Escape from Serfdom
Master the Dark Arts of Corporate Warfare to Achieve Financial Independence
“They say hard work never killed anybody; I say, why take the chance?”
Ronald Reagan
"You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others; you are called the masters of the world, yet there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own."
- Tiberius Gracchus
Introduction
Sometimes a particular event occurs and forces you to take serious stock of where you are, how you got there, and demands some hard decisions about your future intentions. One such event happened to me a few years ago, and it’s the reason I wrote this book. More to the point, it’s the reason I had to write this book.
I will share this story with you in a moment. First, some context about your author.
Who I am is not important. There are many people similar to me out there in the world today. When you read disparaging commentary in the media about the globalists, the centurions of international capitalism, attending top universities and then gallivanting around the planet on business class flights and staying in luxury hotels, dining at the finest establishments as the world burns – that’s me. I was not born into generational wealth, but nevertheless did enjoy a relatively privileged upbringing, all things considered, of which I subsequently took full advantage in my professional career. I am wealthy after a fashion, but not remarkably so by today’s standards. I climbed to the higher (but not the highest) echelons of corporate power; in the end I was too much of an iconoclast to be handed the keys to the car, as it turns out.
This was probably for the best, honestly.
I’m not saying any of this out of self-aggrandizement, but rather to give you a bit of perspective on where I’m coming from. I have spent thirty years working at all levels of the corporate threshing machine in dozens of countries, as a junior employee, as an executive and a consultant, in strategy, technology, regulation, marketing and finance. I have started several of my own businesses; some have succeeded, some have failed. Again, none of this is remarkable or extraordinary. But I have paid careful attention to everything I have seen and heard along the way. This journey has not been without adventure, and has taught me some valuable lessons. Those lessons are what I want to share with you today.
I’m not asking you to listen to me because I’m fabulously wealthy, or was CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation, or am some kind of rarefied, planetary level genius. I’m not. But I am prepared to be honest with you, which most people aren’t. What I can offer is an unvarnished view into what happens on the factory floor and explain to you how the sausage gets made, as they say. More importantly, I can give you a guide on how to make your escape from the factory before getting turned into sausage yourself.
This will have to suffice as an introduction.
A couple years after having left an executive Vice President role at a company in whose mission I truly believed and was very proud to work for, one of my old staff approached me for advice and help. I expected she wanted a reference for a job or some such, which unfortunately turned out to be far from the case. She arrived at my house for coffee one sunny spring afternoon with a smile on her face, but a peculiarly clouded and troubled expression. After some pleasantries, she opened her phone and handed it to me. What I saw was shocking, and well, gross.
There were hundreds of WhatsApp messages from the recently appointed CEO of our company, blatantly sexual in nature. There were numerous photos of him in flagrante. The details of the messages are not important, but this was a case of sexual harassment of the most sordid and revolting kind.
Now, this woman was happily married with two children and had done nothing to encourage such an approach. She was deeply shaken and told me she was determined to leave the company. The CEO was using his vast power to hinder her career and constantly toyed with her professional ambitions (she was a very ambitious and driven lady), offering an obvious quid pro quo of advancement in exchange for a sexual liaison.
Well, what do you want, I asked her. I pointed out that in some respects, while the situation was unspeakably awful, this witless creep had handed her a winning lottery ticket. He was the local representative of a major multinational, publicly traded corporation that made much of its mission regarding equality, diversity and inclusion. They would never tolerate such behavior and would probably be willing to pay virtually any sum to prevent it from ever coming to light. The messages in her phone were pure gold, I told her. Should she be so inclined, I offered to help find her an appropriate lawyer in the jurisdiction where the company was traded. She would surely be in line for a seven-figure settlement in a matter of weeks.
She shook her head. She and her husband were already quite wealthy. I don’t want to be known as the woman who tried to get rich off of this, she said, quietly, I just want to make sure he won’t do it to anyone else, especially anyone not fortunate enough to be in my financial position, with the ability to say no.
I agreed that this was an absolutely laudable and selfless perspective. In that case, I said, let’s write a letter to the global director of human resources and explain why you are resigning your position. You can trust them to do the right thing, I said. They will be as horrified as I am, and I’m sure they’ll take care of you.
This was, without a doubt, the single worst piece of advice I have given anyone in thirty years of professional life.
The letter was sent. An investigation was launched. The CEO admitted everything, blaming it on the scorpion woman who had employed every conceivable form of feminine sorcery to entrap him. Within a week he had been relieved of his duties and it was announced to the press that he had decided to spend more time with his family. He is rumored to have received an eye-watering payout from the company in exchange for his silence. In any event he was able to fund a start-up a few weeks later, which he populated with numerous people poached from the same company. As far as I can tell, he remains happy, wealthy and successful in spite of (or because of?) his vile behavior.
The victim in this case did not fare quite as well. I have since learned that this is not an uncommon outcome. I am ashamed to admit that I did not know that sooner. Our former employer did not ask her to rescind her resignation as I expected they would; in fact, they did not contact her at all. They left her on the side of the road like a bag of trash. The ‘crazy scorpion woman’ narrative began to cascade through the industry. She could not find work, as she was now labeled a madwoman and troublemaker. She spiraled into depression, eventually being institutionalized after an attempt to take her own life.
I called a lawyer friend (coincidentally another old colleague from the same company) and related the situation, with the intention of getting advice about initiating litigation. I also wondered aloud, how could this of all companies behave so piggishly to a woman who was so clearly in the right, who had devoted so many years of service to them, and on a topic of such vital importance to the firm’s essence and identity? The lawyer, kindly and not in so many words, said ‘Well, to be honest this doesn’t surprise me. Any competent lawyer would recommend them to act this way and never contact her again. I would have given them the exact same advice. Now we both know it’s morally wrong, but I would have a duty of care to them as my client to give them the legally correct advice. And if you were still an executive there, you would also have a duty of care to act on that advice. So please don’t blame our old colleagues personally. They’re only doing what they are bound to do, given their positions.”
Her words struck me as oddly, almost offensively, dismissive at first. But after we finished the call, I considered them more carefully. The more I turned them over in my mind, the more evident it became to me that she was completely correct, and the more horrified I became. Had I still been a member of the executive at that moment, I would have been confronted with an excruciating choice: go along with unambiguous legal advice and honor my obligations of due care toward my shareholders, or resign a prestigious, comfortable, enormously influential and well-compensated role. It is easy to say that I would choose the latter out of principle; I am not so naïve or cocksure to say I know for a fact what I would have done. Galadriel did not know what she herself would do until the moment she saw the One Ring freely offered in Frodo’s outstretched palm, after all, and did not pretend otherwise.
My old employee is since recovered and doing much better, though she has never worked since that day and probably never will. She is part of the ‘ladies who lunch’ crowd, reads a lot, and seems reconciled to her new lifestyle. We are in touch with each other regularly.
These events started me on a long journey of careful consideration about the nature of the modern corporation, how it treats employees, and the fraying social contract that exists between the two. The conclusions I have drawn surprise even me. The fact that they surprised me compelled me to write this book; if they startle even me with their fierce urgency after so many years of professional life, I expect they must be of some interest to those just beginning their own journeys.
This book is not for everyone. It is for young professionals in the beginning or mid-point of their corporate careers; perhaps just beginning to assess goals and aspirations, perhaps confronted by some awful choice that has sounded a clarion call of urgency in their mind. It is not for budding entrepreneurs, captivated by the dream of starting and running their own businesses. While they may find this book of some passing interest, these lessons are not intended for them. It is not for senior executives: they already know everything written here, and they’ll just get angry that someone has broken the code of omerta and let the cat out of the bag. Nor is this particularly intended for those seeking only to collect a paycheck and somehow muddle through life. I address this book to those with ambition coursing through their veins, and a restless determination to achieve something of note during their brief stay on a fragile planet, within the confines of the corporate world.
I don’t want to say that I have myself followed all the advice in this book. I wish I had; I would be a wealthier man today. Some of it stems from my successes, but much of it derives from mistakes and failures. A great deal comes from careful observation of others who have succeeded or failed in various circumstances. I am at heart a student of history, of economics and the human psyche, but I cheerfully admit that my actions are not always informed by my hard-won wisdom. Think of me as the notional short, overweight, melanin-deficient basketball coach who has the vertical leap of a snapping turtle but is nevertheless able to stimulate and encourage superior performance in those with the prerequisite native talent. I am a consigliere to the mighty, whispering wisdom from impenetrable shadows in the halls of power, avoiding the spotlight at all costs.
Today, I am your guide on your escape from serfdom, if you will have me.
1. Why work?
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.”
- Yogi Berra
Why do we work?
The question seems banal and absurd on its face. We work to live, to survive. Work allows us to get paid, and purchase food, shelter and clothing. If you’re lucky, save a bit, buy a house, consume, perhaps conspicuously. Start a family, have some kids. Give them the same life you had growing up, maybe a bit better. Retire with your sense of self and dignity intact.
Many people leave it at that, and that’s fine. However, at a certain point in your career, you may begin to reconsider the answer to that question; or rather, to refine it further. Is that really all there is? Should I not be seeking fulfillment, as well as simple subsistence level compensation? Do I not have the right to be stimulated intellectually, to grow my skills and expand my horizons? Do I seek authority, renown, or power? Why should I not be obscenely wealthy? Can I not find a place in the economy where I do not merely fulfill the requirements of an ever more ravenous consumerism, but make the world a bit better, a bit safer, a bit more just and humane?
Many people begin to consider these questions fitfully and opportunistically, generally in response to a particular situation or unexpected crisis. They rarely give it structured and serious thought until later in their career, informed by whatever path they happened to stumble down until that point. Paradoxically, at the point in one’s career when such careful consideration would do the most good – at its inception– one is least equipped to arrive at a satisfactory answer. Up until that point most people’s experiences are from low-level jobs, surrounded by the well-intentioned but largely doltish and ignorant associates of one’s youth. They may have some observations from their parents’ lives, or relatives, or stories from their friends, but these stories are full of holes and important gaps, lack context, and are always burnished to show the protagonist in a better light than reality would probably reflect. At this age one is fed with platitudes, molded by the expectations of one’s family and immediate environment, and likely to come to impossibly naïve and frequently ridiculous conclusions about what one wants from the impending decades of indentured servitude to capitalist overlords. Extricating oneself from this invisible web of half-whispered expectations is difficult, psychologically taxing, and consumes the most valuable and irreplaceable of all assets: time.
Warren Buffet once commented, “Time is the only thing I cannot buy.”
My first wife’s father was forced into early retirement and died of cardiac failure a few weeks later. This was of course unexpected, and deeply tragic. The commonly received wisdom was that he had been so involved in his work, his persona so tied up in his career, that he simply lost the will to live. Now, all this may have been pure coincidence. In retrospect, it most likely was. But I remember thinking at his funeral service how incredibly depressing this notion was.
From one point of view, he’d been freed from drudgery at a relatively early age. The family was financially secure, and he had decades of puttering around the house and enjoying his numerous grandchildren to look forward to. What a gift this potentially could have been! But instead of a gift, this man saw it as an unbearable loss, by all accounts at the level of losing a spouse. But why? To what end? The details at this point are immaterial. Suffice it to say his career was successful, but not notably so, in a field of work that was clearly on its last legs in that part of the world – hence the wave of involuntary redundancies and ‘for sale’ signs waving forlornly in the front yards of most of the decrepit houses in his village. Not to mention environmentally destructive in the extreme. While the company was vital to the local economy, it may as well have been a VCR factory for all the perspective it had, or a landmine manufacturer in terms of social good. Yet this kind, decent, intelligent man had found existentially vital meaning in his work1.
I have worked my whole life in the technology sector. This has always seemed to me to be a field with purpose. After all, technology has led to productivity gains that have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Mobile phones have fulfilled Nikola Tesla’s century-old prophecy of an interconnected world-brain in everyone’s pocket. My children have the entire massed knowledge of humanity at their fingertips at an age when I was pawing through encyclopedias to write papers for school while barely skirting accusations of plagiarism. Email and Microsoft Excel are surely peers with the steam engine or the cotton gin in terms of precipitating a revolution in labor productivity. Anyone who can remember trying to find a hotel in the Austrian Alps at night during a snowstorm by staring at a paper map will agree that online navigation apps are one of the most useful inventions of our generation. Simply put, for the majority of my career, I felt that what I was doing was unambiguously good. Not only for myself and my bank account, but for all humankind.
Things are rarely so simple, of course. The technology industry over time has morphed into an agglomeration of monopolies and oligopolies. Telecommunications has always been a series of government approved oligopolies in any event, unavoidably perhaps due to economics of networks and the scarcity of spectrum. Formerly purportedly rebellious, customer-centric brands such as Amazon, Google and Apple have turned into some of the most abusive monopolists in history on a par with Standard Oil and its ilk, promises to “not be evil” notwithstanding. The monstrous political, social and moral consequences of the commercial and national security total surveillance regimes have only just begun to emerge. Billions-strong fleets of all-seeing nanodrones will soon be floating around the planet, nothing and no one hidden from their unblinking gaze. We are pushed, harried and nudged into behaviors and opinions by the omnipresent, invisible web of social media in a manner that would have been inconceivable a decade ago and is the envy – and plan – of any would-be dictator. As Shoshana Zuboff succinctly puts it in her fantastic book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.” In the book, she paints a fearsome portrait of what is waiting for us as a species beginning to merge with the fruits of its own technology, which is worth quoting at some length:
“Imagine you have a hammer. That’s machine learning. It helped you climb a grueling mountain to reach the summit. That’s machine learning’s dominance of online data. On the mountaintop you find a vast pile of nails, cheaper than anything previously imaginable. That’s the new smart sensor tech. An unbroken vista of virgin board stretches before you as far as you can see. That’s the whole dumb world. Then you learn that any time you plant a nail in a board with your machine learning hammer, you can extract value from that formerly dumb plank. That’s data monetization. What do you do? You start hammering like crazy and you never stop, unless somebody makes you stop. But there is nobody up here to make us stop. This is why the “internet of everything” is inevitable.”
As a technologist I can confirm this is what is happening. The change is faster, more profound and far more dangerous than people - even the paranoid doomsayers - believe.
I took a walk a couple of years ago during the COVID lockdowns with a relative. He’s an uncomplicated man, who works in building maintenance. Generally credulous, I realized he had fallen into the conspiracy ratholes in vogue at the time. He asked me with very real and palpable concern, “hey, you work in technology, you understand this stuff. Did Bill Gates really put microchips in the vaccine to track us?” I tried to keep a straight face and explained to him the physical impossibility of this (what power source would it use to broadcast information? How would a microscopic antenna communicate with a receiver hundreds of meters or kilometers away? What sensors and processors would there be to catalogue, code, and track the requisite data? Etc.)
Anyway, I told him, if you’re worried about what the vaccines in your blood might be broadcasting about you, you’d better take that telephone out of your pocket and chuck it in the river immediately. Because it’s definitely doing far worse things than you can possibly imagine at this very moment. It knows everything you do, and I mean everything. And that information is packaged up and sold to whomever is willing to pay for it, for whatever purpose and to any end, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
He nodded worriedly and we moved on to other topics. He and his wife are still unvaxxed, and he still carries the same phone in his pocket. I haven’t asked him why.
I was recently contracted to advise a Middle Eastern regulatory authority in the course of enacting some new anti-monopoly and consumer protection rules. During one discussion they were worried if the proposals were not too strict and what the effect might be. I told them, guys, this is a regulated oligopoly and these companies will behave like amphetamine-crazed, feral pigs at the trough if you let them. For every one of me you’ve hired, these companies you’re trying to regulate will have ten people exactly like me combing through these rules looking for any gap, any hole, any inconsistency to litigate or exploit. I spent my whole career going around, over, or wiggling through regulation and believe me, these guys will still find a way to screw consumers no matter how hard you try to stop them.
They seemed nonplussed by this idea. I related to them how once I had brought suit against a rival firm and flew to the European Commission in Brussels to explain why they were such a band of anti-competitive jerks and this particular thing they were doing was going to hurt not merely my company and my shareholders, but all of the poor innocent consumers in Europe. Two years later I was working for the company against which I’d previously brought suit, and was back in Brussels, arguing the same case from the opposite point of view and telling them how it was completely unproblematic and actually very beneficial to consumers everywhere. Now I consult on the topic for other companies in similar situations around the globe. The moral of the story being, there is no right and wrong, no true or false, just people regurgitating what they are paid to by whomever happens to be footing their bills that month.
I have a friend … well, not exactly a friend, he’s in that odd space where you are closer than pure work acquaintances but not friends as such, if you see what I mean. I like him personally quite a bit. He’s a decent fellow, with a subtle, perceptive and inquisitive mind, a committed family man, and very particular and conscientious about the quality of his work. I hope he feels the same about me. When one of us happens to be in each other’s part of the world, we make a point of looking the other up for dinner or drinks.
At any rate, three or four years ago he left our company and joined the board of directors of a tobacco manufacturer. This surprised me. After all, the tobacco business at this point is just above child trafficking in terms of moral reputability, but not by much. I presume if you would ask a hundred university graduates today what industries they would refuse to work for, at least ninety would give tobacco as their first response. Yet here was this good-hearted, intelligent, educated man taking on not merely employment but a role of statutory authority with this company in a developing nation with prevalent tobacco usage. How could he possibly accept such a role, I asked myself. I haven’t actually asked him. I cannot imagine a way to pose the question in an objective and non-judgmental manner, though I would very much like to hear his thoughts on the topic.
Once, early in my career, a colleague in our fashionable technology company was leaving to go work for Unilever, or maybe P&G. In any event, he was going to go work in marketing for their diaper division. I found this cause for much hilarity. How could anyone possibly leave all this to go sell diapers, of all things?
At the time I worked for this very strange little Dutchman. When I chortled about our colleague to him, he looked at me with incredulity. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get one of those jobs?” he demanded of me. “They take only the best of the best. I would love to sell diapers.” He explained to me his thoughts in some detail, which I will recount here as best as I am able. Diapers encompass the most fundamental of all needs; that of a mother to keep her baby clean, hygienic and comfortable. It’s the Jungian archetype of all consumer products; the ur-product, if you will. He explained how one well-known diaper brand had confronted a certain commoditization of the sector back in the 80s. After an intensive series of researches and in-home visits with new mothers, they came with a revolutionary approach: “His and hers diapers. Because boys and girls are different. Why shouldn’t their diapers be?” was the slogan, apparently. Genius. Sales and profits skyrocketed.
