More Professional than an Emoticon; Just as Insulting

Unless you’ve suffered severe brain trauma, there’s no reason you’d ever be enthused enough in the workplace to sincerely use an exclamation mark.  Pretty much everyone understands this.  Nevertheless, the exclamation mark plays an important role in corporate communications.

Essentially, the exclamation mark’s role is similar to that of the smiley face: to show that you are grin-fucking someone.  However, the smiley face is sub-optimal for two reasons: 1) it is an emoticon, which is worse than clip-art, and 2) the in-text visage is graphically grin-fucking the reader, which is somewhat shameless.

The exclamation mark harnesses all the best aspects of the smiley face (e.g., the insincerity, the passive brutality), but without the unprofessionality.

Why Passive Aggressiveness Is Important

When permissible, being active aggressive is ideal.  Of course, many times it’s inadvisable to make such bold displays.  In such situations, you should consider a subtler approach while vigorously grin-fucking your coworkers.  Such grin-fucking allows you to demonstrate your ruthlessness while still operating within the corporate behavioral norms.  It also allows you to say semi-insulting things.

This is what the exclamation mark accomplishes, especially in large group email threads.  Examples:

It looks like I stepped on some toes here.  Maybe I should tread more lightly next time!

Davenport — I’m thrilled to partner with your team on the Q4 budgetary initiative.  I realize this is your area of expertise, but maybe we can both learn something from each other!

I’ll have to pass this project along to Higgins.  Should be a great learning experience!

Thompson — Since you’re less senior than I, would you mind relinquishing your drink tickets at the conference?  Thanks in advance!

Collaboration -- one of the many things valued by your reborn self

Distancing Yourself from Your Former Self

If you’re truly managing for glory, you’ll upset people.   You’ll rain on some parades.  You’ll kill some buzzes.  And you’ll probably piss in some Corn Flakes.

More often than not, such unsympathetic ruthlessness will help you ascend the corporate hierarchy — though eventually it might turn public opinion against you.  Which might inhibit further ascension.

In a previous entry I impressed upon the reader the importance of reinventing one’s corporate persona radically and often.  Even the reader doesn’t wholeheartedly heed this advice, reinvention is nevertheless critical at certain points in any career.  Especially when you’re facing an angry mob of betrayees.

A well-staged reinvention will allow you to distance yourself from that asshole who upset everyone.

Get Reborn

Your reinvention should be meretricious and — for others — cathartic.  Accordingly, make your charade appear an epiphany-driven rebirth.  A seemingly momentous event.  Explain how your value system has undergone a renaissance, and that it now emphasizes:

• Selflessness
• Sympathy/empathy
• Team-orientedness
• Collaboration
• Transparency
• Trust
• Cultivation of open and honest feedback
• The support and patience of your coworkers

Will they go for it?  Of course!  Never underestimate people’s capacity for unwarranted forgiveness.

Unapologetic Transformation

Transform and metamorphosize all you want — just never admit that you ever had a problem.  Don’t apologize.  Even if this non-apologizing minimizes your coworkers’ catharsis, keep in mind that an actual apology will 1) affirm your accountability for your former self/actions, and 2) imply an admission of your own fallibility.  Neither of these are desirable.

Change We Can Forget About

Once people are convinced you’ve changed (generally this takes two weeks, tops), feel free to begin reintroducing some of your more effective characteristics (goodbye, selflessness!).

Just as long as you don’t fully readopt all aspects of your old persona, you’ll have still disassociated yourself from your former self and reputation.  This means you get to keep your blank slate.  At least until you mar it again, at which point you should consider another rebirth.

Someone to Do Your Bidding

Sometimes it’s difficult to best your rival through displays of competence and managerial prowess.  Sometimes it’s preferable to use clandestine tactics.  And custodians are there to help.

Like many other office workers, custodians are bored and easily bribed.  Recognizing this presents you with a strategic advantage over your rivals — especially since your new errand boy has a key to every door in the building and works the graveyard shift.

The Custodial Value Plus

Custodians can be leveraged to help with the following scenarios:

• If your rival is corrupt: plant surveillance devices in his/her office (e.g., old-fashioned wire tap, nannycam in a lucite block).
• If your rival is not corrupt: plant incriminating evidence in his/her office (e.g., embezzlement handbooks, strange understockings).
• If your rival is an obnoxiously wholesome person: move empty soda cans from his/her recycle bin to trash bin to make him/her look like a total dick.
• If your rival has ever shown a mild pattern of irresponsibility: water your rival’s plants with rubbing alcohol to make him/her appear incompetent at even the most simple caretaking tasks.
• If your rival has ever shown questionable networking tendencies: add terrible names to your rival’s rolodex (e.g., Pauly Shore, Stalin’s nephew).

And for good measure, encourage the custodian to discreetly plant shotgunned Coors Light cans in your rival’s trash can.  Repeat nightly.  The resulting sight (and faint aroma) will play to your advantage.

