gathering, development, testing and deployment. Such teams would be deployed in situations where quick response and high-quality delivery is essential. Many corporations have a lot of onshore individuals that could be members of one or more "Dream Teams". The main challenge with this idea is the current offshoring mindset in both my employer and our customers, where the answer to any issue appears to be "offshore it", and then everything is structured to get to that initial answer.
Here is an interesting article from a periodical which discusses the phenomenon of Backshoring - the return of work from overseas to the country from which it was originally migrated.
Since Backshoring is very much "swimming against the tide" and also represents an admission of offshoring failure by a corporation, I expect these stories to be largely hidden from view in many corporations.

Ever since I can remember, I have been a night owl. This often gives me challenges. Most corporations, especially in the USA, are set up around the "morning lark" model. I have encountered the chill wind of disapproval from morning larks many times in the past when I roll into work and the larks have been working for 2-3 hours already. The fact that I am still working when they are flaked out on a couch somewhere is something that they seem to have a large capacity to ignore.
This is an entry to a collection of discussions around the morning lark vs. night owl differences.
It is possible to form symbiotic working relationships with somebody who is opposite to you on the sleep and work spectrum. Many years ago in the UK, I had an extremely productive working relationship with a fellow project leader. She was a classic morning lark, she was in the office by 6am nearly every morning, but left by 4pm, and, by her own admission, her brain ceased to fire on all cylinders around 3pm. We would meet together to work issues and set direction from 11am until 2pm, after which time I stayed away from her, since she would be winding down and not at her best. She would stay away from me until 11am, since before that time my brain was not firing on all cylinders. This worked well for our time together.
One comment that I will make is that having a partner who is the opposite to you is probably going to require some sensitive management skills...
UPDATE - Thanks to David Rendall for passing on a link to this article in the New York Times that discusses the larks vs. owls issue and its relationship to the circadian rhythm, which is the body's own internal clock. I remember that a university in Europe conducted research on circadian rhythms many years ago, using college students who were studying for end of year exams. This was a great example of a symbiotic relationship; the students needed a place free from distractions to study, and the research group needed a group of subjects who were prepared to be placed in a secure environment where they could not determine what the time was. The findings of the study were that most people, deprived of time reset cues based on clocks or the appearance/disappearance of daylight, tended to freewheel on a longer day length than 24 hours. In some cases, the students were 2 days behind the actual date.
In my own personal case, I wake up when exposed to daylight. My bedroom has to be very dark (we have blackout curtains). I have concluded that I cannot live in Alaska or Scandinavia, because if I do I will be awake (and miserable) 20 hours a day in the Summer and in virtual hibernation in the Winter. Most likely I will spend 6 months a year in therapy for SAD (Seasonally Adjusted Depression).

One of the interesting challenges I have encountered in the past when dealing with leaders at various levels in corporations is the phenomenon of the leader whose knowledge is deficient in a key area, but who publicly (at least) refuses to recognize this. Quite often the leader rises to high office without addressing the deficiency. Logically, you would think that they would (a) realize that they lack knowledge or skills in this area, and (b) hire somebody to focus on it. In reality, most of the time, they do not try (b). However, more bafflingly, they often appear to fail on (a).
One example is a software company that I worked for in the UK. It had been founded by a software consultant and he built the company up to 75 employees in the UK and 75 in the USA. However, soon after I joined, he lost the leader who held together the consulting group of the company, and who had been instrumental in persuading me to join. The guy quit and went to work elsewhere. The founder's comment to another employee who pointed out that the guy was an excellent people manager was revealing. He commented "I really don't know why we need a man-manager. Everybody should be able to manage themselves".
In the case of this entrepreneur, his comment was a symptom of a wider feature of his worldview, namely, that everybody else would be much better off if they behaved exactly like him. However, the basic problem remained, namely that he lacked an appreciation of empathetic, people-centered leadership. Ultimately it contributed to his inability to grow the business, and led to his eventual departure, since in the meantime he had sold the business to a US corporation who expected profitable, continuous growth.
More recently, I worked for EDS during the end of the Dick Brown era. Dick was a deal-maker, he had no real interest in operations and execution. He got excited about the next big sale or deal. As a result, execution processes (starting with this pesky little thing known as due diligence) were neglected during his period as CEO. The inability of the corporation to execute on poorly-structured and optimistic deals signed by him was a major contributor to a crash of the stock price, and his credibility declined thereafter to the point that he was forced to resign. Once again, a leader was undone by his failure to provide any focus on areas that he himself had little interest in.
As a positive example of how you should manage, one can point to Microsoft during the period where Bill Gates was the CEO and Steve Ballmer was the COO. Gates' visionary ideas, unbalanced by his awkwardness in public, lack of interpersonal skills or interest in minutae were balanced by Ballmer's ebullient, street-fighter personality and focus on operational details and execution. Gates was smart enough to realize what he was not going to be any good at, and in Ballmer he found a personality to perfectly complement his own.
Over the years I have come to characterize people with this leadership deficit by the summary "they often don't know what they don't know, but if even they do know they assume it is unimportant, and therefore can safely be ignored". Needless to say, it is frustrating to deal with such people, since every time you try to draw them into a discussion of the "black area", they lose interest and then it is hard to avoid them shutting you down. I even invented a phrase to summarize this behaviour pattern when applied to software developers, many of whom labour under the dangerous delusion that they are qualified to design a user interface, when in fact they would be downright dangerous in any form of Human-Computer interaction design role.
It turns out that my purely anecdotal observations are also paralleled by academic observation and research. The pathology is part of a wider pathology where people become convinced that they are good at something even when even the most favorably-disposed observer can see that the reverse is true.
Specifically, David Dunning and Justin Kruger conducted research after Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. He and Kruger published a paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” in 1999.
This multi-part article in the New York Times blog discusses the research and the phenomenon in more details.