A couple of years later the wave had passed, the euphoria faded. How to recapture that old magic? The same people in the same marketing department were tasked to revitalize the proposition. After much deliberation and customer dialogue, they came with a new proposition which is, perhaps, the purest distillation of marketing genius. My oddly lumpy, cherubic Dutchman acted out the famous advertisement in his office while his staff gawked and marveled at his antics. Imagine a new mother, at her wits end, standing by two cradles. She’s just had fraternal twins. She looks at two boxes of his and hers diapers, one empty. “If only there were one for both,” she muses hopelessly. Thank goodness our favorite CPG brand has come to the rescue with their “New, universal diapers. Finally, one that fits all!” For the modern working mother who cares about her child but doesn’t have time to waste in the diaper aisle of the supermarket!
My boss hooted with laughter at the pure, unadulterated nihilism of it all. “Don’t you see? They created a need out of nothing, then used that to create a completely new need! Genius! Pure genius!” And all of it riding on the jittery insecurity of the millions of new mothers minted every month, wanting desperately to do the right thing by their purple, squalling little crotch goblins.
This series of anecdotes may seem a bit random and unconnected. However, there is a common thread between them. The point that I have taken from them, and that I want you to take from them, is that what one does for work is completely meaningless. There are no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ companies out there, some providing value for people at large and others simply extracting an indefensible shareholder surplus from ignorant consumers. There is nothing inherently better about writing code for Google than selling chewing gum; the only difference in the size of the paycheck. We are all oxen tethered to the wagon of corporate exploitation. The companies that claim to have broken the mold and aim to do something different inevitably are exposed as the worst offenders and the most egregious charlatans. Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling all went to prison. The acclaimed genius behind the poster child of a company whose employees found meaning in doing business differently, Zappos, turned out to have been doing ketamine and whippets fifty times a day and was convinced he was morphing into a crystal when he finally died in a storage room dumpster fire. Adam Neumann’s mission to ‘elevate the world’s consciousness’ turned out to be a euphemism for elevating his own bank account while leaving shareholders holding the bag. When the titans of technology met President-elect Trump at the Tower of Mordor in December 2016, they knelt at the foot of evil and gladly kissed its ring.
From a broader perspective, we are boiling the planet underneath our feet, yet keep adding fuel to the fire daily. The founding myth of capitalism, that infinite growth is possible in a finite physical system, has always been risible. Humans and domesticated animals account for 97% of global mammalian biomass. At this point, it is inevitable that we will cross the 2.5C threshold within two generations and precipitate a global extinction event. This will doom the few ragged remnants of humanity to a future of consuming insect protein bars while sheltering in caves from the blistering, unbearable heat while ocean waves lap at the windows of office buildings in New York, Rotterdam and Hong Kong. Yet globally we continue to subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $2 trillion annually. Exxon Mobile was hiding prescient studies about global warming back in the 1970s; the US government has sabotaged the work of global climatology for generations. The problem and its solutions have been known for decades13, but our global polity continues to behave like a cirrhotic drunk with a liver the size and consistency of a basketball who nevertheless hides fifths of vodka under the sink. As Friedrich Hayek commented presciently in the Road to Serfdom, “We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has produced results utterly different from those we expected.”
No matter what you do, for what company in whatever field, you are one of a billion workers shoveling coal into the furnace of a train bound toward oblivion. You are one of trillion metastasizing cancer cells in the guts of our planet blindly consuming their host as efficiently and quickly as possible. Irrespective of what you tell yourself, you are part of the problem, not the solution. There is no solution out there to be part of.
Do not try and kid yourself that whatever company you work for is doing something unique or irreplaceable. Nokia had a functioning prototype very similar to the iPhone years before Apple released it; it would have appeared sooner or later, with or without Steve Jobs. The airplane would have been invented without any Wright Brothers, as would the Model T in absence of a Henry Ford. Penicillin would have been discovered even if Alexander Fleming had been hit by a bus in his childhood. Someone would have invented the modern travel suitcase even if Robert Plath had not had his flash of inspiration in 1987. The Butterfly Effect would have been conceptualized even if Edward Lorenz had been able to wait another hour for his coffee break. Companies and people never truly invent anything; they merely find themselves at a moment of technological serendipity and are smart and fast enough to act on it. Make no mistake, the world will get wherever it is going with or without you.
The conclusion I draw from this, and that you must draw from this, is that it doesn’t matter a dingo’s kidney what you do, or for whom. No job, role, title, company, or field of work has any intrinsic meaning. It’s no better to be a doctor than an arms dealer. You might as well sell diapers, insulin, tobacco, Prozac, warships, cluster bombs, or vacuum cleaners. Nothing matters. Neither you nor your company will change the course of history, which hurtles inexorably toward catastrophe and ruin; or even your industry, which will endure the same vagaries of boom and bust to which it was always destined. You may as well enjoy the ride as long as you can, and ensure that those you care about have the same opportunity.
The only point of work, it follows, is financial independence, not subsistence. Let me emphasize this. Why do we work? We work so that we don’t have to work. This is not an answer. It is the answer. It is the only answer. Anyone who tells you different is lying, and most likely with the aim of getting you to work for them so they won’t have to work themselves. Achieve financial independence as soon as practically possible. Decouple yourself and your fate from this monstrous machinery of employment. Free yourself to enjoy life while we still can. Join a theater troupe. Write a book. Sponsor your local baseball team; why not become a coach? Take up ultramarathoning. Spend a week touring Berlin sex clubs. Make your own hotsauces, smoke your own ham, pickle your own pickles. Become a mycologist. Take a course in watercolor landscape painting. Embarrass yourself during open mic night at your local pub. Retire to the Yucatan, or Costa Rica, or Lombok. Do anything except trudge to an office every day to perform pointless tasks for the benefit of hideous people in the furtherance of ghastly, unsustainable ends.
No job or company or accomplishment is meaningful except insofar as it helps you achieve this goal; no job or field is intrinsically bad or evil unless it prevents or hinders you from achieving them. Maintain clarity about your true mission and do not allow yourself to be distracted from it. Ideally you want to be in a position of financial independence as early as possible and to make the most money with the least amount of work and stress, leaving time for personal projects and investments and accumulated capital for your children.
Graveyards are full of people who died poor after a lifetime of work they found meaningful or important which then rapidly evaporated into insignificance, leaving their families nothing but debt and misguided lessons about the importance of hard work. This serves no purpose except to continue the cycle of pointless servitude. But this cycle of serfdom can be broken. This book is about how to break it.
2. Corporations are people too (just not ones you’d want to spend any time with)
“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.”
- James 5: 1 - 5
Much has been made of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in the United States in terms of corporate personhood and the concept of granting legal entities the rights of persons. The concept is much older than that. Even the word ‘corporation’ derives from the Latin corpus, or body. Case law clearly accepted the notion of a company as a ‘person’ in the United States from the early nineteenth century, and far earlier in Great Britain.
Joel Bakan’s well-regarded work The Corporation on the topic established the contours of this argument succinctly. The modern corporation, conceived as a person, is devoid of all moral constraints, having relieved its shareholders of any liability for its actions and free to attract those willing to stomach whatever behavior then results. It is extraordinarily powerful, able to marshal vast resources under the all-seeing, unblinking eye of executive oversight. It is immortal, unless it manages to destroy itself or is in turn consumed by a more efficient predator. Finally, as I pointed out earlier, it is legally bound to seek maximum shareholder returns to the exclusion of all else. This latter aspect fulfills the clinical definition of psychopathy. From the spectacular ecological carnage of BP and ExxonMobile to the legions of Oxycontin addicts to Nestle’s gruesome cocoa plantations in Africa, and Amazon delivery drivers with their urine filled bottles in the passenger seats of their cars, it is absolutely clear that the only real crime from these companies’ point of view is getting caught. Employee health, safety and well-being, human rights, the environment, national security … these are all simply costs to be externalized. Compliance is a matter of cost-benefit analysis, nothing more. I cannot count the number of times I have presented a regulatory or legislative mandate to management, only to be immediately asked about the relative cost of compliance versus penalties for ignoring it.
Once when I was a student, I had a summer job for a couple of years erecting tents for weddings and other events. We had periodic health and safety trainings, which we immortal, invulnerable teenagers obviously found desperately tiresome and cause for much mirth. One time the guy who’d been delivering the training about some obscure OHSA rules stopped in the middle of his talk, glaring at the yawning, laughing hooligans he was trying to help. “You stupid little shithead fucks,” he growled at us. Something about his demeanor shut us up quick. A deathly quiet descended. He continued. “Do you know that every goddamn rule in this handbook, every labor law on the books everywhere in the world, is written in blood? The blood of people like you and me. They died so you could work in safety. Your employer could give a fuck if you live or die, or lose an arm or an eye. There are always more dumbfucks out there ready to take your place. These rules are made for you, not for them. Get it straight, assholes.” I have always remembered that moment, when the pure, raw, inescapable truth of that statement struck me like a baseball bat in my gut.
My intention here is not to re-litigate this argument of the corporation as soulless psychopath, which at this point has been established so definitively, the behavior of the largest offenders so cartoonishly malevolent, it hardly bears repeating. What I do want to do is explain what this means for you in your everyday circumstances, and your long-term plans.
In terms of your immediate situation, working for a company is the equivalent of being locked in a room with a heavily armed psychopath. Behave accordingly. So long as you are useful to the firm, it will behave itself, even shower you with rewards and praise. This may change, drastically, without a moment’s notice.
In my first executive VP role, we had a saying which has half a joke, half not. “Feed the bear, or the bear will eat you.” We made sure we fed the bear and kept it satiated as far as we were concerned. But the bear is never satisfied. If someone else fails to feed it, it will eat whatever is at hand. The shareholder always comes first, and the shareholder wants EBITDA growth. That means either revenues go up, or costs go down. The preference is always to increase revenues – costs can be reduced later. When revenue dries up, they come for costs. And you are a cost. I went through many rounds of cost-cutting during the financial crisis of 2008, and I had to let go many people I would have preferred to keep, and whom I believed the company should keep as they delivered significant value or had real potential. But in the end, you cut the people you can afford to lose in the current budget cycle, not the ones you’d prefer. It’s similar with assets in a cash crunch. You sell what you can, not what you want.
I am not saying this to justify actions I feel badly about, but to explain to you what will be in the minds of your superiors when a crisis arrives. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because you are loyal, valuable, accomplished, or talented that you are not necessarily expendable. These words are not antonyms.
Companies will tell you that you are important, vital even to their success. That the human element is what makes them unique. They depend on you, and for that reason they care about you, your welfare, your development. They want the best people, which is by definition, you. They will invest in you, so that you become a more productive and well-rounded employee, and more value generating to the firm at the same time.
Lies. The intention of all this meaningless chatter is to increase your productivity without a corresponding increase in your compensation; to retain the most productive; to create a feeling of responsibility, of indebtedness. The entire system is designed to reduce your expectations for compensation and advancement, substituted by the notion that you are building some kind of fictional equity which will be converted into economic value at some point in the future. Do not imagine that because what you do is important or even vital to the company that you are safe. There will always be some pig-headed manager above you eager to dispose of you precisely for this reason, consequences be damned.
Now, I’m not saying you are not building this equity. Learn what you can in every job you have. Gain whatever skills are accessible to you. But do not expect that this will be rewarded by your current employer. Also keep in mind that most people drastically overestimate their own difficulty to replace; you are probably among them.
There are five vitally important trends you need to understand when planning your long-term future and path toward financial independence. First is that while there has been an enormous increase in productivity over the past decades, nearly all of this surplus accrued to the owners of capital, not labor. Second, the tax contribution of major companies has been in long term decline: these astonishing profits no longer fund public services. Third is the massive concentration of compensation in upper management at the expense of the average employee. Fourth is the ever-greater concentration of wealth and assets. There is an ongoing game of musical chairs in the global economy where there are fewer and fewer seats at the table of sharing in the gains of economic productivity. If you want to claim one of those chairs, you must ascend in management and you must begin to accumulate assets quickly before the bear finally turns on you, as it will. Fifth is that the traditional social safety net you might otherwise rely upon on to save you is fraying rapidly. Do not count on it to save you from a lifetime of unwise profligacy.
Labor’s share of national income has been in steep decline for decades. This became particularly pronounced after 2000. While it is not uniform, it is happening everywhere, and it will continue. There have been certain moments in time, generally after crises – the Black Death, World War II – when a shortage of workers has meant that labor is sufficiently scarce to increase its share of profits and the productivity surplus. Largely, over the course of economic history, this has not been the case and labor’s share of economy-wide profits has been under constant downward pressure at the expense of capital.
One of the most important drivers of this is where and how income growth has been created. Globally, there has been an incredible growth in profitability of technology firms. These firms employ relatively few people and instead rely on intellectual property, massive R&D and capital expenditures and intangibles. The top 10% of large firms capture 80% of economic profit2. Google and Meta together for instance employ about 270,000 people globally whereas the two largest telecom companies (China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom) employ 700,000. The four largest technology firms have a market capitalization of $8 trillion dollars, or $4 million per employee versus for example $500,000 at Deutsche Telekom.
As corporations have accumulated wealth, they have also drastically reduced their contribution to society. Between 2000 and 2021 the share of corporate tax as % of GDP in the United States fell by half. As corporate profits have sailed ever higher, corporate taxes have continuously fallen.
One of the modern corporation’s favorite parlor tricks is to pretend they have substituted tax payments with their own social investment programs – formerly known as CSR, now commonly seen under the rubric of ESG. I have spent enough time in boardrooms when the topic of ESG comes up as people roll their eyes and begin scrolling through their phones to assess how much importance senior executives attach to these initiatives (less than zero). The more clever ones are able to put up a more sustained charade of interest, but even then make no bones about ensuring these investments go back to financing their core business at the end. When you boil things down, the lion’s share of ESG involves capturing government subsidies to do things they would have done in any event – constructing solar panels on the rooftops of warehouses, building mobile phone masts or fiber optic networks in rural Africa, and so forth. What investment is made in less advantaged communities, the environment, bridging the digital divide or whatever the cause du jour is, corporations will frequently spend a 3 – 4x multiple of the investment on communication of that investment to the public so everyone knows what ‘good citizens’ they are.
To summarize: ESG is a gigantic global self-congratulatory PR circle jerk designed to suck subsidies out of governments and paper over the ever-falling tax contributions to budgets.
As tax take from corporations has fallen, debt has risen. In ten years in the United States, interest payments on debt more than tripled to nearly $700b, or about as much as the budgets for their global war machine of oppression and occupation. Given that the top 1% of households own over 50% of equities and bonds, and the top 10% hold over 90%, this is obviously a gigantic transfer of wealth of about 3% of GDP from poor to rich happening every year, and at an ever-increasing rate.
This is of course in addition to the ever-growing gulf of compensation between the highest paid managers and the lowly employees and gig workers who fill out the ranks of the modern corporation. While 50 years ago a CEO would typically be compensated at 20 – 30x that of the average worker, this has now exploded to 200 or 300x.
If you work in a corporation, rising to the intermediate and senior level of management places you on a logarithmic, not linear, upward scale of compensation.
The emerging consultant class bears a great deal of responsibility for this trend. It has been widely remarked upon that McKinsey’s executive compensation practice has at times constituted half of the firm’s billings. In The Firm, Duff McDonald comments on the other side of the equation that McKinsey has been the “impetus for more layoffs than any other entity in corporate history”. Not to pick on them particularly, of course. Bain and BCG are no better, only less successful at what they do. The consulting industry is devoted to the creation of enterprise value, to the exclusion of all other considerations. In the past this may have concerned ending defined benefit pensions, offshoring of manufacturing, and reduction of health care costs; today, it is centered on investing in technology in order to reduce long term operating (eg human) costs.
The generative AI revolution will only accelerate this trend. While generative AI has recently made a media splash, this technology has been slowly chipping away at labor intensiveness of processes for many years. Even back in 2017, a Japanese insurer, Fukoko Mutual Life, fired its entire actuarial department and replaced it with an AI agent. Goldman Sachs estimates the technology will eliminate up to 300m jobs globally within a decade. The last tool labor has remaining with which to demand a fair share of the productivity surplus is the fact that it is needed. Once AI renders much of our effort moot, even this will begin to dissipate.
The AI revolution will either usher in an era of equality and abundance, or an ever-accelerating concentration of wealth which will mean one of the few jobs available is volunteering to be hunted from helicopters by scions of the oligarch class. If we take the past as prelude as to what the future holds in store, you would be wise to bet on the second scenario. What this practically means is that you must accumulate as much capital as you can so that you don’t end up on the wrong side of the line.
If today you are a well-paid individual contributing professional or a low-level manager, beware. These trends are coming for you, quickly, and at an ever-accelerating rate. Imagine yourself as a harp seal on a small piece of ice while orcas circle lazily in the black waters below. This is the situation of a professional in the modern economy. You need to get to safer terrain as quickly as you can. And by ‘safe’, I mean financially independent.
All of the aforementioned trends are intended to, and have had the primary effect of, increasing the concentration of global wealth in the hands of a few and widening and deepening the moat around themselves to prevent others from joining. According to the latest UBS Global Wealth Report, the top 1% of wealthiest families globally own 45% of the world’s wealth.
Share of top 10% of households on total wealth 3
As the wealthy get wealthier, they also ensure that they hoard the best investment opportunities for themselves, like giant swine driving away rivals from an overflowing trough of food. A little-remarked on fact is how many companies have exited public stock markets in recent years. In 2000 there were 5,500 listed companies on exchanges in the United States; in 2020 this had fallen to 4,000. During that period 3,300 companies were taken private by funds or their owners/ managers4. Investment in these enterprises is now available only to the elite cadre of the global rich served by wealth managers and with access to the top PE and hedge funds. And of course, these people are not fools. They bring these companies private because they see outsized returns available from doing so, leaving the chaff for the plebian hordes investing on Robinhood.
Many people assume that the state pension program will fill in some of the gap left by their failure to invest. Do not rely on this. I don’t want to get into a lengthy digression on this topic, as it is vast and complex and I am not trying here to make political arguments one way or another. Nevertheless, take a moment to consider this practically. Look at the average pensioner living primarily on social security, public pensions or whatever it’s called in your part of the world. Is this a lifestyle you would enjoy? Most likely not.
Now consider that in virtually all cases, this is the best it is going to get. Public pensions the world over are set to collapse due to the inevitable mathematics of demographic change. Universally in the G-20 where most of you live, fertility rates have been below replacement levels for decades while lifespans of the elderly increase constantly. In the EU, the last time any country had fertility rates above replacement level was Ireland in 1995. Populations will decline, the elderly will cling to life for decades past retirement, with the result that the dependency ratio of elderly to working age people will increase asymptotically. The only stable solution to this problem is massive and sustained immigration, but this is politically unpalatable in most places. Therefore the value of any public pensions available will decline precipitously over coming decades in most countries. In 947 out of 1169 regions in Europe, the old age dependency ratio will be over 50% by 205029. This means every working person will need to support half of a pensioner wandering around in a park somewhere with his or her weiner dogs. Keep this in mind when thinking about your future. The Boomers are all preparing to set sail across the River Styx leaving economical and ecological carnage in their wake, singing as they go, “après nous, le déluge!” Do what you have to do to make sure you are not swept away in the current.