Showing You Care…

One of the best ways to convince employees that you care about their well-being is by offering them silly perks.  It shows you understand their needs and are willing to contribute corporate resources to improving their well-being.

…About Productivity

But to ensure these perks don’t decrease productivity, strive to make them minimally usable.  This way you get the credit of caring without the cost of actually caring:

• Give them a foosball table placed in a high-traffic area, ensuring that even moderate usage will expose players as selfish slackers.
• Allow them to occasionally work from home, as long as they comply with a daunting, bureaucratic and ultimately insurmountable application process.
• Right after lunch, offer them all the taurine-rich beverages they can drink.
• Give them an electric massage chair which is uncomfortable to use for more than ten minutes and faces a monitor flashing your corporate mission statement and values.

As an effective people manager, sometimes you’re required to share the credit.  Although this is generally a drag, it occasionally can optimize your personal glory.  The key is to appear gloriously supportive and gracious.

As a general rule, feel free to share the credit whenever you can expect to get even more credit for doing so.

Keeping the “I” in “Team”

Of course, when publicly acknowledging someone else’s contributions, be sure to frame everything through the first person:

I want to recognize the young Mr. Jenkins for his hard work.  I’ve always been impressed with his work ethic and supportive of his initiative.  I value his contributions greatly.

With enough emphasis on yourself, your supportiveness and savvy management technique, you can ensure that your credit-giving eclipses the accomplishment itself.  And that’s something worth celebrating.

The Standard Approach: Aspirational Attire

An old adage says Dress for the job you want.  If you’re aiming for the CEO job, that means sporting the finest Italian apparel Monday through Thursday, then relaxing in one of your Gulfstream polo shirts on casual Fridays.  Even if you don’t have that executive role quite yet, it’s never too soon to establish your executive image.

An Alternative Approach: Turning Business Casual into Business Sexual

An even less subtle approach is the business sexual look.  This means unbuttoning an extra button or two of your thousand-dollar shirt, wearing tighter-than-necessary pants, and boasting fine leather footwear that rises needlessly above the ankle.  Although this approach might remind people of your animal-ness and attract a modest percentage of coworkers, it can just as easily repulse, offend and — depending on the gestalt — horrify.

Scent of a Woman…and a Man

The best alternative to the business sexual look is the use of pheromone fragrances.  (Pheromone fragrances have come a long way since the 1990s, when they seemed only to arouse hillbillies and varmints.)

Go ahead, spray some top-shelf pheromone cologne on one wrist and some pheromone perfume on the other.  This way, you’ll attract anyone with a functioning sex drive — and they won’t know why.  And that means you can get away with just anything.  Your aroused coworkers will consider your stale ideas “sexy” and your terrible utterances as merely “naughty.”  They’ll be sex-drunk and you’ll be power-drunk.  Enjoy!

To remind the candidate who’s in charge, walk in ten minutes late with an ice cream cone.  This should set the tone.

Testing for Core Attributes: Endurance and Pliability

Anyone you hire should possess the two core attributes of endurance and pliability (a.k.a. the willingness to do whatever).  Such employees will help make your job easier, less stressful and generally more hilarious.

To test for endurance (and obedience), ask the candidate which of the following three prison break movies he/she enjoys the most.  The longer the prison term served in the movie, the stronger the candidate’s sense of self-denial and blind respect for authority.

• Tango and Cash (worst answer) — Stallone and Russell quickly escape from prison and to resume their obnoxious escapades.  (In fact, if the candidate knows the film Tango and Cash, end the interview immediately.  This candidate is obviously not worth your time.)
• The Shawshank Redemption (fair answer) — Tim Robbins invests twenty years and generally plays ball.  This candidate is prepared to run the long race.
• Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (best answer) — The title gives away the ending.   This candidate possesses eternal patience and appropriately low expectations.

To test for pliability (as well as general susceptibility to coercion), ask the candidate how much money he/she would require to perform some patently ridiculous act in public.  The best answer, of course, is: “No money at all — the prospect of impressing you is reward enough.”

By combining these two questions, you can see how each candidate performs on the graph of desirability:

Note that at the top left of the graph you will find self-respecting people who love trashy 80s buddy cop movies.  The rarest of birds.

Declaring War when It Matters Least

Full-fledged battles are difficult to win at work, as they usually focus on large issues such as strategy, ideology and vision.  But these battles, when won, earn you the most respect and do the most to catapult your career.

That’s why you should pick minor squabbles you know you can win (i.e., ones you can start by condemning someone’s tone, decrying the poor formatting of a client-bound document or rallying against an esoteric bureaucratic measure), then escalate them into all-out wars.  You’re pretty much guaranteed to win, since no one else will fight nearly as hard over such seemingly meaningless issues.