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”
It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

This could perhaps be the origin of the old saying "ignorance is bliss"...
The article on the New York Times blog is actually a long article about the wider phenomenon of anosognosia - the inability of people with body deficits such as paralysis to even recognize that they have the deficit. To an outsider it looks like a particularly extreme case of denial, which of course it is. The last part of the article contains a nice Venn diagram summarizing the extremes of self-delusion into which we can all fall, with denial in the center.

I am not sure if I should help with this...

Link: http://news-releases.uiowa.edu/2010/february/020410abusivebosses.html

This study (excerpted here in the press release) shows that bullying and abusive leaders are often tolerated if they are perceived to be successful.
This is is no surprise to me. I once had the misfortune (in 1999) of working for a Vice President at Sabre who had no discernible interpersonal skills (I did not think this was possible, but the daily evidence backed up that unlikely reality). He was a classic tyrannical, bullying, obnoxious leader, yet his leadership style was quite clearly tolerated by Sabre right up to the point that he left the corporation.
In that particular case, the VP waited until I went on vacation, then took away all of my responsibilities (while neglecting to inform me until I went to see him on my return, after discovering that everybody in the team was treating me like I was radioactive) and told me to go find another job within Sabre. While classless in the extreme, the move was fortuitous in that I was able to find another role in Sabre and quit working for what is definitely the most interpersonally defective leader I have ever encountered.
The conclusion of this study is somewhat depressing, but quite understandable. A lot of corporate leaders, even when confronted with clear evidence of bad behaviour by leaders, will attempt to rationalize away the evidence, using a variety of tactics ranging from cynical, lazy and tired cliches (a classic one being "to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs") through to ad hominem fallacies, usually based on some variant of allegations that the evidence for bad behaviour is coming from "poor performers", "whiners" etc. etc. None of the rationalizations is at all plausible, but they are remarkably resilient when people wish to live in denial.
UPDATE - I found an interesting doctoral thesis that suggests that if you find yourself faced with a bullying leader, that collective action is a more likely route to effecting positive change.

Link: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/struggling_us_airways

Now why didn't the other airlines think of this one first...?

Link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/187962046_1.html

With Carly Fiorina re-appearing recently as a public figure to try and gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in California (after a lengthy period out of the public eye battling cancer), I found this interesting article about her tenure at HP, which ended with her dismissal in 2005.
As is often the case, the demonization of Fiorina after she left HP tended to focus on and personalize her own perceived failings, and overlook the contribution of other actors in the debacle. As this article makes clear, there was plenty of blame to go around, starting with the HP board of directors, who, worried about the decline in the HP stock price, felt that they needed an outsider to "save" the corporation. Once they had hired Fiorina, they failed to exert proper stewardship and ignored numerous warning signs up till and after her dismissal. As a result, HP came under scrutiny for ethics violations even after Fiorina left, and Carly Fiorina's successor as CEO, Mark Hurd, had to apologize to the outside world for the ethical lapses.
The situation that unfolded at HP was very similar to what occurred inside EDS during the period of time when Dick Brown was the CEO. Like Fiorina, Dick Brown was a sales-driven deal-maker with little interest in operational processes. As a result, he focussed on splashy sales deals (which drove the stock price up) and then ignored execution issues (which in turn drove the stock down and eroded his credibility to the point where he was forced to resign in 2003). Once again, he was enabled in this by a weak and largely compliant board, his own position as CEO and Chairman, which is still one of the colossal conflicts of interest for a corporation, and his own employment contract, which rewarded him handsomely for inflating the EDS stock price. Dick was merely doing what his contract incented him to to, which in the short term made the marketplace happy, but it stored up medium-term trouble as solutions were oversold and execution was neglected.
Both Carly Fiorina and Dick Brown were examples of what the article terms "rock star" CEOs; sales-focussed ethically neutral leaders who came to be seen by their employees as self-centered, uncaring and inauthentic. Sadly, the pendulum in large corporations has not yet swung all the way back from those excesses.

Link: http://toughguide.blogspot.com/2010/01/5-mistakes-smart-people-make.html

Good posting about some of the traps that you can fall into if you are a smart person...

Link: http://litemind.com/

The 6 principles look useful...thanks for the tweet from Guy Kawasaki.