Let me recapitulate:
· Corporations behave like remorseless psychopaths because they are. They are driven by the profit motive and nothing else. As Utah Phillips once observed, “the profit system follows the path of least resistance, and following the path of least resistance is what makes a river crooked.”
· These companies are owned and run by the top 1% and exist to generate profit for them and create an ever-increasing gulf between themselves and labor. A terrifying arsenal of public lobbyists, management consultants and technological advancement ensures that surging economic profit goes to them and stays out of the grubby hands of proletarians. Both income and wealth are far more concentrated than they ever were, and this trend will continue indefinitely. Profits are always privatized, risks are socialized as much as possible.
· None of this is likely or frankly even possible to change as the tools of the 1% to control and manipulate the masses - and hence public policy - get more powerful and sophisticated, and a willing army of paid mercenary managers and consultants take on the role of enforcers (note: you are here). Do you remember when the Panama Papers and subsequent Pandora Papers were released containing terabytes of painful detail about how the wealthiest business people, celebrities and politicians on the planet hide their wealth to avoid scrutiny and evade taxes, and absolutely nothing happened except that one poor Maltese journalist was incinerated in a car bomb for her effrontery? Well, Pepperidge Farm remembers, even if no one else does. This is the reason why nothing can or will change.
· It will therefore become ever harder to break out of the role of enforcer and become an owner. You need to take action, now, if you ever wish to do so.
· The state will not save you. The currently retiring generation is the last that has any surety of enjoying the fruits of its labor via an adequately funded pension scheme. You will receive the scraps that remain, if anything at all.
By the way, if you are wondering what the really smart money is up to, there is a very quiet but burgeoning subset of consultancy services advising billionaires how to future-proof their apocalyptic boltholes. There’s no point in having a self-sufficient, fortified compound with a private airstrip and submarine pen somewhere in rural New Zealand if your mercenary fighters simply decide to shoot you once civil order collapses so they can enjoy the fruits of your planning themselves. So the next time you’re worrying about the next mortgage payment, spare a thought for the poor decibillionaires trying to figure out how to make an app on their phone that will allow them to detonate explosive collars on their palace guards should they begin to sense hints of unrest. There are reports that The Zuck’s billion dollar fortress in Hawaii has a moat that can be set on fire to incinerate intruders. I know this all sounds like a bad joke, and I wish it were. It’s not.
3. Loyalty is a no-way street
“I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.”
- Donald Trump, to James Comey
The first thing you learn making corporate presentations is to start at the end. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them.
So let’s start at the end. It’s closer than you think, so you’d better get ready for it. This company you have been loyal to and served devotedly will dispose of you the moment it finds a more cost-effective alternative, be it digital or another animate blood bag like yourself but in a cheaper geography, so prepare as best you can. They will demand commitment but they themselves will show all the loyalty of a house cat chewing the face off its dead master once it experiences the first pangs of hunger.
Years ago, a friend of mine who worked for a medical instruments manufacturer told me an interesting anecdote. He had hired back someone to their company who had left a few years previously. They had been through a long discussion about what he had learned in the interim and how this would add value to the company. My friend’s boss got wind of this and demanded he release the re-hire immediately.
This stout fellow, to his credit, would not budge. “I will not,” he said in his charming northern English, Manchesterian brogue. The re-hire had given notice at his job with the assurance of his return to the old company; my friend could not go back on his word, in this situation. After much back and forth, the higher boss acceded. “Loyalty counts,” he growled, ending the meeting.
But loyalty does not count. Or rather, it only counts one way. At my first EVP role, we were having a function to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the company’s founding. Important context: in between it had been bought by a multinational conglomerate for a vast amount of money. As I was running the festivities, I suggested to the CEO that maybe we should honor the people who had been there since the beginning and made it what it was. Of whom the CEO was one, it should be noted. She was the company’s third employee in its entire history.
She sniffily dismissed this notion. “We have too many people who have been here too long. I don’t want to encourage this kind of thing.” Clearly she had been in some meeting with global management and been told something to the effect that the company was stuck in its old ways and needed fresh blood. Now, this attitude was simply odious. She herself met this criterion, and she had made an astonishing amount of money from the buyout and subsequent CEO tenure. She was already financially independent many times over. Yet she was unwilling to make even a symbolic nod toward those whose hard work and sacrifice had gotten her there over the previous decade because of offhand commentary from some functionary at global HQ, who in any event had obviously been thinking of much older and more established branches of the business than ours. Nevertheless, keep in mind this was one of the largest and most well-respected companies on the planet, and its message to local CEOs was more or less “fuck loyalty”. I suspect they are not alone.
What I also want to point out is if even this one individual who had gained so much from her people’s loyalty could not bring herself to lift a finger to acknowledge them, what can we expect of a faceless corporation? If you guess nothing, you would be correct. Get yourself a cookie.
Just before her ticket finally came up, she went through a spasm of throwing an executive out of the company every three months in a last effort to save her own skin. Like a desperate sea captain throwing sailors to sharks trailing her lifeboat, she cast people out one after another. But blood in the water only attracts more sharks. I was unfortunately the last one out before she got the boot herself. In spite of everything she sacrificed in terms of loyalty and decency, she was still discarded like a piece of random junk when the time came.
Statistically in fact, her path was not abnormal. The average global tenure for a CEO of a large company is about five years5. Executive officer tenure at CEO-1 is less than this. It is ridiculous to expect long-term thinking or consideration of loyalty from people who know from the outset they are likely to be gone in four to five years not matter what happens and will be booted in two if they do not demonstrate convincing and tangible results.
I chose the citation at the beginning of this chapter precisely because of its absurdity, Donald Trump is infamous for demanding total loyalty while demonstrating none himself. He is a buffoon, but a successful buffoon, all things considered. He is the extreme outlier that nevertheless confirms the norm. While most individuals or companies would not be so brazen in their hypocrisy, as usual his only real crime is saying the quiet part out loud. The moral and behavioral distinction between the Trump Organization and any other Fortune 500 corporation is one of degree, not principle.
My advice is to prepare yourself for exit from day one. Firstly, prepare yourself psychologically. As I wrote earlier, remember that nothing you are doing actually matters. Sure, take some pride in your work and do a good job, but do not wrap up your identity in service to a bunch of bozos who would grind you up and sell the remains as animal feed if they could get away with it. Keep an appropriate psychological distance. Your job is not your identity, your boss is not your friend, your colleagues are not your family. If you got hit by a truck tomorrow, they would replace you in a week and have forgotten you completely in a month. Maintain the same attitude toward them.
Second and very importantly, collect everything. Bring everything you can home from work and keep a filing system. Take meticulous notes, and particular note of any health and safety violations, legal or regulatory infractions, corporate malfeasance, tax avoidance, or violations of labor law. Invest in a discrete recording device for key meetings. Ferret out bad behavior by the executives; there are surely numerous financial, sexual and/ or substance-based indiscretions occurring, you simply need to find them27. Find out what corporate IT logs and does not log in terms of behavior (will they know if you backup your hard drive regularly to an external device or cloud account, for example). Take notes of conversations with your superiors as contemporaneously as possible, with secret recordings if these are not electronically defended against or illegal in your jurisdiction. Keep particularly good records of anything to do with your personal goals, performance, evaluations and any irregularities therein.
While I am not suggesting to extort or blackmail your colleagues or your company, it is certainly better to be in possession of and in command of all relevant facts when the inevitable clash comes. Their attempt to exit you will be a key moment where a great deal of compensation is at stake, not to mention your reputation.
A few months before my CEO decided to cancel my position, I was warned this was coming by various sources in the company. Knowing her pettiness, it was clear to me she would try to strip me of my bonus as part of the exit, to demonstrate her ‘toughness’ to global HQ as well as provide a justification internally for disposing of a well-liked and effective executive.
Sure enough, a few days before the close of the fiscal year, her EA began to instruct me to add certain goals and targets to my KPIs which obviously could not be met at that point. Some she told me to add less than twenty-four hours before I was dismissed. When the HRD smugly told me how small my exit package would be due to non-performance, I was able to present her with an already prepared, extremely detailed letter addressed from my private lawyer to the global compensation committee members outlining how the company had dropped in unachievable goals at the last minute in order to avoid paying out a well-deserved bonus, with an annex full of time stamped e-mails. She turned white and immediately agreed to my terms.
In my back pocket, I also had information about how some members of the HRD’s team had been caught buying property on which company assets were built through shell corporations, then agreeing to pay themselves exorbitant rents. A Big 4 forensic audit has been launched which she and the CEO conspired to quash – fortunately I got what I wanted without having to deploy such a ‘nuclear’ option, which would have had unpredictable consequences.
Be prepared, and never bring a knife to a gunfight. And always assume it will be a gunfight. If possible, bring a bazooka, but don’t use it unless you have to. They make a lot of noise.
These points have related to the end game in the company, which will not come often but must be well-prepared for as it will come, no matter how good you are or how well you perform. The further you rise in management, the more political the position. At this level there is often an ever growing disconnect between performance and tenure. This accelerating insecurity is part of the reason executives are compensated so handsomely.
A less urgent but equally important point is to remain rational in the company of well-intentioned but ultimately powerless managers striving to convince you to sacrifice something in the name of the company. While this sounds easy to dismiss – of course I will look out for my own interests instead of those of this soulless corporation – this becomes exponentially more difficult when your manager presents it as a personal favor, or that your leaving is a personal betrayal, or how much of your work your colleagues will need to take on, or how much they have invested in you, or whatever sad story they concoct.
These people didn’t get into their roles by being bad at what they do. You must remember that all corporate relationships are transactional. They are trying to get you to act on personal empathy to make an irrational decision that benefits the company because it also benefits them as a manager. Remain disciplined, stick to your plan, ignore their pleas to personal loyalty. Any loyalty you show them is wasted. They will drop you like a hot coal as soon as they have a better opportunity elsewhere.
Once I left a pretty well-paid and satisfying job in a company for something much more interesting in another division of the same company. My manager sat me down for an hour and tried to talk me out of it, employing every trick in the book. I was twenty-eight and I quite liked him. He was a tall, insouciant Scandinavian fellow with a keen intelligence and quixotic sense of humor. I admit that I nearly cracked under the pressure. But I held fast, stuck to my original plan, and took the new job. This was instrumental to my further development, and I never would have gotten where I did without it.
A few weeks later the Nord had also left his job for something better. All his chatter about loyalty and commitment and obligation was so much dust in the wind. He had certainly been far down the path of negotiations for this new role when we spoke. Did he care? No. Should he have cared? No. Should you care about whatever twaddle your manager is spouting at you about your next move? No, no, no. Loyalty doesn’t count. It never has, and it never will. Anyone who says differently is probably trying to get you to do something you shouldn’t.
4. Spit, don’t swallow: regurgitate the corporate Kool-Aid as needed, but never drink it
“And those who were seen dancing were thought mad by those who could not hear the music.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
As you ascend the corporate ladder, you gain both direct and indirect influence; you will also attract more and more attention. Your words will be repeated as a source of authority, for good or ill. They will also be carefully parsed for adherence to corporate goals and objectives. While these goals will frequently appear meaningless or even destructive to the company and its ability to create value for shareholders, it is vitally important not to appear to block them or to have a negative attitude.
This requires a bit of nuance and elaboration. Every firm on the planet desperately chases after increased shareholder value. This comes from three main sources:
· Momentum and inertia of the business
· Structural changes in the market/ M&A
· Commercial performance
The weight of these depends quite a bit on the industry. For instance, in telecommunications, simple momentum is responsible for most variance in profitability and shareholder value. Bigger companies tend to succeed and defend predatory pricing, smaller ones tend to struggle. When the market is growing, everyone grows, and vice versa. I spoke to the regional CEO of a global telecommunications concern once who remarked, “One of my biggest problems is that a monkey could have successfully run a telecoms company in the 90s and 2000s. Now our whole industry is full of people convinced they’re geniuses and the sun shines out of their assholes just because they got up and came to work on time during the right decade.” Utilities are governed by regulation, high tech firms are dependent on successful execution of hundreds or thousands of M&A projects, whereas firms with low barrier to entry such as consumer packaged goods or internet retail tend to see the most reflection of commercial performance in shareholder returns.
Source: Growth Decomposition Database, McKinsey & Co. 2014
Nevertheless, in most industries commercial performance accounts for a minimum of results variance, yet corporations are still expected to come up with sophisticated plans and initiatives. Every new executive will have his or her signature initiative or strategy whose benefits you will be expected to trumpet at every opportunity; moreover, everyone will be expected to deliver evidence how these initiatives are delivering immediate and sustainable value.
It is important to distinguish between what you have to deliver and what you are expected to parrot. You will have your day to day line responsibility, whatever that happens to be. This will have a series of goals set which help keep the company running smoothly. You must deliver this, which will be a key part of your evaluation and advancement.
Most companies also have a second factor in evaluation which is not what was delivered but how it was delivered. This is often given a veneer or objectivity but in fact it tends to degenerate to compliance with the corporate agenda of gibbering jargon. Do not dismiss the importance of this merely because of its irrelevance to practical results. It will be your undoing.
I once worked for a company which had a history as a quirky upstart but had been bought by a big multinational corporation. Most of the people in the executive minus one level had been there for many years and had solid records of accomplishment behind them. When the central HQ sent in their pompous foreign executives to manage their new property, these established professionals found great mirth in playing “Bullshit Bingo” where various terms of meaningless corporate jargon were marked off on cards. Their surreptitious activity turned out not to be as surreptitious as they thought, and most were gone in a year or two. There are armies of people in any corporation devoted to enforcing adherence to whatever flavor of industrial groupthink happens to be in fashion at the moment. If you want to make money off of these people, you need to play their games, by their rules. Be the good soldier in Red Square, nearly dislocating his shoulder as he salutes the Czar. Did the Roman legions laugh at Caligula when he declared war on Poseidon and ordered them to fight the very ocean itself? They did not. They plunged their spears into the waves as though their lives depended on it. As they did. As does yours.
I don’t mean to imply that what your corporate masters routinely demand of you is as demeaning and ridiculous as Caligula’s war on the sea. I mean to say it straight up and directly, as clearly as I am able, without the slightest hint or trace of ambiguity. Reconciling yourself to this carnival of the absurd is a burden, but one you must learn to bear with a smile and good humor. Like Nietzsche’s inaudible music, the performative dances corporations require you to do seem senseless and absurd to the casual observer, but this makes them no less vital to your future well-being. The very absurdity of these rituals is what imbues them with meaning from the corporation’s point of view. In Japan, employees historically had to gather together and sing odes to their company every morning. People can hardly be expected to show or feel extraordinary devotion by acting and behaving like normal people. Deviation from the mean is the goal, not a consequence.
In that same company we had a CFO from abroad who was really very good at her job. She was so good the CEO hated her and attempted to undermine her at every opportunity. But the CFO had an ace in the hole: she lashed herself unapologetically to promoting the propaganda coming from the center; i.e. her bosses’ boss’s agenda. An attack on her came to be seen as an attack on the Group CEO. Within a year the local CEO was gone and the CFO herself went on to a stellar career in the Group corporate functions, and much larger and more important national operating companies than ours. Now this woman was absolutely brilliant, and I am certain she found these ritualized incantations of corporate doublespeak as tiresome and humiliating as I did. But you’d never know that from talking to her, even in private. I have always admired the tenacity and discipline she demonstrated in that regard, though it was a skill I was never able to learn myself. I wish I had.
She recently took a job working for one of the company’s great rivals in a very sensitive position. The stakes in this particular market in this industry are at the moment absolutely existential. I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s a very difficult moment for a very important market. After a couple of decades of professing allegiance and parroting endless tropes about loyalty to the company, when the right opportunity came she pounced instantly with clear-eyed rationality and no hint of doubt or remorse, straight to a position where I expect she will wreak absolute havoc on her former colleagues. And good for her, I say.
5. Turning Income into Wealth
“I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves.”
- Joe Louis
Achieving financial independence or at least acquiring a sufficient financial cushion that you do not feel pressured to accept roles you do not want, can survive a reasonable period between jobs without wages, and enjoy a flow of passive income all come down in essence to your ability and willingness to turn your income into wealth. And by wealth, I specifically mean productively invested financial assets. This seems like an elementary and painfully banal point, but many people – even those with very high incomes - do not manage to do this early enough or to a sufficient extent. To take an extreme example, 78% of professional football players experience “severe financial hardship” after retirement21. This includes those who made tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. It can also happen to you if you are not careful.
I am not going to spend time on basics here. I assume if you are reading this book, you know that you need an emergency reserve fund; that you should get rid of credit card debt at 19% APR as quickly as possible, whereas there’s not much point in paying down a mortgage with a fixed rate of 2.8% if you can safely invest the same capital at 8% somewhere else and this sort of thing. It’s just math. My intention here is rather to discuss how to avoid some common mistakes people make at the next level of sophistication, which is when and how to deploy capital productively.
Much has been made of studies where people with very high household income actually live more or less paycheck to paycheck. Over half of American families with household income of at least $100,000 per year say this is the case18. High incomes serve no real purpose if everything is eaten up by lifestyle creep and you find yourself working to maintain that lifestyle into your 60s. Additionally many people fall into the trap of assuming that once they have reached a certain income level, they are more or less guaranteed to stay at that level or higher for the rest of their career. This is not true, and it is a dangerous misconception.
Income tends to peak in your early forties as a woman and fifties as a man15. Keep in mind this median degradation disguises a great deal of variance. For every Boomer lawyer or tenured history professor still hobbling into the office at the age of 74 for $250,000/ year and asking his or her Millennial assistants to help create PDFs or change the printer cartridges, there are another three who got canned in a “reorg” where redundancies were suspiciously concentrated in the 55+ age bracket and are now greeters at Walmart or holding stop signs on construction sites and breathing diesel fumes all day long.
Once you cross this threshold you are in increasingly dangerous territory. Health problems are more likely to arise; a stroke or cancer diagnosis may drastically change your situation in a moment, both in terms of costs and ability to generate income. If you lose your job at this point for whatever reason, in many fields ageism will become a factor. You do not want to find yourself desperately searching for a high-income job at age 53 which simply may never materialize. You need to begin turning income into wealth at an early age and be sure you can ensure at least a reasonable subsistence through investment income by age 45 or 50 at the latest. Generally, I advise people to work off the assumption they will not have regular corporate work after the age of 50.