This is a great way to assert your dominance without tackling anything serious.  It’s also a great way to distract people from any meaningful debates you might be losing.

The Greatest Victory: Receiving a Forced Apology

The easiest and most gratifying battles to win involve theatrically taking offense then demanding an apology.  Any halfway formidable politician will pull such antics weekly; so should you.

For example, if you’re losing a protracted debate about where your company should open a new call center, wait for your opponent to make a disparaging comment about your proposal, then exaggeratedly take offense and demand an apology, explaining to everyone how your opponent’s disrespect and pettiness undermined everything this company stands for.  Once that apology is grudgingly delivered, demand yet another public apology for the fact that the previous apology was heavily delayed and halfhearted.  At this point, everyone has forgotten that you lost the real argument, because your opponent is huffily obeying your demands.

Channeling the Wizard of Oz

According to social psychologists and cutthroat salespeople, being convincing depends less on what you say than how you say it.

Video-conferencing provides the ideal opportunity to amplify that how: to astound your coworkers with your theatricality and gravitas.

When VC’ing, you control every element in the frame in which you appear.  Even if you’re a minor player on the corporate stage, with the right choreography and stagecraft, you can appear as commanding and intimidating as the ultimate talking head (pictured above).

Stagecraft

Although it might be satisfying to appropriate the Wizard’s smoke and fire routine, such a Vegas-esque production will probably compromise your credibility.  Instead, aim for a subtler visual aesthetic — and feel free to recruit an “artsy” acquaintance who took a stagecraft class or two at college.  (It’s not like they’re too busy to help.)

Here are a list of things your artsy friend should help you accomplish:

• Position the camera about two inches below chin level.  This gives your audience the impression they’ve been seated below your level — at the kids’ table.
• In the background, make sure your degrees (accredited or not) and accolades (legitimate or not) are visible.  Feel free to add vintage weaponry to your walls, just to send a message.
• Position the primary light source behind your head.  This will create a slight halo effect while casting a mysterious shadow over your features.
• Ideally you’ll be VC’ing from some sort of echo chamber, which, when you speak, will produce the sonic qualities one would expect from a supervillain’s lair.  (However, if your home office is heavily furnished/decorated, thus dampening the echoes, encourage your artsy friend to remove all furniture, rugs and wall decorations, except for those intentionally included in the frame.  If your floor is carpeted, request your artsy friend procure enough free tile samples — preferably marble — to cover the surface.)

This might sound like a lot of work, but it’s 100% worth it.  And your artsy friend will undoubtedly benefit from this rare episode of physical labor.  Win-win.

Gravitas

Once the camera is rolling, speak only in directives — even if they barely make sense.  You’ve already won your audience over with top-notch production, so don’t undermine this with mumbled pontifications or half-speak.  And pound the table when you make a point — hard enough to shake the camera, thus driving home the notion that you’re “high impact.”

Remember, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as the delivery is impressive.  This is what earned Avatar rave reviews despite its flagrantly underwrought dialog.  And this is what will earn you credibility and influence despite your own underwrought ideas.

Although human resources professionals are popularly perceived as a crack squad of whistle-blowing spoilsports, they can be instrumental to your personal agenda of ruthlessly climbing to the top of a corporation.

This is because all HR professionals share the common goal of “setting people up for success.”  Unlike everyone else in the corporation, HR professionals aren’t motivated by besting their coworkers.  In fact, they don’t even see the corporate setting as a place for competition (see Figure 1a).  They see it as a place for cooperation (see Figure 1b).

Figure 1a -- classic corporate hierarchy: most employees view this structure as a tournament, in which they strive to advance to the highest level

Figure 1b -- how an HR professional understands the corporate tournament: a warped-yet-virtuous cycle of feel-good moments interspersed with actual work (exaggerated for effect)

Yes, there’s a good reason your company’s CEO doesn’t have an HR background.  Because your company would be a big frivolous mess.

Leveraging Good Intentions

As long as you’re not committing an HR infraction or interfering with party planning, HR will do anything to help you out.  So leverage away!

For example, if you want to ensure that a rival group or team is systematically patronized, you should identify a “problem” that requires an HR task force.  For example, let HR know that your nemesis’ team (don’t phrase it this way) appears to be suffering from low morale.  HR will jump at the chance to get involved with the goal of turning those frowns upside-down.  They will form a task force with subcommittees and actionable items and motivational events, none of which can be refused by your nemesis.  In other words, it’s the perfect way to make your nemesis feel like a dunce on an ongoing basis.

Or, if you want to trap someone into helping with a project, just cc an HR professional on your email request (“cc’ing HR for context”), and explain how this is a great chance for the email recipient to build cross-functional relations and teamwork.  If the person refuses, they’ll have an HR task force to deal with.

There really are uncountable ways you can ruin someone else’s day (and maybe even career!) by summoning your company’s crack squad of well-meaning interlopers.  Death by a thousand hugs.