THE best way to understand a system is to look at it from the point of view of people who want to subvert it. Sensible bosses try to view their companies through the eyes of corporate raiders. Serious-minded politicians make a point of putting themselves in their opponents’ shoes. The same is true of the world of work in general: the best way to understand a company’s “human resources” is not to consult the department that bears that ugly name but to study the basic principles of one of the world’s most popular, if unrecognised, sciences: skiving.The first principle of skiving (or shirking, as Americans call it) is always to appear hard at work.