Source: Payscale
Robert Kiyosaki’s celebrated if simplistic Rich Dad, Poor Dad makes one vitally important point, which is that many people confuse assets with wealth. While from an accounting point of view a big house, a garage full of nice cars, drawers full of jewels and expensive watches, and a vacation home are indeed assets, they do not generate income. They often depreciate in value and will only add to your cost base through property taxes, insurance, registration, upkeep, etc. Kiyosaki takes the view that anything which does not produce a positive net income stream is in fact a liability, and there is a great deal of truth to this sentiment.
Many people are attracted by the idea of founding a startup, inspired by the stories of those who have achieved great wealth and renown by doing so, and see this as a path toward independence. My advice is not to go down this path until you are already independently wealthy and can afford to comfortably lose your entire investment. Statistics are not on your side in the startup game. 21% of US startup businesses fail within 12 months and half within five years19. Startups require enormous amounts of energy and time; time when you should be at the peak of your earning power. If you fail, you will have expended some of your only irreplaceable asset – time – in addition to the capital and energy you have devoted to this. Equally importantly, you may compromise your reputation for effectiveness and capability.
People say they respect those who try and fail, but this is often not true. It is very common to publicly applaud those who risk and fail while quietly mocking them in private. While you may get new contacts and skills, opening new pathways to success, you will also close off many others. Do not be so enamored by all the success stories you see heralded in the press that you forget about the uncountable numbers of those who failed and deeply regret having tried. No one writes about them in magazines, but it is an inescapable reality. Additionally, those of you outside the United States may find the reality of closing a company and bankruptcy a far more punishing experience than in New York or San Francisco, and with more lasting consequences; there is a reason why so many start-ups and unicorns originate in the US that is wholly separate from the concentration of talent and capital.
Even if you do succeed, do not imagine you will be free from oversight. As long as you have other shareholders to answer to, you are just as beholden as any corporate executive. In some cases even more. Anyone who has ever reported to some jittery, 29 year-old, drug-fueled private equity investment manager with the emotional intelligence of a hyena knows what I am talking about.
I worked for a start-up company early in my career. The owner was a famously maniacal workaholic. One time I was driving with him to a client meeting and cautiously observed, “Hey boss, you don’t look that good. Want me to take this one, you go home and get some rest?”
He acknowledged this with a grunt. “Yeah, I’m tired, I haven’t been sleeping much. Nine hours.”
“Nine hours … that’s not, well … that bad, you know.”
He turned a black, bleak gaze on me, wreaths of dead sparrows visible in his eyes. “I mean all week.”
Don’t start down this path if you’re not ready to really go the distance, is my advice.
Again, keep in mind the purpose of this book. I am not writing this for the prospective entrepreneur. If that is the path you want to take, I wish you luck but I can’t help you. I’m not saying it’s the wrong way to financial independence, just that it is very difficult and statistics are not your friend here, and there is an invisible dirty underbelly apparent only once you get into it.
The safest way to build durable wealth and sustainable passive income is through investing in stocks and real estate. While this is perhaps obvious and banal advice, many people underestimate its importance, particularly early in their careers. You should at least have a brokerage account by the age of 25 to which you contribute regularly, even if small amounts.
Do not invest in individual stocks or mutual funds, and do not use financial advisors. Stock picking is a fool’s errand. The idea that any individual investor can outperform professional funds and banks, with their armies of caffeine- and modafinil-fueled analysts and Stanford PhDs repurposed as quantitative wizards, is fanciful. There are companies that I understand as well as anyone on the planet and even I can’t really predict what their stock prices will do over time. There are simply too many variables you do not see and whose influence you cannot quantify in time even if you do. As Keynes noted, “markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. Don’t try and beat the house at blackjack in a casino, and don’t try to outguess the market with stock picking. In private, less guarded professional equity analysts will admit to you that even their buy/ hold/ sell recommendations are rather acknowledgments of recent trends than predictions of future performance.
Some people are able to outperform the market through intelligent stock-picking but they are either a) rare, b) often informed by insider information, or c) lucky. Many people fall into category C during a bull market and convince themselves they are geniuses because they made risky trades while the market was rising and won big. They frequently learn the error of their ways years later when the market crashes and this is typically a very expensive lesson.
As Buffet himself says, “Thanks to the American tailwind and the power of compound interest, the arena in which we operate has been — and will be — rewarding if you make a couple of good decisions during a lifetime and avoid serious mistakes.”
Don’t overcomplicate things. Invest in a couple of broad market ETFs instead. Ignore mutual funds. By definition, half of mutual funds will underperform the market, and half will outperform. But they all charge robust management fees for the trouble. VTSAX has a 10 year average total return of 12.8% and miniscule management fees. Most mutual funds charge 2% of assets under management per year. So to beat VTSAX they need to deliver at least 15% per year. There are funds out there able to do this consistently over time, but they are rare.
Stay away from options trading. People see success stories on the internet of people making millions with their Nvidia calls and want to get in on the action. This is straight up roulette at the casino. There is a huge success bias in what is reported by those who got lucky. 90% of option trades end in loss or at zero. Go for it if you want, but this is not a rational way to invest if you are not a professional.
Financial advisors claim to work for you, but they don’t. From their point of view, you are just cannon fodder for the big money clients whose interests they are actually motivated to protect. Do not bother with financial advisors until you have really substantial assets to manage (by which I mean $10m+). At this point it certainly makes sense to engage professionals for creation of trusts, tax optimization of generational wealth transfer, and so on. But for garden variety investment advice in your acquisition phase, financial advisors are far more likely to be counter-productive than helpful.
It is vitally important to begin investing in stocks early in life. If you have $50,000 of equities by the age of 30, you are virtually guaranteed to be a millionaire by 50 unless you do something silly, such as getting divorced. Consider the following example of two people investing an inflation-indexed $5,000/ year in VTSAX by the time they are 50. One begins at age 25, the second at 30.
The portfolio of the fellow who started earlier is worth nearly $900,000 at age 50, versus $500,000 for the one who started later. The $25,000 of not invested funds in his misspent youth made a $400,000 difference later in life even with the exact same behavior from age 30.
Taking another example, imagine someone who invested consistently in VTSAX from age 25, at the rate of (inflation indexed) contributions of $5,000/ year from age 25 – 30, $10,000/ year from 30-35, $25,000/ year from 35 -40, and $50,000/ year from 40 to 50. By age 50, this mindful lady has invested $870,000 over 25 years but has built a portfolio worth $2.7m without lifting a finger. At age 50 she can safely reinvest this in a dividend-oriented portfolio paying out $10,000 - $12,000/ month.
If you happen to luck into one of the increasingly rare jobs that offer a defined-benefit pension program, this may be a hidden gold mine. While the salary may be lower than in standard corporate gigs, you may be entitled to between 50 and 80% of anything from your median career wage up to last full salary. Assuming you would take such a job at 25 and retire at 55 with an average payout of $100,000 for the following 30 years, this has a net present value today of $260,000. So imagine the previous saving charts starting not at zero but at $260,000, and they begin to look more interesting. Also, given that these jobs are typically low pressure, public sector/ civil service positions or in companies so institutionalized they might as well be government postings, this also means you are a) much less likely to be released at a senior position, and b) have more time and energy available to focus on your own investments, and c) medical insurance is often retained. There are plenty of retired cops, prison guards and military folk out there doing much better financially than people expect because of this.
The only catch is you need to believe the entity will be around long enough to meet its commitments. The RAND corporation released a study in 2023 showing that about a quarter of public pension benefits are unfunded, a trend likely only to exacerbate in the future9. When considering defined benefit programs, most likely public sector pensions which may crumble due to profligate public spending versus higher-stress, higher-income roles and investing savings at a higher rate of return, all you can do is ask yourself Harry Callahan’s famous question: “Do I feel lucky?” and proceed according to your intuition. You have no hope of predicting what the situation will be thirty years from now. Do not kid yourself otherwise.
Real estate has proven for many people one of the most reliable ways to accumulate and build wealth. As Lex Luthor remarks in Superman, land is the only thing they’re not making any more of. Intelligent real estate investments generate both predictable, recurring income as well as value appreciation.
Real estate is not for everybody, and there are perfectly legitimate financial instruments that replicate these investments. As a general rule of thumb in the US, RE investments make sense from about a 12% gross return (rental income vs purchase price). This figure can be lower in other geographies where property taxes and insurance are much lower. At the same time, there are plenty of REITs (real estate investment trusts) that deliver comparable returns in terms of cash flow with zero effort and little risk. However, these funds tend not to appreciate in time at the same rate as individual properties. In fact, many depreciate due to constant release of new shares and dilution of existing shareholders.
Personally I enjoy real estate investing. I like standing in a building I own, with architects and tradesmen, talking about projects and timelines. I like the feeling of standing in a newly reconstructed property, the smell of fresh paint, meeting property managers to talk about repairs and tenant relations. Not everyone does. It can be a difficult business, and a risky one. One thoughtless investment, an overlooked sign of black mold in the roof of an apartment building, a hidden easement, a leaky roof, can lead to an endless nightmare of headaches and lawsuits. But these risks and difficulties are what allow the savvy real estate investor to sometimes secure extraordinary returns. And if the shit hits the fan at some point at least I have real assets that exist as something other than a digital mirage somewhere on ‘the cloud’. There are very good reasons why Ted Turner and Bill Gates are two of the largest landholders in the United States.
United States residential home prices are famously resilient, driven by persistent population growth. Even accounting for the impact of the Great Recession between 2008 and 2012, prices in most major markets are up by multiples of two decades previous.
Foreign markets are not as strong as the US historically, however most major markets demonstrate significant growth over time. There are certain exceptions such as Italy, which has had fertility rates below replacement levels since the 1950s, but these are rare.
Generally speaking, as an investor you can safely count with 5 to 10 points of value appreciation per year in addition to the gross rental return. As long as this sum of rental income and price appreciation is above the 12% you can expect from passive investments in index funds, it may be a worthwhile addition to your portfolio.
Consistent and conservative investing will only get you so far, however. Let’s imagine that at age 50 you have accumulated a stock portfolio of $3m and a real estate portfolio of $2m. If the stock portfolio delivers dividends at 4% and the real estate units 6% net of insurance, property taxes, and management fees, this leaves you with gross income of $240.000 annually. Now, how you would evaluate such an income depends a great deal on who and where you are. This is in the 92nd percentile of US national household income. On the other hand it is nearly three times the cutoff to be in the top 10% of income earners globally6. A quarter million dollars in Manhattan, London, San Francisco, Singapore or Hong Kong means an entirely different lifestyle than it does in Ann Arbor, Ostrava, Campeche or Kuala Lumpur.
Simply consider the issue of health insurance once you have achieved financial independence and are no longer working. Anywhere in Europe a small fee of a couple hundred dollars per month is sufficient to have your family covered by the national single payer health system. In the United States the equivalent coverage typically costs $2000 - $3000/ month, and even this will not save you from punishing five, six or seven figure bills in (surprisingly) common circumstances. A shocking 67% of bankruptcies in the United States are due to medical costs20. Another point is property taxes on your primary residence. Again, in many places in Europe or Asia these fees are inconsequential, whereas in the United States the taxes on a $1m home will typically be $10,000 - $20,000 per year, depending on the state. University for two children will be free in continental Europe, cost $100,000 in the UK but could be well over half a million dollars in the US. And so on.
Tax is another vital issue. Rates vary widely. If one wishes to live from passive income, consider the differences in tax burden accruing to a relatively simple portfolio delivering $100,000 p.a. in dividends, the same in rental income, and $50,000 in capital gains taxes on average. Even within Europe, the tax take on this portfolio varies by 100%.
What I am trying to say is that when you are setting out to achieve financial independence, it is vitally important to have the end game in mind. Where will you settle? What will be the running costs of your life and your loved ones? What extraordinary costs will you potentially confront? As you age, will this location still be suitable? Living in a bungalow on Koh Chang or Bali may be attractive when you are 50, but what about when you are 80? Only once you have this mapped out can you determine what amount of productive assets you need to support yourself. Remember that 50% of lifetime medical costs tend to come in the last year of your life. This is particularly important in the United States, where the medical established has developed an extremely efficient system for draining even the wealthiest people’s funds down to nothing for the purported reason of enabling them to eke out a few more feeble gasps on their very pricey deathbeds.
Once you have this number, it is also important to stick to it. Many people make their FIRE (financial independence/ retire early) number only to hesitate about actually quitting their job and moving onto the next phase of their lives. Their identity is too bound up in work, they don’t know what they will do all day, they are worried suddenly if the figure they calculated ten years ago is really enough, lifestyle creep has accustomed them to needless luxuries … the reasons are myriad, but the result is the same: an anxiety-ridden executive doing his or her job half-heartedly, one foot out the door but unwilling to take the plunge until they are unceremoniously pushed.
Many of the very wealthy solve this issue by purchasing a tangible business to run. Independence does not necessarily mean you want to do nothing; just that you are free to do what you want, and don’t have to listen to a bunch of jerks telling you what to do. If you are talented and driven enough to achieve financial independence, it is unlikely you will suddenly want to put the brakes on and spend the next forty years sitting on the couch, drinking beer and muttering at the television.
I have advised you against investing in your own start-up early in your career; however, purchasing a healthy, going concern at a later point can be and for many people is a good compromise between the drudgery of employment and the lassitude of living purely from passive income. In fact, if you want to maintain an income and lifestyle of the top 1% as opposed to the top 10%, this is very nearly a prerequisite. Entering the top 1% globally means an income of over $500,000, or $900,000 in the United States. Earning $500,000 at a 5% dividend payout ratio means you need liquid assets of at least $10m, which is very difficult to amass. However, if you have a couple of million dollars to invest there are frequently existing businesses for sale which are stable, consistent income generators without a huge amount of work involved and these can often be purchased for 4 – 6x annual profit.
In the 90th to 99th percentile of income, about 75% of income derives from wages. This changes drastically in the top 1%, however. Over half of them and a startling 86% of the top .1% of US taxpayers have pass-through income from S-Corporations or small, closely held C-corporations. The top .1% of income earners make 8x the money from such corporations than the entire combined executive compensation of the S&P 15007.
Many of these are of course private law firms, doctor’s offices and so on. But many others are more mundane. For example, there are many quite simple and straightforward regional licensed distribution businesses to be had in many fields. My cousin married his divorce lawyer (long story) who I expect was well compensated in this career. She recently took over her parent’s business of distributing furniture to regional retailers in our area; they told me they were surprised that she now works 2 or 3 hours a day and makes more money than she ever did as a successful, practicing private lawyer. One of my other cousins bought the regional license for a high-end real estate brokerage and makes quite a good living with a relaxed lifestyle which seems to primarily entail a lot of golf with rich clients and prospects. An uncle inherited a fuel delivery business close to Boston, and he has had offers to sell it for the high single millions; this is in addition to a dozen residential units he rents out. If you haven’t bothered to get the qualifications to be a cardiologist or opthamologist or white-collar lawyer, there are other paths open to you. Owning a string of automated car washes may not be glamorous, but in the end money always has the same color, no matter where it originally came from.
Again, let me be painfully clear. I have advised against start-ups and new businesses because they often fail and take an extreme amount of time and energy and luck to make work. This is not the same as buying a running, healthy business from your neighbor who just got a cancer diagnosis and whose feckless children are off giving windsurfing classes on Tenerife.
(Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
Small businesses are one of the great global engines of family wealth accumulation, and this is not remarked on as frequently as it should be. There is always something for sale. People die, get divorced, get sick, want to move, accumulate gambling debts, discover the joys of meth, kids want to do something else … whatever. It’s not your problem, but it very well might be your opportunity. If you encounter a chance to acquire a sustainable, low-involvement, local business at a fair price in a place you are thinking of settling long term, this is something you should carefully consider.
6. Shut the fuck up about turning income into wealth
“A fool is known by his speech, and a wise man by his silence.”
- Pythagoras
As in the excellent book (and even better film) Fight Club, where the first and second rules of fight club are that you do not talk about fight club, the first, second and third rules of financial independence is that you do not talk about financial independence with people from work or with your relatives.
Your boss does not need to know your plans. Your colleagues do not need to know your plans. Your sister’s boyfriend’s cousin Mitch looking for investors in his MLM does not need to know your plans. Your Boomer parents with their suddenly very frightening reverse mortgages don’t need to know your plans. Your husband or wife does need to know, and that’s the end of the list. But I am especially referring to work colleagues. Treat them like cops. What is the first rule about getting stopped by a cop? Shut the fuck up. He’s already decided if he wants to arrest you or not. You won’t improve matters by opening your yap.
This goes doubly for the case where you come into an unexpected windfall, be it inheritance, a massive severance payment, an award from a lawsuit, striking it big on your cryptocurrency bets, the lottery, or whatever it may be. Tell absolutely nobody about it, pay off any higher interest debts, and stash the cash in your investment fund. Nothing rouses feelings of jealousy and entitlement in those around you like knowing you have just come into a pile of money. Your friends and relatives will see you as a bank newly opened for their business, your colleagues will be jealous and snarky and begin to plot your downfall, and your boss may be infuriated that your net worth is suddenly higher than his or hers. There is no advantage to any of this, so don’t let it happen. How? That thing that is simultaneously the easiest and hardest to do … shutting the fuck up.
Your employer wants docile, compliant workers who depend on their paychecks. They often announce that they are seeking entrepreneurial types, but this is a lie. A pal of mine from one of the biggest global executive search agencies confirmed this for me. “These companies always say they want entrepreneurial mindsets, but when they really meet someone like that, they get terrified and shit themselves. They actually want people who look and talk like entrepreneurs but at the end of the day just want to collect a paycheck. Real entrepreneurs are too disruptive, volatile and hard to control.”
A great deal of the corporate management apparatus is based on convincing employees to accept various forms of non-monetary ‘value’ instead of cash. This reminds me of first or second grade when the teacher would give us little plastic tokens to be proud of for finishing our work. I have a closet full of similar trinkets from companies for completing various projects. One time I was asked to join the board of directors of a different company owned by my employer. After several months of excess workload, I enquired about compensation. The owner’s representatives looked at me incredulously. “Do you have any idea what an honor this is? And you’re asking about money?” Well, yes, I’m asking about money. Keep the honor. Honor never helped anyone make a mortgage payment. No, in fact I do not have any interest in working for free for one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
Once during my EVP days we had an executive committee session on HR strategy, policy and rewards. Amidst the numerous slides, two stuck out at me. One where there were claims about how we wanted to recruit extraordinary talent in our field at all levels, and a second slide much later on where our compensation strategy was detailed. The plan was to compensate in the 60th - 75th percentile at CEO-1 and -2, and at industry median at the levels below that. We had available reasonably precise salary benchmarks from our consultants (keep in mind, folks, every time you hire a consultant, the data you provide also goes into enriching their knowledge base which they then turn around and sell to your competitors).
