rabbis and bagmen

I don't know if these roles only exist in partnerships, but I have one of them - bagman.
Your rabbi is the man who makes you a partner - brings you up, introduces you to the right guys, gives you the right projects, and visibility, so that when he sponsors you everyone who matters knows who you are. Your bagman is your lieutenant (looked it up and it's clearly the right word since the bagman gets to take your place in battle so you don't have to die...), and if you're anybody around here you have one. If you're very important your bagman is on a tour of duty and you're part of his "make partner" plan (visibility and the right projects part). Also, the tour starts you on your relo journey - partners here expect to move whenever and wherever they're sent. Like Kansas City. Yet another reason why this place is like academia - and yet another reason why i do not want to be a partner.
Is there a pattern to these aspects of work? The need to demonstrate committment to the effort by being willing to move anywhere they want you to? The mentoring and the grunt work required to make it to partner/tenure? The importance of fictive kin and lineage?

and another thing...

I still read Filler on suck.com at least once a month. because it is damn funny. still.

what's english for leverage?

There's an entire vocabulary that i've picked up, and as a result, another that i've probably lost, because a few days ago i had lunch with a long lost anthro friend and i could not recall what word I would have used instead of "leverage" to describe some work thing. is leveraging something you only do in business land? and what about operationalize? and do real people actually prioritize? or risk manage? or have critical success factors? or create strategic alignments? or forecast? or develop decks to update leadership? or rationalize their spend quarter to quarter?

why doesn't anyone think about work work?

i constantly toy with the notion of an ethnography of middle management, or of professional services, or of generalized white collar work places, and wonder why it is that no one has really done any good ethnographies of workplaces that are just humdrummedly marching late post-capitalism along at its right good clip. maybe the discipline is dead - i haven't really looked for it in a while - or maybe it's still the residual inability to research us here now, where the complexities of complicity, and the difficulty of estranging the incredibly familiar, become too difficult. it's always more fun to go to japan, or botswana, or really just about anywhere novel. the office is not novel.