The cultural movement may be suited to the workplace but successful Dada is hard to achieve

DADAISM HAS arrived in the office. The movement, which was big around the time of the first World War and ridiculed the meaninglessness of modern life, is perfectly suited to the workplace.

The pomposity, the pretence, the downright idiocy: all are gagging for the Dada treatment.

The current master of business Dada is David Thorne, an Australian designer and blogger who cites his chief interest as reciting prime numbers backwards.

He first became famous about a year ago when he tried to pay a chiropractor’s bill with a drawing of a spider and published the e-mail exchange on his website www.27bslash6.com. If you haven’t seen it you really ought to look. The joke is in the gap between the normal idiocy of business communication and the abnormal idiocy of the spider. It is very funny indeed in a good, clean way.

Thorne’s most recent exchange, which has been whipping bloggers into a frenzy in the past couple of weeks, is also funny – although it is neither good nor clean.

It starts when a web designer approaches Thorne asking him to design a logo and pie charts on spec for a project on business-to-business networking.

Thorne replies with a pie chart entitled: “David’s enthusiasm for doing free work for Simon ” – labelling the segments “none”, “the tiniest bit” and “hardly any”.

This produces an angry, sarcastic reply, to which Thorne submits a logo that “represents not only the peer-to-peer networking project you are currently working on, but working with you in general”. The logo at first looks like an eagle but as you look you see one man is performing a lewd act on another. Simon gets angrier and angrier. He writes: “Do not ever e-mail me again”, to which Thorne delivers the knockout blow: “Ok. Good luck with your project. If you need anything, let me know.” The reply is unprintable.

I learnt three things from this exchange. Artists like to get paid. Pie charts are really very silly things. And being savagely, brutally rude to someone who you feel deserves it is as bracing as a roll in the snow. There is a further Dada dimension to the story: it lies in a foggy internet zone between truth and fiction.

There appears to be a real man with the same name on Twitter who is by turns pretending to get the joke, denying everything and slagging off Thorne.

If this man does exist, is this a case of cyber-bullying that we should worry about? Or has Thorne simply made up the whole thing? He has a fine pedigree in such invention. A letter from McDonald’s telling staff in Australian drive-throughs to omit some of the items customers had paid for, signed by “Robert Trugabe”, caused a stir recently and turned out to be his brilliant handiwork.

But whether true or fiction, I don’t care. I value the pie chart exchange both as a work of art and as an interesting management exercise. Managers spend their lives trying to defuse anger, though often manage to stoke it inadvertently. Thorne’s exchange is shocking because it does the reverse: it picks on an angry person and calmly goads him into being a great deal angrier.

I come across a lot of angry people in the course of my work. Many of them read the Financial Timesand seem to take exception to anodyne things written by me.

Last Thursday, a Joseph Waring from Hong Kong contacted me to say my last column was pathetic and I was ridiculous. It ended: BTW: the entire office here thinks your haircut is a bit youthful for you.

Just as I was trying to think of a suitably inflammatory reply, I opened a message from a retired lawyer called Stephen Gold.

“Are you paid to be . . . useless and patronising?” he enquired in a furiously sarcastic e-mail that was so long it must have taken half the day to tap out on his BlackBerry.

In the interests of art, I sucked my pen for a bit and composed the most sickly, patronising reply I could muster and finished with the three most inflammatory words in the English language: Hope that helps.

I pressed send, sat back and waited. An hour later the reply came. But instead of being incandescent, Mr Gold was more civil than before. Thanks for taking the time to reply, he wrote politely.

As a work of art, my effort was a failure. But it told me three more things. 1. Most people don’t answer messages at all. 2. Irony in an e-mail is always a mistake. 3. Being funny is hard; successful Dada is harder still.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)