In my usual impolitic manner, I raised the question as to how on earth we expected to attract top talent with mediocre compensation. I might as well have let out the most enormous, rancid, Texas baked bean fueled fart in terms of the reaction this elicited from the rest of the executive team. How could I be so obtuse as to think that filthy pecuniary rewards were the only reason people got out of bed and came to work? Did I not realize that there are many other reasons why people choose employers than something so base and crass as money? Did I think that any of them, for heaven’s sake, were only there for the wads of cash that were showered on us? Everyone in the room was comfortably compensated in the high six digits in cash and stock awards of course, but heaven forbid anyone suggest this was the reason we were all sitting there watching precious moments of existence slip away.
During a training at one early point in my career the point came up that every company (or society) has unwritten rules, and you don’t find out about them until you break them. This was a painful lesson for me about violating the unwritten rule of discussing the most fundamental reason why we go to work: to get paid the most that we can for our time, knowledge and skills. This point is anathema to corporate management. Avoid it at all costs. Use euphemisms, say you are interested in personal development or upskilling, whatever makes sense and is in vogue at the time, but avoid the stigma of being labeled as someone who is “just out for the money”. This label will do you no favors with management tasked with getting the most performance out of people for the smallest cash outlay.
The point is that you need to find a way to encourage them to reward you financially instead of virtually without letting them know you’re on to their game. Once they realize you are not interested in the charade of holiday pizza parties instead of bonuses and what not, you’re done. You will be viewed as having “the wrong attitude” and HR will single you out for liquidation before you infect others with your pernicious thoughts. The further along the road to financial independence you are, the more difficult it becomes to cajole or threaten you into submission, and this is the undoing of the whole system of control the company is based on22.
One fellow who worked for me made quite a bit of money on his own and later married into even more money. He likes cars, and likes to spend money on them. He recently got a new job and rolled into work in his expensive, spanking new BMW and from what he told me he actually experienced quite serious problems because of this, to the point of being suspected of taking bribes. Part of this is jealousy, but there is also a strong undercurrent of his colleagues and managers thinking ‘can we really control this guy?’ He is incidentally one of the hardest working, most effective managers I have ever had the pleasure of working with, in addition to his absolutely sterling integrity; this just goes to show you the vital importance perception of docility on the one hand and your colleague’s envy on the other plays in perception of behavior and evaluation of performance.
So go out and make your mad stacks of cash. Squirrel it away and watch it grow. Resist the temptation to crow about your successes to your family and colleagues. I know this is easier said than done; particularly when some provincial, mouth-breathing rube of a relative has mocked you for years, or some insufferable colleague badly deserves to be cut down to size, there is a certain temptation to roll up to an event in your new Mercedes-Benz GT and sigh about how difficult it is to deal with all the hassle from your dozens of rental properties and how you just moved to an eye watering new tax bracket, to excoriate the cost of horse stabling and what not. It feels good to do it, but that ephemeral dopamine rush is absolutely not worth the resulting, long-term inevitable hassle that is certain to follow. The more money you have and the easier you make it seem to earn it, the more entitled everyone will feel to a piece of your pie. And it is your pie.
I was speaking to a Finnish colleague of mine once and we found some common ground that where we come from the only acceptable way to talk about money is to complain about how hard one works in exchange for insultingly low compensation that was apparently set sometime back in 1983. This expectation holds irrespective of what the truth of the matter is. But there is a valuable lesson there. If you constantly cry poverty even when you are swimming in cash, at least no one will bother you and come to you for handouts. And this is an asset like no other.
7. Job hop your way to wealth and fortune
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
- Andre Gide
When I was just starting my career, my grandfather (who was a successful businessman in his own right) gave me one piece of advice. “Don’t be a job hopper, boy. Whenever a resume would come across my desk from some guy who had a new job every couple of years, I would just throw it out immediately.”
In retrospect, he was partially correct and certainly had reasons for his opinion. On the other hand, the quickest way to a raise or promotion is to skip to a competing company. The trick, therefore, is to job hop without seeming like a job hopper.
Now I am not going to say there is a magic bullet here, or a ‘one size fits all’ solution. There are plenty of people who have plodded through the ranks of a corporation and been amply rewarded; there are others who have skipped from role to role, company to company, and ended up with a disastrous reputation of being unreliable and flighty, and eventually become virtually unemployable. Someone you know has probably followed every conceivable variant in between. That said, statistics are not on your side if you stay with the same company for ten or twenty years.
Firms do not appreciate internal talent for a variety of reasons. First, familiarity breeds contempt. Someone who has worked closely with you for three or four years, warts and all, is likely to be more impressed by a candidate who comes in from a competitor, with a freshly pressed new suit and shiny tie, bespectacled and furrowed of brow, eminently serious and polite and on his best behavior. The external candidate and the agency representing him will crow about his strengths and do their best to hide any weaknesses. References are carefully selected to present him in shining light. And so on.
You as the long term, valued employee, on the other hand, may be caught in a trap of your own devising, and even competence. I have seen countless examples of people passed over promotion because they were too good at their current role and the company could not imagine replacing them. If you have accumulated responsibilities and tasks that would normally require three or four people, you may ironically have disqualified yourself from advancement simply because the company will not have budget to cover the hole left by your promotion. It is possible to be too good at your job. I know this sounds like a joke from a Dilbert cartoon, but it’s not. It happens more often than people think. The tangible, immediate impact of you leaving your current role may far outweigh the theoretical benefit of a putative promotion, from your manager’s point of view. While the manager’s interests at this moment may not entirely coincide with the company’s interests, don’t forget that in the end it is your manager who will actually make promotion recommendations, not the company.
This happened to a good friend of mine at one of the major consultancies. He spent years on the cusp of partnership but was voted down time and again. Having worked with him closely, I am convinced the problem was that he was simply too good at what he did. No matter what hellbroth of a problem presented itself, or how insane the client requirements, no matter how junior and inexperienced his team, he always delivered, and at a truly exceptional level. The management in his region became so accustomed to this mind-boggling delivery machine that overcame all obstacles, no matter how formidable, that they could not imagine promoting him and finding a replacement. Less talented and accomplished colleagues at the same level were regularly promoted while he languished, constantly lauded yet always unrewarded. Unfair as this may seem, it was of course perfectly rational from the partners’ point of view.
I worked at one global multinational which had an executive leadership program. Essentially the thought was to take the most perspective talents from the CEO-2 level and prepare them to move to CEO-1. On its face this made a great deal of sense. However, the program became a running joke in the company: once someone was nominated to the program, it was essentially a death sentence. I estimated that 75% of people entering left the company within 3 years, and I suspect virtually none of them were ever promoted. In my local operation during my five year tenure, we hired twelve people into our executive committee. Exactly zero of them were internal promotions, never mind from this particular pool.
Ideally you should switch companies every three to five years if you want to optimize your income. Less than three years makes you look flighty and raises suspicions you are fleeing your own incompetence. Three years is a reasonable track record and any bodies you have buried on the way will likely be clawing their way out of their graves by that point. Four is better than three, and five is better than four. More than five years, however, is usually a wasted investment unless you have a tangible promise of imminent major advancement from someone with authority to make it happen.
One time I was interviewing a lady who had been recommended to me as being highly talented. Looking at her CV, she had been at Job A for 4 years, Job B for two years, now she was at Job C for one year and was sitting in front of my desk for an interview for yet another role. I asked her pretty bluntly, “Do you actually know why you’re here and what you’re looking for? This pattern tells me you’re looking for something and haven’t found it yet. But with every job you’re getting less patient. I want to know what it is so I can figure out if you’ll find it here or not, otherwise you’ll just be gone in a year and we’ll both have wasted our time.” This stumped her, though she admitted it was an interesting question she hadn’t thought about and probably should have. We agreed to check back in with each other after a few months; I never heard from her again.
My point is, job hop but do it intelligently. Avoid suspicious patterns and have good, plausible stories in your pocket for such questions.
Job hopping brings clear benefits in terms of expanded scope of authority but most importantly compensation. Job changers will typically enjoy at least twice the salary increase as job stayers, as demonstrated by the ADP National Employment Report.
This is not something you can repeat endlessly, but strategically timed moves periodically through your career may drastically change your financial trajectory.
Imagine two people starting their careers at age 25, both at $50,000 per year. One is a job hopper, the other a job stayer. Let’s assume the job hopper moves companies every four years: frequently, but not enough to arouse suspicion. The job stayer plods along at the original company. Assuming both are very successful, they will average 5% pay increases over their career. The difference is that the job hopper makes a 10% raise every time he moves. By the time the two are 50, the job hopper has a salary of $213,000, vs $161,000 for the job stayer. This $50,000 delta may very well be the difference between financial independence and eternal wage slavery, so long as it is husbanded effectively.
When switching jobs, keep in mind that the job market is a gigantic merry-go-round of obfuscation, exaggerations, and lies. 70% of people lie on their resumes according to research, and oddly this percentage gets higher the more qualified people are. 85% of people with advanced degrees lie as opposed to 63% of those with bachelor’s degrees. 40% of hiring managers admit to lying about job roles and responsibilities, career development, and growth opportunities; 6% cheerfully admit to “lying all the time”17. So keep in mind if you feel the sting of conscience when submitting your CV, that you are in an arms race of lies with all the other applicants. The likelihood your competitors are honest is vanishingly small. The only crime is getting caught.
Nevertheless, it is wise to keep in mind that the likelihood of getting caught varies wildly by country, company and position. Publicly available information about criminal records, financial situation, educational achievements and so forth varies a great deal from place to place. You may skate through to your second job with a few exaggerations on your CV that no one will bother looking at, but which at director levels will be easily caught by a bit more scrutiny. Companies really have very different approaches to similar levels of position: one may check a couple of references you provide but take things more or less at face value, whereas another one will hire private investigators to dig up what they can on executive level candidates. Some Board positions can be had on the strength of a famous last name or a strategic charitable donation; others cannot. A friend of mine who was appointed to the board of a local airport authority told me the interview and vetting process was far more intense and grueling than his PhD doctoral defense had been. Know what you’re getting into before starting such a process.
Before signing and accepting anything, do your due diligence. People often see what they want to see in the acceptance phase of a new job, and this is extremely dangerous. Locate and talk to people who have recently exited the company get the unvarnished truth. One error of judgment isn’t the end of the world, but two or three such mistakes can seriously derail your career.
To summarize: hiring budgets are always larger than retention budgets. Companies hate giving raises or promotions to existing employees as they think it will stimulate unquenchable demand among the rest of the unwashed employees. Bringing in expensive external hires reminds has the salutary effect of reminding staff that they are worthless and instantly replaceable. Talented people are therefore frequently passed over for internal promotion in favor of less suitable external hires for a variety of apparently illogical reasons, but this has been the norm for decades and will not change. Rubbing your nose in the shit that they will gladly give an unknown external hire compensation they would never offer you in the course of an internal promotion is a conscious strategy. It’s a feature, not a bug, and you would be unwise to believe anything different. There is no shame in being the less suitable but overpaid external hire, instead of the abused, passed-over internal talent. Someone will be. It may as well be you.
8. The art of quitting
“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”
- George Patton
Ideally, in a twenty-five year career you will change employers four or five times to maximize income without destabilizing your reputation. These are therefore key moments in your journey and should be planned for accordingly.
The easiest situations of course are relatively early on in your career where you have been offered a substantially better opportunity elsewhere. In this case of course quit to take the better option. But do so intelligently.
First, make sure the offer is really better, and not just marginally so. This putative new employer is most likely lying about something or at least not being completely forthcoming about the job’s downsides – I reiterate the statistic that 40% of hiring managers admit to lying about their company or the position on offer in order to attract candidates. Make sure you find out exactly what this particular band of bozos are lying about. Do adequate due diligence about the company, the office, and your new boss and co-workers. You do not want to give up a comfortable, fulfilling role only to find out that the supervisor who seemed eminently reasonable during a forty five-minute interview is in reality a narcissistic maniac. Ensure that you are really comfortable with the trade-offs you will be making. Is another $18,000/ year really worth a 15 minute longer commute every day to some unspeakable industrial zone with no decent lunch options? Check that you are comfortable with the office: one of the key drivers of personal contentment in work is the physical office situation and layout. There is no point in taking a job where you will be miserable on a daily basis simply because of the physical environment in which you have to work.
At the same time, do not allow yourself to be swayed inordinately by an admirable, inspiring superior. No matter how intelligent, charismatic or successful this individual is, there is no guarantee they will still be your manager in half a year. They may be promoted or already have one foot out the door already for all you know; they can be felled by a sudden illness or accident. An M&A or reorganization may throw everything into chaos. Make sure the overall system, environment and compensation package brings you tangible advantages outside of the human factor and which will endure beyond any management changes.
Read the fine print. Remember to plan for the end of the job from the beginning. Do not dismiss vague clausal language about voluntary or involuntary termination as irrelevant or something that will be ‘solved when it comes up’. No one looks at contracts when everything is going fine. It’s only when conflict arises that the contract is pulled out of the archive. And I have seen countless situations where everyone was awfully surprised what was in there once it came to read them years after the fact, all involved principals long scattered to the winds. In the final analysis, the only thing that matters is what was committed to paper, signed and archived. Spoken words are ephemeral, worthless and impossible to enforce.
Ideally combine one or more of these moves with being dismissed for organizational reasons if you can engineer it. Being dismissed for organizational reasons does not carry the stigma of performance-related dismissals but you will still be entitled to claim a major severance settlement depending on your position, tenure, jurisdiction, and privileged knowledge. While this cannot be repeated ad infinitum, one or two strategically engineered terminations over the course of your career can leave you with a significant capital windfall, particularly if you have planned ahead and made arrangements to start new employment immediately. If you can move seamlessly from Job A to Job B but still pick up a severance, unencumbered by a non-compete clause, you may find yourself with an extra couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund a new real estate project or pad your equity portfolio.
Should you find yourself wanting to quit, if possible never do so without the next job lined up. When I say lined up, I mean offer accepted and new contract signed. Again, verbal assurances, no matter how heartfelt, are unenforceable in court. I know people who have given notice at Job A only to find the offer at Job B rescinded days before starting the new position. Do not under any circumstances let yourself end up in this position, no matter how attractive or lucrative the opportunity seems, or how much good faith you sense from the counterparty. Something out of their control may suddenly change and all will be lost at a moment’s notice.
Let your current company know at the last possible moment of legal notice. There is absolutely no benefit to you to do more than the legally required minimum here, no matter what obligations you may feel. They may try to talk you out of leaving; if so, the shorter period will have a salutary effect on the clarity of their thinking and alacrity of making an offer. Many bosses interpret this as a betrayal and may seek to take some kind of revenge against you; do not underestimate how even the most affable, cordial manager may suddenly transform into a vicious, vindictive adversary once you have announced your departure. From his or her point of view, this causes numerous problems – finding a replacement, costs for recruitment, and training, probably a salary increase, lack of productivity in the ramp-up phase to be covered by colleagues, reduced departmental performance, and difficult questions from above about why a key resource is leaving… the list goes on. If you are going to be the target of the resulting rage, there is no point in allowing an unpleasant situation go on for any longer than necessary. They may also begin to load on work and tasks in an effort to either punish you or as a reason not to pay out a bonus or even dismiss you for cause: keep careful record of any such instances and record everything if legally allowed. A few poorly chosen words on the part of the manager at this moment of stress may expose them to a serious lawsuit once you are comfortably established in a new position at a competing company.
If asked, do not tell them where you are going, what the new position is, for whom you will be working, what your new compensation package is … you owe them nothing. There is no conceivable case that the information they are looking for is for your benefit. If they want to make a counter-offer, say nothing. For once information asymmetry is working in your favor, not theirs. There is no need to make things easy for them (at the same time of course, a strategically placed lie to a known office gossip that your new salary is 15% higher than reality might not be a terrible idea – just maintain deniability). They may have more nefarious goals in mind, including litigation or attempting to convince your new employer to rescind the offer. The latter happens more frequently than people expect. Many industries are small and people know one another. If you are moving to a competitor in the same field your new manager or colleagues may have worked with your current colleagues in the past. You do not want them spreading disinformation about you at your new company before you are in role and able to defend yourself.
It may happen when changing roles that your current employer will actually make a convincing counter-offer if they are sufficiently desperate. Be wary of such situations. They are making this offer not because they want to, but because you have forced them into it. Such a situation inevitably breeds resentment. This will surely cause a problem in your manager’s budget: when asked why, (s)he has two potential reasons as to how this came about. Either a) (s)he is a poor manager and out of touch with his or her key resources, b) you are a money-grubbing, disloyal, ungrateful jerk. If you guessed that the answer to the question “what happened” will almost certainly be (b), you would be correct. Your current company will be sure to take action to ensure that whatever scarce knowledge or skills you have will be duplicated so the situation will not recur; you can also be sure that you are marked for redundancy at the earliest possible moment. Promotion will be far less likely and may even be completely out of the question. Colleagues who lacked your drive and motivation to seek other opportunities will be jealous and attempt to undermine you. Even if they fail, it will not be a pleasant place to work going forward. The prospective new employer who thought they had you in the bag will be irritated and view you as flighty, unreliable and unwholesomely mercenary: this may affect your reputation in the entire industry. For all these reasons, if you do accept a retention/ counter-offer, make sure it is worth it and be mindful of the very real externalities that accompany it.
The fellow at the beginning of the book – the CEO with a penchant for sexual harassment – played this game extraordinarily well. I actually interviewed him in the first round when he joined our company at CEO-1 and he was very impressive. Most impressive. I don’t believe I am easily fooled in such situations. I actually wanted the same job he was applying for and I had to admit to the HRD after the interview, ‘I hate to say it, but this guy would be way better than me at it’25. The only ask he made of us was that under no circumstances could we speak to his current employer as he was in the middle of sensitive negotiations about a promotion; he did not want it to seem as though he was trying to bring outside pressure to bear on the discussion. This seemed like an eminently reasonable position, so we agreed. In fact, it came to my attention on good authority much later that at the time he was under investigation for having on-premise (by which I mean on his desk) sexual liaisons with a subordinate and was on the verge of being asked to leave the company. He negotiated a voluntary exit (probably with a staggering payoff) and walked right into our company without any reference checks due to the sensitive promotion negotiations purportedly taking place! When I think back to the immense professional and legal (not to mention marital) pressure he must have been under at the moment he walked into our interview, yet was absolutely cool and unpertrurbed, with a bone dry, self-effacing charisma, and played both of us – two of the most sophisticated multi-nationals operating in the market, with the discussion moderated by a premier global executive recruitment agency – what a virtuoso! It was a situation that demanded the performance of a lifetime, and he nailed it.
Of course, any lesson from this particular anecdote should be taken with considerable reservations. This gentleman was and remains obviously a total psychopath (I will return to this theme, and the prevalence of such individuals in executive teams, in due course). No one with an ounce of shame, dignity or self-reflection would have been able to participate in such an interview with a straight face with all of this background noise going on. His subsequent atrocious behavior once in role merely confirms the diagnosis. But I digress.
Never, under any circumstances, quit a job because you are angry, have been pushed too far, someone left a turd on your desk, or whatever the case may be. You will not be eligible for compensation, and you will look like a quitter. You are better off precipitating a termination and at least claiming severance. Never accept a conversation from an employer in which they claim “by this I assume you are submitting your resignation”; always force them to terminate you in writing so that you can claim severance and benefits. Keep coming into the office until you are ordered not to, even if your desk has been removed and you have to sit on the floor. Many companies who have decided to release someone will attempt to ratchet up pressure on them precisely for this reason, to get them to quit without paying out severance.
It is also worth noting that your new perspective employers know this perfectly well. There is not much value in being able to say “I quit,” as opposed to “I was terminated”. They know very well that many times the quitting may have been presaged by underperformance, and suspect that if you were providing value you would not have been allowed to quit. Also, if you quit, this raises questions your perseverance, flexibility, work ethic, and ability to regulate your emotions. There is no benefit to any of this. But working to the bitter end, doing your very best with the inadequate tools you had until the moment you were unceremoniously fired? At the very least such a story can be spun to portray an employee possessed of loyalty, stamina and grit; and at worst some forgivable naivete about the situation you were in.
People sometimes resign dramatically out of misplaced sense of pride. The procurement director of a company I was working at once stormed out of a meeting with a couple of our superiors, called maintenance and requested a hammer and nails. She (loudly) nailed her resignation letter to the door of her office and left. She was generally well-respected and I believe must have had her reasons for this behavior, knowing the people involved. Nevertheless, do not do this. You may enjoy an ephemeral sense of satisfaction from telling some imbecile boss to go screw himself and storming out of the office, but in a month they will have forgotten you, you will have long since been replaced, but you will still have bills to pay. Pride and hubris are deadly foes of economic rationality. Be wary of them. Never act on emotions in the heat of the moment. Warren Buffett teaches us, “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.” Or, as Marcellus Wallace puts it pithily in Pulp Fiction, “That’s pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. It only hurts, it never helps.”
If you are put on a ‘personal improvement plan’, keep in mind they are not what they claim to be. Being put on a PiP is a death sentence. It is legally mandatory in many jurisdictions or by corporations to establish a pretense of fairness. In reality, the decision has already been made to sack you. At a minimum, use this notice to begin looking for other work. Seek other opportunities to make it seem as though your eventual dismissal was retaliation for something else. Begin the process of forming a union. Start cataloguing health and safety risks/ code violations. Tell your manager you’re trying for a baby or, if you are a woman, already pregnant. Say you took a 21&me test and you discovered you are genetically a member of a disadvantaged minority. When you are fired a couple of months later, you can now make the case it is unlawful dismissal and retaliation for unionizing, whistleblowing, gender discrimination, or whatever else you’ve managed to concoct. Even if you have no intention on following through with such a lawsuit, even the threat of such action may give your manager pause. This may at least lead to several weeks delay as he or she conducts an ass-covering exercise with the legal department, buying you valuable time.
Recently there was a document dump from an insider at Amazon. According to Business Insider, Amazon placed thousands of employees a month into the initial phase of its PIP process in the months leading up to multiple rounds of layoffs it conducted from November 2022 to March 2023, when the company cut a total of 27,000 employees.”23 This is simply an industrial scaling of the phenomenon of ‘PiP as prelude to termination’.
9. The art of staying long and prospering
“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
- Old Soviet joke
Perhaps it bears some repeating at this point what this book is, and is not. This is not a motivational screed about personal development, or making yourself a more holistic manager, or whatever. Work, like life, is multi-faceted. I am assuming that by picking up this book you are at least passably intelligent, competent and assured in your day to day work; you are well-dressed, presentable and punctual. My point is not to help you self-actualize, or be a more empathic or kinetic boss, or a more efficient key account salesperson, or how to be an ESG champion in your company, or whatever. There are thousands of other books out there which will help you with such topics. You may have noticed that people with similar skills, abilities, experience and talent advance at much different rates and end up in completely different places; it may not be entirely clear to you why, and what you can do to end up on the faster track, and no one is really able to explain this to your satisfaction, or tend to present you with unhelpful, self-serving explanations. This is what I am trying to help you with in this book; to understand the unspoken rules that tilt the playing field in favor of some and interject insurmountable obstacles into the paths of others.
The observations I have and counsel I offer are therefore quite generalized. You must apply them to your own situation as you see fit. Companies and industries have different habits, customs and expectations; different countries, even cities (spend a week working in Milan and then another in Naples, for example, and you will see what I mean) have heterogenous work cultures. What is snickered at or tolerated in one country, may be a death knell in another. In Asia everyone smiles and nods at you and is excruciatingly polite, whereas I’ve seen furniture thrown across tables in Moscow board rooms. One time in Bucharest a delegation of bulky gentlemen from the Romanian secret service warned us we were stepping on important people’s toes and that “accidents can happen.” I have worked in countries where office extramarital affairs are a kind of cheerful national sport, and others where the wrong joke at the wrong time can lead to deportation, flogging or a stoning. The raucous shenanigans one might see in an advertising agency or private equity firm will not be looked upon with amusement by the gimlet-eyed executives of the national electricity distributor. At the same time, the latter may be enjoying a few obvious quid pro quos with major suppliers that would land one in prison in a more mature market. Context is key. Know yours.
Nevertheless there are a few rules of thumb that are not always obvious when entering the workforce you would do well to keep in mind. They are the rules that are left unsaid, that you need to figure out for yourself. Unfortunately, this usually happens the hard way, As I mentioned before, the problem with unspoken rules is that you don’t know what they are until you break them. Then you have a serious problem on your hands.
In the next few pages I want to explore this general theme in a bit of detail, looking at how to make the most of the personal assets genetics has blessed you with, planning your career progression and how to think systematically and structurally about approaching this problem.
Keep in mind the advice I give here is as much as anything about gauging likelihoods and playing statistics as much as possible. People break these rules all the time and nevertheless enjoy success; others play by the religiously with no result except ignominy and failure. Much of life is governed by chance, which means the best strategy is to play the numbers as best you can. Lotteries are essentially taxes on people who can’t do math; the fact that people occasionally win does not mean that it makes sense to buy tickets every week. All I am saying is that, all other things being equal, these strategies are more likely to bring you success and wealth, and therefore closer to financial independence, than not.
Life cannot really be planned. There are too many variables outside of your control. I frequently meet young people who have a meticulously planned career ahead of them which, if I am asked, I tell them is fanciful. Life is analogous to a fish fry being dropped at some random point in a raging river. Where and when you are dropped, into what conditions and which particular current and surrounding predators will determine where you end up far more than whatever desperate little thrashes you make with your fins. What you can do is react intelligently to situations as they come up, prepare yourself as best you can to take advantage of opportunities and keep threats at bay, and try to place yourself consistently in situations where there are more likely to be opportunities than dangers.
10. You are your primary asset: make the most of it
“The only person you are destined to become is the one you decide to be.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You’ve only got one you. Until CRISPR and other bioengineering technology advances to the point where we can have a third arm installed for superior gaming performance like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or whatever other useful mutations we may dream up, you are stuck with the gifts nature, nurture and genetics gave you.
When I speak about ‘you’, I’m not referring exclusively to the ambulatory sack of cytoplasm you know as your body and the knowledge coded into the neural pathways of your mind. I also mean the intangible aspects of will, drive and determination and, equally importantly, how this entire package is perceived by those with whom you work. This last is what matters in the end above all else. There is no meaningful reality apart from perception. There is no independent “you” that exists which is distinct and separate from how you are perceived; you are in the end constituted by what others see, say and think about you, nothing more and nothing less. Whatever rich inner life you might enjoy is immaterial and devoid of value to the world at large.
Reputation is like virginity: you only lose it once. Curate your reputation carefully. It’s fashionable to talk about people’s “personal brands” but really this is not a new idea. After some time in a company or industry, you will be talked about; the more you rise in a corporate hierarchy, gossip levels also increase geometrically.
Corporations are complex and have their own internal economies. It’s not possible for everyone to do everything, and not smart to try. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is your best friend when you think about profiling yourself. You don’t necessarily need to be the absolute best at anything, but you would behoove you to figure out where you are the relatively most talented in your peer group. Double down on perfecting those skills and promote yourself as useful in them.
More importantly than skills however is the perception of focus, reliability, and integrity. No matter what your job or role is, everyone’s comfort level is increased by these traits.
Focus: in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda gives young Luke Skywalker a tongue lashing about how he is always looking into the future and up at the stars, never thinking about where he was in the moment and what he was doing. This is a common trap young people fall into early in their careers. It is painfully obvious they are thinking about their next job and view the tasks in front of them as nothing more than an irritating stepping stone to get somewhere else. Do not allow this to become apparent even if it is true. Never come across as a “young man in a hurry”. Always give the impression you are completely focused on the tasks at hand to the exclusion of all else. This gives your superiors confidence the task will be done and that you are not harboring dreams of rising above your station in life.
Reliability: the fundamental currency of any hierarchical organization is that when a superior asks for something, it gets done on time and in good quality, and they will be informed if that becomes impossible for whatever reason. This is the most essential attribute that drives progress in a corporation, the belief that managers have in you that when a task is assigned it will be completed. All senior executives at the beginning and middle of their careers developed this reputation. It is far more important than vision, knowledge, intelligence, charisma, communication skills, networking or whatever else. The corollary to this, of course, is to be very careful what tasks you accept and make sure you will have the resources and authority to complete them. As you rise in the organization you will receive more difficult tasks and marshalling the needed resources is more complex and delicate; your assessment as to whether or not the task is achievable becomes more difficult, and more crucial to your future well-being. But this is the essence of growing as a manager.
Integrity: while this probably goes without saying, maintaining a reputation for integrity is vital for many (but not all) roles. My personal opinion is that people either have integrity, or they don’t. If you don’t, I’m not here to judge you, but I do advise you to be careful. I have seen cases where someone paid or accepted a bribe or took some other ethical or legal shortcut and this came back to haunt them with a vengeance many years later. It is difficult to sleep well at night knowing the SEC may dig something up on you at any moment. On the other hand, I know of people who have engaged in thoroughly inappropriate behavior and now own hotels in the Alps or spend their time yachting around the Mediterranean. Perhaps their sins will never catch up with them.
I have heard on very good authority a story about the sales director of a large company in the former east bloc. He brought the procurement people from the ten largest clients of the firm to a skiing weekend. At night the entertainment was a bus full of young ladies and assorted narcotics. At breakfast the next day at each place setting was a file with photographs of the night before and a new (rather onerous) renewal contract to be signed. While the contracts were signed, this is not really the kind of reputation you necessarily want to cultivate. There is a Dilbert cartoon where the titular protagonist justifies some shady activity by saying, “Well, sometimes the straightest path is through the mud.” This is true, but keep in mind you get awfully dirty that way.
I was contracting for a large company once and as sometimes happens in such situations, I had been working my tail off for several weeks without getting paid or even having a contract signed. It was getting kind of strange, and my wife was telling me I was crazy to put up with this. Nevertheless the clients assured me everything would be taken care of, they just had difficult processes at the moment due to a recent M&A they were involved in. Not exactly knowing what to do, I went to a good friend of mine in a very senior position at a competing company and asked him what he thought of the situation. Should I take the risk and continue, or not? He asked me for the names of the people who had given me assurances. I gave him two names. “He said, oh, you’re fine. Go ahead and continue. Those two guys, their word is absolute gold. You’re 100% safe.” I found that moment quite striking and I resolved to do what I could so people would say the same of me in the future.
If you are in doubt about what to do in a particular situation, one easy way to think about things is the “newspaper test”. Think to yourself, if I agree to [whatever strange proposal just came up] and this later was written about in the newspapers, would I worry or not about my mother, colleagues and clients reading all about it? If the answer to this question is “yes, I would worry; in fact, I would die instantly of shame,” then do not proceed.
Note that this test is not foolproof. I went to a talk once from a gentleman who had worked at a United Kingdom financial institution who was greatly surprised to learn that he had been indicted for international price-fixing; he learned this, unfortunately, by being arrested at immigration after flying into Miami with his wife and daughter for a vacation in Disney World. He spent three years in a US federal penitentiary. He was never actually charged in the UK where these purported crimes took place. The newspaper test is useful but insufficient, is what I am trying to tell you here. Err on the side of caution.
Profile yourself. I return again to the theme of the personal brand. Like any brand, you need to profile yourself. There is a common framework for brand positioning used frequently by large corporations which derives primarily from the work of Carl Jung. While there are different approaches to this, for the most part they divide the world along two axes: freedom versus control, and inward versus external focus. This allows you to form a mental map of brands, people and what they represent. Jung used this categorization to develop 12 historical leadership archetypes, represented in the map below.
How you profile yourself obviously must begin with your core strengths and values. What are you good at and, more importantly, known for? This enables people to know what they can and cannot expect from you, and lets management know where best to deploy you to take advantage of your strengths. No one would expect Angela Merkel and Daenerys Targaryen to respond the same way to a particular crisis. There are situations that call for a Putin or Mussolini, others where a Gandalf or Luke Skywalker is required. You do not need a Nikola Tesla or Steve Jobs or analogous visionary to run a municipal water distributor.
I do not mean for you to compare yourself with these individual historical or fictional figures of course. I have selected extremes to highlight the differences between them and demonstrate that they are intuitively meaningful; this is what makes them powerful symbols. They are here to illustrate the nature of these different archetypes, how distinct they are, and how difficult it is to change them once you have started down a particular path. What I also want to say is that people will profile you; they will attempt to slot you into one of these archetypes, even if this process takes place subconsciously. As it will happen in any event, you may as well play along and even ham it up. Conversely, do not allow yourself to have a diffuse or ambiguous profile. People who work with you should have a clear idea what you are, and what you are not.
These can be small things. One fellow I knew in product development came into work for years with a neatly kept ponytail and a bow tie. He was really a visionary in terms of product development and simply decided to lean into the ‘Sage’ archetype. He was good fun with an excellent sense of humor and everyone knew what to expect from him.
We once had a European-level CEO who would visit us occasionally who was an unapologetic dictator. He was French and made much of his holiday home on Corsica (Napoleon was from Corsica, in case anyone missed the reference), never bothered to ask anyone for their names and enjoyed screaming at everyone. He was obviously fond of the Putin/ Napoleon/ Mussolini/ Grand Moff Tarkin school of management. He would swoop in on his private plane, interrogate us for twelve or fourteen hours, consuming perhaps a cup of coffee and half a cola during the day, then fly off to Paris where he had some private company of his own. There was absolutely no point in discussing anything with this individual or expressing doubt or dissent. He would order your termination instantly. But this is precisely why he’d gotten the job. At that point in time and that region of the world, his approach was most likely necessary.
His successor took over after the crisis passed and was a very pleasant, thoughtful fellow and an accomplished painter. I am just saying that different challenges call for different profiles. Corporations know this and try to match the right person to the right challenge. Ensuring that you are clearly profiled in people’s minds means you are more likely to be assigned tasks where you have a higher chance of success. This is to everyone’s benefit.
Look the part. Dress better than average for your level but not better than your superiors. The first piece of advice Ru Paul gives anyone, irrespective of station in life, is “wear a suit”. Buy a couple of suits you can’t exactly afford for when you need them. A $2,000 suit may win you an extra $5,000 in compensation during a salary negotiation. Be as good looking and attractive as you can be given your physical stature and attributes. Looks matter; only fools believe otherwise. Looking successful often makes people believe you are successful. You are more likely to be listened to the better looking you are. Of course, these things have their limits, but it is far easier and faster to become a couple of notches more attractive via physical fitness, clothing, makeup, scents and accessories than it is to become more knowledgeable or professionally competent. Take easy wins where you find them. Forbes once noted that each centimeter of height increases your annual compensation by 1.3%8. If you have ever been in multiple executive boardrooms you know what I mean. It’s not that you never see short, fat and ugly men or women there but if you visit enough of them you will see the statistics come to life. The trope about the 6’3” silver-haired male executive has more reality to it than people like to think. There is a reason the governor of Florida famously wears shoe lifts. The exceptions you see will prove the rule when you talk to them and discover whatever prodigious talents they have that enabled them to overcome their natural disadvantages.
If you’re not a fashion bug (full disclosure: I am not) you may be surprised to find out how much attention people pay to these things. I worked with one gentleman in public sector sales and he was absolutely infallible on this topic. We could walk out of a meeting with a dozen people he’d never met before and he could tell you in detail what brand of watch everyone wore, who had bespoke suits or monogrammed shirts, how expensive the women’s jewelry and handbags were, whose shoes were polished and whose not, and so forth. It was extraordinary to watch him hold forth on this. He could talk for an hour about the sartorial choices and their significance that we’d observed – or rather, that he’d observed - during a twenty minute meeting.
I asked him once how he’d gotten so knowledgeable about this. He shrugged. “You need to keep an eye on this sort of thing in public sector sales. It shows you who expects bribes, and who doesn’t.”
Jo Nesbø wrote a delightfully strange novel titled Headhunters (which I guarantee if you read it will make you look up if he really did work in executive search at some point). It’s full of unexpected truths, one of which I will share with you here: “When I propose a candidate for a job I don't do it because the person in question is the best but because he is the one the client will employ. I provide them with a head that is good enough, placed on a body they want. [...] The world is full of people who pay serious money for bad pictures by good artists. And mediocre heads on tall bodies.”
I once worked with a woman who had a truly gifted mind and was phenomenally competent at her work as well as being pleasant, practical and great fun. Her considerable native talents were married to a world-conquering level of ambition. Her biggest problem was that she was short and homely. However, she leaned into this like no one I have ever seen. She bought the most extravagant collection of towering, bejeweled, high-heeled shoes you can imagine, wore outrageous clothing and had the hairstyle of a 2002-era raver grrrl. It was impossible to ignore this woman as she came clopping and tottering into a meeting room. All eyes were fixed on her. And then when she opened her mouth, of course, the most amazing thoughts, ideas and insights poured forth. My point is that she was listened to, whereas many women with valuable things to say are not. Had she accepted her genetic physical fate and taken a more conservative fashion approach I doubt she would have gone as far and fast as she did. It was a daring strategy, but a successful one. Be good looking if you can, but if you cannot, at least be interesting. At all costs avoid being seen as mousy, submissive or forgettable. Everyone should still remember a meeting they had with you at the end of the day, even early on in your career. To be forgettable is to die a slow, humiliating death.
Learn to be an effective communicator. Invest in public speaking classes and interpersonal communication coaching. Many companies offer this for free as part of employee development. Small things make a big difference. Poise and body language say as much as words. Learn to project confidence in your speaking and manner. Delivery trumps content every time.
I worked once with another very talented woman who really knew her stuff and was absolutely wonderful to cooperate with. She was knowledgeable, intelligent, fair, fun and committed to her work. After her first presentation to the shareholder representatives, I took her aside and asked if I could give her some advice. I told her, “Look, you know the content cold. You communicate at the right level of detail, you answer questions that were asked and not the ones that weren’t, your command of detail is phenomenal…The problem is your hands – at this point, I mimicked their desperate, white knuckled twisting and clawing and fiddling with jewelry – which scream to your audience I have no idea what I’m talking about and I don’t belong in this room.” We had a chuckle and I advised her just to do a couple of sessions with a communication coach. One or two practice sessions where they video you will be painful, but you’ll see what I mean and you won’t repeat it. I don’t know what action she took, but I never saw her do that awful hand wringing in public again.
There are a few rules to public presentation, to telling a good story, to having the right body language at the right moment which I’m not going to go into here but are really very important. There are strategies to dealing with peculiar situations: how to approach an overly hostile interlocutor14; how to project your voice in an auditorium too large for the audience; proper cadence of speaking while being simultaneously translated to another language. Particularly at the higher levels of management it’s not enough to know things and have command of detail. These are simply table stakes. You must also be able to communicate forcefully, to craft a compelling story, to read the mood of a room as it develops in real time and most importantly give people the confidence that you know what must be done, why it must be done and most importantly how it is to be done. You must be prepared to deal with hostile audiences, audiovisual equipment failures, and randomly adjusted timelines.
Management is about trusting people with authority, not belief that they happen to know the facts about a particular topic. Expertise can always be hired or bought. Many people know the facts. Those who are able to translate that knowledge into collective action by bringing others along with them possess the most fundamental skill that separates the upwardly mobile manager from the individual specialist. And in the end that depends on the ability to communicate, motivate and inspire.
I had a sales role early in my career and this was of inestimable value to me later. There is an old truism that “everyone is in sales”, and this means more than one thing. Any company is a marketplace of ideas. As you ascend through management, paradoxically your own individual thoughts become less important (will you really personally generate more or better insights than the summed wisdom of the 30 or 50 professionals who work in your department? If you answered yes, you are either a self-aggrandizing narcissist, or you have the wrong people working for you) but your ability to socialize and sell these ideas to your peers and superiors becomes exponentially more vital the further you rise.
One time I had to give an all-hands discussion about a new technology that no one really understood or cared much about. The internal comms department handed me a lengthy speech full of technical jargon that I threw away as soon as I saw it. I went on stage not really knowing what I was going to tell the hundreds of glaring engineers gathered before me. On the spot I came up with what is now known as the “invisible unicorn” speech. I explained to them how my daughter wanted a pony for her birthday, but I couldn’t afford it due to my miserly pay as an executive at this company; so I told her I’d gotten her an invisible unicorn, which we periodically had to come out and feed and pet, and it would become visible once she turned sixteen. I then drew the analogy between this fable and the fantasy all of our technology vendors had sold us and the media about this new technology. It was a great success and I am told it is still talked about years later. The only point I want to make here is the reinforce the fact that delivery trumps content every time. The technology is still underperforming, my daughter has yet to see her unicorn, but people still laugh about my ingenious speech.
Appear energetic. Most senior executives have read books by and about Jack Welch: one point he stresses repeatedly is that you should hire and promote energetic looking and behaving middle managers. While obviously a lot of these people are just running around like panicked chickens and no idea how to actually solve the problems confronting them, they do look busy and this is something in the view of many senior people. Even if you are a reflective, considered and deliberative person, learn how to appear energetic and driven by a constant sense of urgency even when there isn’t, or it’s not productive.
I don’t want to imply that he didn’t have his reasons for his opinions, or that it didn’t work; it obviously did. It’s just that GE operated at a frenetic pace which is simply not the reality of most modern companies. GE completed 800 M&A transactions during Welch’s tenure alone, as opposed to about 200 for Cisco or Microsoft during their entire existence. So such a model clearly works, but in certain contexts.
A colleague of mine at a company which unapologetically worshipped at the altar of Jack Welch was once sent to a market with unique challenges where they confronted a terribly difficult situation. They were losing market share and hemorrhaging cash. The global CEO sat with him before he left for the posting. “Just do things,” he urged him. “Don’t spend time on analysis and strategy. Just start doing stuff. I don’t care what you do but do something, And do a lot of it. Figure out what’s working as you go along.”
Now, personally this is not how I like to work and I frequently find it counter-productive. But the fact is that this guy was CEO and I was not. It’s obviously not impossible for reflective, considered people to rise in the corporate hierarchy, but it is much easier for people who visibly demonstrate vigor and lurch around in a constant state of crisis. Top management does feel more comfortable sending someone out into the field knowing something will get done, there will be some action or achievement to which they can point, than they will knowing that in 3 months they will get a comprehensive, thought through plan. They may not survive the earnings call in between.
It's vital to understand this philosophy because it is so pervasive. You don’t need to subscribe to it personally but it’s surely best if you know how to act the part if you need to. Even if it’s not the explicit expectation in your company, it’s hard to go wrong by demonstrating these attributes. They go colloquially by “4 Es and an P”. I will quote Jack himself at some length, as it’s important that you understand how your superiors likely judge you, even if they don’t say so explicitly.
· Energy: “Energy is the ability to go, go, go–to thrive on action and relish change. People with positive energy are generally extroverted and optimistic. They make conversation and friends easily. They’re people who don’t complain about working hard–they love to work. They also love to play and overall just love life.”
· Energize: “This is the ability to get others revved up. People who energize can inspire their team to take on the impossible–and enjoy doing it. The ability to energize is apparent in someone with an in-depth knowledge of their business, who sets a powerful personal example, and has strong persuasion skills.”
· Edge: “Having edge means having the courage to make tough “yes or no” decisions. Smart people can assess a situation from every angle–but smart people with edge know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without all the information.”
· Execute: “Being able to execute means having the ability to get the job done. It turns out a person can have positive energy, energize everyone around them, make hard calls, and still not get over the finish line. Being able to execute is a unique and distinct skill. It means the person knows how to put decisions into action and push them forward to completion, through resistance, chaos, or unexpected obstacles. People who can execute know that winning is about results.”
· Passion: “People with passion have a heartfelt, deep, authentic excitement about work. They care–really care in their bones–about colleagues, employees, and friends. They love to learn and grow, and they get a huge kick out of people around them doing the same.”
I quote this in full again not because I support it – honestly, I find it all somewhat discomfiting in some respects – but because it is so ingrained in the minds of management and corporate psychology that it is as fundamental to modern corporate thought as the Ten Commandments is to Christianity. You might as well try and sell pulled pork sandwiches in Tel Aviv as avoid these expectations as an effective manager, whether they be explicit or not.
The only concession I will make to this is execution. Execution, I freely admit, is magic. Many talented people get nothing done in corporations. It’s hard to put a finger on how it happens and why, as it varies wildly from company to company. That said, seek out the people in your company who get things done. Their reputation precedes them, and they are not hard to find. Befriend them, work with them, watch them, emulate them. This will do you no harm and may yield extraordinary benefits.
Generally speaking, as a manager you will often be confronted with situations on individual projects where compromises and difficult decisions need to be made. For the most part the decision comes down to prioritizing time, scope and budget. From the point of view of parading your sense of urgency for all to see, your bias should be to prioritize time, then budget, and finally scope. In other words, cut scope to save budget, increase budget if needed to meet agreed timelines, and only extend time as a last resort. Obviously this has its limits – there is no point in cutting the scope of a regulatory or legally mandated project if the reduced functionality will not ensure compliance, for example – but by and large this should be your playbook when managing such tradeoffs if you want to appear as an action-biased, “can-do” manager.
A fellow who once worked for me (and remains a good friend to this day) was under consideration for a role at another company and gave me as a reference to the executive search agency placing him. The consultant called me and we chatted. At one point he asked me what was truly unique about the candidate. “Well,” I said, “the thing about this guy is he delivers everything. He doesn’t care what it is. Over the years we gave him problems in sales, operations, product, care, and technology and he always delivered. Didn’t matter to him in the least. If you tell this guy in the morning that you need a unicorn, by god, in the afternoon you’ll look out your window and see he’s wrestled down a horse in a field somewhere and is busy drilling a horn into the poor thing’s head.” We had a laugh but when I thought about it later, I was actually a bit envious. I don’t think anyone would have said that about me, whatever accomplishments I might point to.
At one company I worked for one of the shareholder representatives was a wise and charming older man in the sunset of his career. He had a bit more tolerance for the role of varied management styles in a company. He told us once, “I view a management team like a Christmas tree. You need some sturdy branches and a solid trunk, and some nice flashy decorations. It can’t be all trunk and branch, or you’ve got a boring tree no one wants to look at. If you’ve got too many lights and decorations on the other hand, at some point it will fall over and catch on fire.”
The other shareholder reps used to make fun of him to his face. He was forced out unceremoniously soon after I met him. There is no room for nuance in the modern corporation, as it turns out.
If you are ever unfortunate enough to seek money from private equity you will quickly understand how seriously they take the maxim, “We fund management teams, not ideas.” A great management team can turn even a mediocre business plan into gold. A crappy team on the other hand can doom the best ideas mankind ever had. Ideas and knowledge are commodities. A track record of execution and delivery is the only currency accepted in that realm.
A good friend of mine was trying to exit the world of consulting and was a candidate to be CEO of a high-tech agriculture start-up in the Middle East, something he (and I) knew absolutely nothing about. We did some mock interviews in preparation. He was worried about his lack of knowledge of the content. I told him, this is the least of your problems. I look at your CV and I see a guy who spent X years in a top tier consultancy who never delivered anything in his life except power point and Excel models. As a shareholder of this company, I can always hire ten of you if I want. You need to convince me that you’re the 11th who can actually deliver this project on time, scope and budget and get it producing cash. This comment stumped both of us, honestly, and we never found a good answer to it. He didn’t land the job.
We are what we are. Nevertheless, do what you can to make yourself seem as action-oriented and energetic as you can. Top management wants to know that the people under them are ferocious go-getters who are physically, genetically incapable of failure. They want you to be the bad guy so they don’t have to be. Also, hyperactivity makes you more visible and inflates your importance in the eyes of colleagues and executives. Even in companies of thousands of people, when you are sitting in the executive you often have the feeling that only fifty work there because you see the same faces over and over again involved in all the key projects. Energy, speed and a can-do attitude will get you into this group; even if they don’t realize it, this is actually the talent pool executives implicitly have in their mind when thinking about major promotions and new opportunities.
Interestingly, I have found this is not really an important or common trait either in high level consultancy or privately held, small businesses. Generally in those two groups, when a major problem or crisis hits, the best people are completely calm. I have worked extensively with one fellow in top tier consultancy with whom we’ve been in some really very difficult spots, where even my unflappable phlegmatism disappears and the ‘perform now or die’ instinct kicks in. This guy on the other hand turns into a Zen monk, calmly gathering data and murmuring cryptic koans of reassurance to the panicking team around him. He then sweeps everything up, says “OK, leave it to me” and by morning has concocted an amazing presentation that addresses everything. Another gentleman I know who owns a small shipping company is completely wild and unpredictable until a crisis hits; then a switch flips and he’s calm, collected, data-driven and reassuring until it’s solved. I just want to say that this false sense of constant urgency is a peculiar facet of the corporate world. In other areas where the principals actually have skin in the game, they do not practice it and do not value it in those with whom they work.
Accumulate as much information about your company and your industry as you can. I mean particularly and especially outside your role in the company. You will be seen as curious, energetic, open minded and eager to develop. This may help you advance internally. Not doing so may certainly block you or consign you to specialist positions. Nothing is quite so irritating and irksome as some specialist in treasury or data mining or marketing who wants only to know what is absolutely necessary for his or her work and regards anything else as a pointless waste of time.
When you work with people in some other area of the business than you are in, one thing you are sure to find is they believe they are indispensable to the proper functioning of the company and that this is something they enjoy discussing. Giving a sympathetic ear over a coffee to some lady running the sales commissioning system or FX hedging operation or the guy running the IT release calendar or someone deep in reporting systems or operations of whatever your field happens to be may yield surprising fruit. People like to talk, but hate to listen. Be a good listener and you will become popular for one thing, and you will learn for another. What I can guarantee you is that there is something interesting and worth knowing about even the most dull and mundane-sounding job, if you are able to suss it out. If it weren’t doing something of value, it probably wouldn’t be anyone’s job, after all. You will be a more well-rounded manager and a few moments of sympathetic listening can make lasting, surprising allies in places most people don’t bother going.
Once, early in my career I had a colleague in the marketing department who was whispered about in reverential tones. He was the guy everyone wanted on their project, as he was the one who could guarantee it would happen. I was curious about this, and asked people why it was. One colleague just shook his head and whistled. “The numbers this guy has … it’s unbelievable. Nobody knows where he gets them, or how. But that’s how he makes the sale. He brings the facts and data that no one else can.”
Looking into it, it was clear that he had made friends with people in technology and operations and had access to their operational management information systems, whereas his colleagues and competitors were stuck making requests to the grunts running the commercial data warehouse. So he was inevitably capable of producing an ace on demand whenever needed.
The guy was really very bright and very capable. He never made it to EVP level, however. His ego was too swollen, his talents too visible and volatile. He made his colleagues feel like idiots and constantly challenged the authority of his superiors. He was widely despised as a prick, but tolerated so long as he was useful. When he pushed things too far with his boss one day, he had no friends to come in and try to mend fences or otherwise intercede on his behalf. Pride and arrogance were the undoing of a career overly burdened with untold potential.
Accumulating such knowledge may not always help you in your day to day job as this example demonstrates. However, it is certain to make you more valuable to a competitor, supplier, or customer in your next role. Keep careful notes and files in a separate system invisible to your corporate IT. This will be a gold mine of information upon your exit.
A word of caution: be careful using this information and stating where it came from. Most sensible folk will adopt a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy’ and accept useful information at face value. However, I did hear of one fellow poached from a competitor who, in an excess of exuberance, burst out in a meeting about a particular topic “Oh! I have all that information! I copied my hard drive before I left!” Everyone looked at one another, shrugged, and the personal leading the meeting regretfully called HR and instructed them to terminate the new employee forthwith. Information in your head is fine, information copied to a thumb drive is not. Never disrupt the useful fiction that everything you know is logged in neural pathways in that soggy lump of bacon you call a brain and is most certainly not in carefully indexed files at home, safe from the prying eyes of current and past employer IT departments or legal discovery processes. Your new employer could not and will not use information gleaned under such circumstances and - equally importantly - cannot risk its own information ending up similarly exposed. Therefore, obviously, no such information exchanges are possibly occurring on its watch (even though they do, everyone knows they do, and they are utilized every day...shhhhh).
Maintain a general overview of the business but find and establish yourself in a niche with a ‘wide moat’ – peculiar knowledge, skills, qualifications, certifications, experience, contacts, relations etc. Charlie Munger famously talked about this in terms of companies – what is the impassable or insurmountable barrier that protects the still waters of Visa, Apple, Coca Cola or Microsoft from the brutal, violent red ocean of full competition? From your personal point of view, your ‘moat’ is anything that makes you harder to replace, more difficult or expensive to fire, and allows you to command premium consulting rates later in your career.
I worked for a company bought by private equity. They wanted to fire one of the executives who had been there for a long time. However, this guy had survived many ‘nights of long knives’ in what had always been a very politicized company and had a moat as wide as the sea. As it turned out, the company had quite a bit of business with various branches of the national security apparatus and this gentleman was the only person in the company with the proper certificates to see the documentation from their requirements. The business depends on him, and him alone. Nearly a decade later, the PE owners have yet to replicate this certification with their own people and the crafty old executive is still puttering around the company, smiling and enjoying his exorbitant consultancy rates.
I was always a generalist in my career and this got me to a certain point. However, in my final corporate role I led a program on behalf of our private equity investors to do something extremely specific which had never been done before in our industry. I am not saying it was my idea – it was theirs – but I was vital to its execution and was in command of the details in every one of numerous project streams. These details would be lengthy and tiresome to relate here, and are too industry-specific to be of value to a general audience. I will not trouble you with them. Nevertheless, some time after we completed the project I was awfully tired of working for uncouth, ill-behaved, screaming private equity maniacs, and they were equally tired of my diffident attitude toward the day to day management of the business. We were printing money, after all. At any rate we decided to go our separate ways. Weeks later I got a phone call from an old friend who worked in one of the major consultancies that companies all over the world wanted to emulate our program and would I care to jet around the globe helping them? I did and I do, making more money with less work than I ever did as an executive26.
I stress this not out of self-congratulation, pride or boastfulness but because there is an important lesson here about career paths that I want you to understand. I got to the role for the private equity group because I was a generalist, and I was one of few people capable of conceiving the scope and execution of such a complex operation. They gathered together a small group of us with such a wide view of the company, technology, finances, products, systems, competition law, regulation, etc – and empowered us to make unprecedented, radical change happen. My subsequent move into consultancy would never have happened as a generalist, on the other hand: it was only the specific, irreplaceable experience on this one unique project that parachuted me into the upper echelons of one of the world’s most storied advisory companies.
There are two ways into high-level consultancy from the executive role. Either you are such a renowned figure that the consultancies know you will move into another role soon, so they more or less keep you on retainer as a paid external in hopes you will order projects from them in your next role; or you know something very specific and very hard to replicate. Both situations can be very lucrative. Make friends with the partners of your local blue-chip consultancies. They are largely highly intelligent, pleasant people who are fonts of useful information and dispose of eye-wateringly large expense accounts. I once went to dinner with a partner from one of these companies in the Middle East. The bill was over $4,000 for three of us, and I was still hungry afterwards. There is really no downside to maintaining such relationships.
11. People are the problem
“The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness… Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
One time I was out for dinner with the account manager from our largest vendor and in an unguarded moment he filled me in on his theory that everything wrong with the world comes down to people. People are greedy, selfish, unreliable, short-sighted and self-destructive. Everything about corporations, he argued, is set up to keep people from exercising their natural human inclinations; I murmured something judicious in assent about how even the most enlightened company (such as mine) could be prone to adopt an unfortunately uncharitable attitude toward its employees and treat them like machines…
“No!” he exclaimed, passionately. “If they treated us like machines that would be fantastic! You can always trust a machine. It does what it’s supposed to; nothing more, nothing less. No pride, no ego, no silly ideas about making the world a better place. They simply act and do make the world a better place. You can leave them alone and they won’t bother anyone. I would love to be treated like a machine. But I can’t, because I’m a weak, foolish primate like everyone else and, as a result, cannot be trusted. People are the problem. Not companies, not rules, not systems, and certainly not machines. People are always the problem. People are the only problem left to solve.”
I was forced to acknowledge that he had a point. Unfortunately, over the course of your career (at least until we are all subsumed into The Matrix) you will be forced to deal with people and ingratiate yourself to them. There is no way around this if you wish to advance in corporations which in the end are social creations. Nevertheless there are a few ways to make this less painful, risky and time-consuming.
Forget the word ‘I’. There is no gain in coming across as arrogant and self-centered, and there is no harm in being seen as an instinctive team player. Make a habit of saying ‘we’ and always presenting yourself as part of a team, even if no such formal team actually exists. This will motivate your peers to want to work with you, as you do not take credit for their work. Underlings and suppliers feel valued. Rivals are put in a position of being co-opted or fighting a larger, unified collective. If you are successful, you seem magnanimous; if not, responsibility is diffused.
Always cite objective, unimpeachable authorities, never your own thoughts or feelings. You are advocating for the customer; you are trying to ensure that shareholder value is maximized; you are trying to make sure the views of all legitimate stakeholders are represented; you want to ensure we’re not excluding marginalized groups. In the end you can always resort to the deities of logic and analytic rigor; but again, and I emphasize this point, this is not about you. It is never about you. You are simply a lens through which objective insights come into focus, nothing more. You think nothing, you have no doubts, you just want to make sure that we are being adequately rigorous and data-driven and listening to the voice of the customer and protecting the shareholder interest. This obviously sounds much more palatable than saying “I don’t know what drugs you’re smoking but I wouldn’t wipe my ass with that ridiculous business plan of yours and if you take that to the executives, you’re on your own, pal”.
Like much of the advice here, of course this to some degree is context dependent. If you are in a very predatory environment full of jostling egos, you may be compelled to defend your record and contributions explicitly. Do not be seen as a weakling from whom other people can seize credit without fear of retribution. However, even in such environments, less is more. You want to be seen as a relatively rational, impartial, team player concerned more with the good of the company than with personal advancement. People will be less likely to see you as a threatening rival, more likely to help or advise you, and more likely to warn you of impending dangers or traps.
On a related note, ask people for advice more than you would naturally tend to. This is a risk-free way of improving relations and your own image. You will come across as open-minded, self-effacing and humble. No one in the history of humanity was ever offended by someone coming to them unprompted and saying “I respect your opinion a great deal and would love to hear it on such and such a topic”. Should you find yourself doing the opposite of what they recommend, at least you can say “I heard you out and your opinion gave me pause and led me to gather more information, but ultimately …” You will surely not be in a worse situation for having gone to them in this case and over time you will gain a reputation as a reflective, open-minded individual desiring to see all sides of a problem. People you have gone to may also feel a reciprocal obligation to seek you out on topics of interest to you, giving you early warning of future developments and the advantage of information asymmetry.
Particularly in your career development, this is a helpful approach to take with your manager. Avoid the pointless and fruitless discussion of “where do you want to be in 5 years” as the result is most likely that you intend to either be long gone from this dysfunctional circus, or to have your idiot bosses’ job. Unless your superior is a fool, he or she will realize you are now either a threat to the functioning of the department, or to their position as such. But if you manage to turn this around to “what would you, O wise and all-knowing boss, advise me, your humble servant to do, with so many exciting opportunities but limited time for me to render services to this most excellent of corporations in pursuit of delivering shareholder value?” you have created an outstanding opportunity to ingratiate yourself. If they come with a path forward, they will likely also feel some obligation to help you realize this ambition and may even make commitments to do so on the spot. No one likes to be proved wrong, obviously, particularly regarding advice they gave to others – never underestimate the power of this. Once your boss says something is possible, he or she will feel some implicit obligation to make it so (never speak of this explicitly, it will backfire on you).
Even absent this, the boss will now feel like you trust and respect him or her, seeking wisdom for guidance on the most vital of all matters. The implicit sign of submission reduces the threat level you represent. It is an open-ended question, allowing him or her to guide the discussion in whatever direction most pleases him or her. Feeling good about themselves makes them feel good about you and more likely to help you in the future. Who is he or she most likely to name as a successor? Obviously the bright young thing who is so intelligent and discerning that they come to them consistently for advice and counsel. Who else?
The opposite is also true. Do not give your boss the impression you hold him or her in contempt. I had a brilliant young fellow with not one but two PhDs working for me at one point who clearly thought more of himself than his boss, or of me (his bosses’ boss). He was effective in some respects but widely loathed in my department and the company at large. One time I invited him for a discussion about his future. I pushed him about what he wanted to do. He was not a fool, so he danced around the question as I kept goading him. Finally, I confronted him with the real question. “You want my job, don’t you? Admit it!” Well, yes. “And more to the point,” I continued, “you think you’d be better at it than I am, don’t you?” He hemmed and hawed for a moment but as I poked and prodded eventually he burst out saying “Yes! I deserve your job and I deserve it now! I would be better at it than you are. Much better!”
“And you know what, that’s exactly your problem, and it’s the reason you’ll never have my job.” I responded. “It’s why I invited you to this talk. I can see you think that, everyone else can see you think that, and the only reason I put up with it is because it amuses me, and I have more tolerance for such things than my colleagues do since I feel exactly the same way about them. But in any other department you would have been eliminated ages ago. You need to hide this better if you want to get anywhere in life. I don’t give a shit that you think you’re better than I am, but other people you work for will care very much and won’t tolerate your garbage for an instant.” He was enraged, but his wife actually stopped me a couple of weeks later to thank me for talking some sense into him. He ended up having a very successful career.
So hide your contempt and ask people for advice more than others do, and more than you think is needed. In the worst case, no harm has been done and you lost a bit of time; in best case, you may convert a passive observer or rival into an active ally, or gain an edge of favoritism with the boss vis a vis others in your department. Perhaps you will even get good advice – stranger things have happened, after all. Keep careful (after the fact) notes of such conversations. People like to talk, and most do so willingly when given the chance. Police interrogators often remark on this phenomenon. People want to confess their crimes, you only need to give them an adequate opportunity to do so. In such an open-ended and personal context when you come unannounced asking for advice, surprising nuggets of information may slip out that would otherwise remain closely guarded secrets. Dissemble in front of the idiots as much as your patience allows.
Remember, corporations are large beasts. Getting things done is a game of statistics as much as anything. Do not make enemies unnecessarily; the more people in every random meeting who are at least neutrally or ideally positively inclined toward you, the easier your life will be. Also remember these people are amplifiers of your reputation in the industry. Sooner or later you will be applying for work at a competing company, and at a certain point of your career your reputation is sure to have preceded you. They people you work with today will have distributed throughout your industry and its adjacencies in a decade. Make sure that you are known as an effective but humble manager, rigorously fact-and data-driven, a good listener always keen to seek out valuable opinions from co-workers, invariably seeking the best result for the customer and the company as opposed to personal gain.
Obviously I am not saying this must be your true nature. You might be the most egotistical, cold-blooded, self-absorbed, puppy-kicking maniac on the planet as far as I am concerned, and that’s absolutely fine. I am telling you to hide this if it is indeed the case as it will not help you advance along this particular path. Dissemble and deny as much as you need to.
Be visible to your boss’ boss but do not outshine the boss. Visibility is the key to advancement. Being visible makes you both promotable and harder and more difficult to dispose of. But there is a fine line between visibility and outshining you had best not cross.
It’s worth noting that Rule #1 in Robert Greene’s excellent 48 Laws of Power is “Never Outshine the Master.” To quote the relevant principles:
”When it comes to power, eclipsing the boss is a particularly dangerous mistake. People in power need to feel secure in their position, superior to others in intelligence and charisma, and deserving of their perks. When they feel insecure, they lash out.
Whenever you demonstrate your talents you provoke resentment and envy (manifestations of insecurity) in others, whether they’re bosses, subordinates or peers. Of course, you can’t spend your life worrying about everyone’s petty jealousies, but you need to pay special attention to your approach with superiors because of their greater ability to harm you. They can make heads roll, although not as literally as did kings of the past. This is why it’s important to never outshine the master, your superior.
Never break this rule. I did once, inadvertently, and paid a heavy price.
We had a sort of round robin in our executive team in terms of HR, teams, future potential and so forth. One part of this entailed each executive listing who would be able to take their role in 2 years, one year, etc and also who would be the best person to step in on emergency basis in the event of some unexpected event such as death, illness or other type of incapacitation. We had eight executives in our team. Of the eight, the four most important – finance, technology, consumer sales, and enterprise sales – listed me as their emergency replacement. Normally one would consider this quite a compliment. My gut, however, told me this was a red alert fuckup with no good solution. As we went around the table and my name kept coming up, I could see the CEO’s face get more and more sour. She looked like she was sucking on a lemon soaked with strychnine. I knew I had a very serious problem. If the four most important executives in the company say you are the best one to step into their roles without any notice or preparation, it stands to reason you are most likely also the best person to step into the CEO’s role. This did not escape her, nor did it escape anyone else in the room that day. It was the opening salvo in a war of attrition that lasted a couple of years as she gradually removed departments, responsibilities and authority to undermine me. She still needed me for some tasks, and so hesitated to liquidate my portfolio; I calculated that she was likely to be removed sooner than I was, and in any event it was worth enduring the constant humiliation to get the inevitable payout and not give her the satisfaction of driving me from the company. We both lost in the end, in a kind of pyrrhic bonfire of the vanities.
Avoid getting into such a situation from the beginning is my advice, dear reader.
I realize this story appears specific to the executive role and may seem of limited relevance to a more general audience. Nevertheless it holds true across all levels and industries. No one, not even the shift manager at a donut franchise or car wash or burger joint, likes to be outshined by a junior employee.
I used to go running with a fellow from the engineering department of my company who happened to live nearby. He had done a bit of work for my department and I had heard from my people that he was astonishingly productive. I was far away from him, organizationally speaking, and could not really bring any influence to bear on his career, even if I had wanted to. Nevertheless, people closer to that part of the business marveled at his abilities, telling me that he would produce at twice the quality and in half the time of any of his colleagues. One time I found myself in a difficult, time-sensitive situation and directly asked him to do something. He turned it around in less than a day. Three days later his manager called a meeting with me to berate me for going around him to assign impossible tasks to his staff in unrealistic timelines and to inform me that there was no possible way they could find the many weeks of capacity this idiotic project of mine required. The guy turned to his manager and said, “What do you mean, we don’t have capacity? I already finished it. It took me three hours.”
Naturally, this sort of behavior led to a great deal of resentment from his manager and co-workers, as he made them constantly look and feel like fools. The manager was unable to explain why he was never able to get the performance of the rest of the team up to the high standards set by this one extraordinary individual. Internal clients had their expectations raised and now demanded that this new standard be upheld across the board.
The solution his manager found to this intractable problem was to fire him based on some vague, hand-waving denunciations about “attitude,” “approach” and inability to cooperate with his worthless peers and even more thoroughly worthless manager. Once he was forced out, everything reverted to norm, most everyone was content, and things went back to normal.
It is better to be great than good, but it is not better to be astonishing than great. Being great means you are an asset that can be nourished and used. Outstanding means you are outshining, and outshining makes you a threat to be dealt with immediately. It is better to be evaluated in the top quartile consistently than the top 5%. Top quartile guarantees consistent advancement, top 5% is dangerous and volatile terrain where you will have many unseen enemies working against you. While it feels cool and edgy to be in this territory, it is not where you want to be long term. More to the point, it is not where you or anyone else can survive long term.
It's better to sound right than be right. You have surely run into the irritating know-it-all in school or at work who always has to one-up everyone and put down every argument or idea advanced by his or her colleagues. Even if correct, some people often do more damage to their cause than they aid it. I would prefer to have such people on the other side of the argument, as they never achieve enduring results. Even if they win a particular battle they always lose the war of ideas. Do not be this person if you want to advance in corporations or in life.
It's rarely possible to win an argument on the spot, and it doesn’t pay to try. What you will do is force your opponents into defensive postures and back them into corners from which they see no escape, leaving them with no option but to counterattack. People rarely change their minds when confronted with facts. Facts can always be rationalized away, and frequently are.
A better way to achieve your goals is to compliment people on their vision and focus on the how. There’s no reason to solve why if how is bound to presents intractable financial or operation hurdles. If you are correct in your dissenting opinion there will always be some kind of difficulty in execution to be brought up. Focus on this, and ask open-ended questions. Give them enough rope to hang themselves. By taking this approach, you will appear judicious, open-minded and wise. The very unworkability of execution will manifest itself, they will be sent back to reconsider their approach, and you are now the gatekeeper to their further progress, whether that is stated explicitly or not.
No matter how ridiculous or idiotic the idea your colleagues are peddling, pretend that you think it is valid at first glance and simply begin asking questions. There is nothing to be gained by making someone feel like a fool, even if they are.
It is better to sound right than to be right. If you come across consistently as a restless seeker of how to make things work, your own ideas will be granted that much more weight when it comes time to present them. When your own turn comes up, there is nothing wrong with being passionate, but never make it a hill to die on. You are only presenting options for authorized decision-makers. Being too invested makes it look as though you lack objectivity. Generally, you will be all right if you follow a few simple rules:
· Tell a story: you need a knight, a princess, and a dragon. If the company does what you advise, the knight rescues the princess, and the kingdom will enjoy an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity. If it does not act, the dragon consumes the princess and the knight in some grisly fashion and probably lights the town on fire to boot. This is bad. I am speaking in symbols here of course, but this is intentional. Your story must be semiotically sound and coherent.
· Have a sense of pageantry: in addition to telling a story, tell it well. The executive is bombarded day and night with dry, antiseptic, mind-numbingly boring presentations. Don’t be afraid to inject some humor, to invest in graphics and sprinkle in some colorful language as the situation permits. A clever joke or strategically placed bon mot may allow a thoroughly disputable assertion to slip through unchallenged; giving your audience a burst of energy and an opportunity for a couple of chuckles halfway through a dreary day will make them far more disposed to give you what you want.
· Bring anecdotes: nothing is holier than a customer insight. Make time to speak to customers. Attend focus groups. Screenshot online discussions about your brand. Note down striking quotations. Make them up if need be, and you can get away with it. This is your ace in the hole.
· Marshall facts and data: statistics will not sell your story but they will give it depth and credence. Torture the data until it sings the tune you require. At some point in your career taking some courses in statistics and econometrics is wise and can pay substantial dividends. Nothing gives management comfort and intimidates rivals as when someone casually starts tossing around phrases like “we ran a series of multiple regression analyses and this solution has a very convincing R square of .63 ..”, or start scribbling equations full of Greek letters on a white board.
· Benchmark: whatever you want to do, someone, somewhere in the world in your industry already did it. Find out who it was, and what happened, if it worked and why. Do not let your rivals find out first and use this information to derail your narrative.
· Give at least two plausible options: you can have two or three additional straw men that can be struck down without a thought. But if management feels like you are trying to railroad them toward only one choice they will most likely get angry and send you away. Management is about making choices; it’s their job. Do not give the impression that you are making those choices for them, or aspire to do so.
· Sound reasonable: again, invest in speaking courses. Smile. Thank people for difficult, uncomfortable questions. I cannot reiterate enough how much more important it is to be confident and sound right than it is actually to be right. Sounding right gets you invited back to the executive committee time and again. Being right is much less of a sure bet.
Early on I worked in one company in marketing and I was a source of endless frustration to certain of my colleagues. An enormously talented young lady in my department lost her cool with me once and hissed at me, “You know what the worst thing about you is? The crazier the shit that comes out of your mouth, the more and more reasonable you sound, and everybody just starts nodding along. Can you please stop it?” We all laughed. When we left the meeting some of my other colleagues sidled up to me and whispered, “actually don’t stop it, we need someone who can do that.”
Suck up, kick down. As you advance, never count on upwards loyalty being rewarded or reciprocated. There may be individual exceptions to this, but always bear in mind these relationships are transactional, not personal. You will be discarded once you cease to be useful. Similarly, do not invest in downwards loyalty more than needed to extract performance. Never take serious damage to protect those beneath you. Sacrifice underlings as needed to preserve yourself like pieces in a chess match; do not risk a capital piece to save a pawn. Your rivals will perceive failure to do so as a weakness and will exploit it fully in the future until it finally leads to your ruin.
This has always been my most major weakness. Of all the rules here, this is the one I will most gladly break time and again. I know it’s not smart, but life is multi-faceted and everyone still has to get up and look him or herself in the mirror every morning. You have to decide for yourself who that person is that you want to look at.
Several times I found myself in the position where I inherited or hired someone into a role which they were perfectly suited for; after a few months my boss came with a radical reconception of the role; I tried to make it work and it didn’t. Meanwhile my rivals in these various executive teams – none of whom would have hesitated a moment to eject the poor sap whose role had been redefined – made hay over the weakness and incompetence of my team. Naturally the easy way out would have been to declare the personnel unfit for purpose, chuck them out and start over. Fool that I am, I stuck by my guns and defended these people as they tried to accommodate new realities and new expectations.
In the end, none of them survived in role and my own position was always significantly weakened. Perhaps rightfully so. They went to new jobs they probably would have gotten in any event without my defense. I got a reputation as someone who was loyal downwards and willing to go the mat for his people; but did that really help me, when push came to shove? No, it did not. Yes, there are people have distributed over the years to Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Buenos Aires or Tokyo or wherever who feel that they owe me something and when I’m in town we go for a nice dinner. Do I feel like I did the right thing? Yes. Did it help me at all on balance in my career? No way. Decide for yourself what you want to do in such situation but beware of the consequences, and do not exaggerate the vitality of your support for these people’s careers. They survived before you appeared, and they will make their own way after you are gone. There’s a reason goodwill is distinct from cash on corporate balance sheets. They are not the same thing.
One time during a period of particular crisis, I really had to make some difficult decisions about people I wanted to defend and those I would cut loose. There was one particular individual in whose talent I really strongly believed: I expended an extraordinary amount of political capital on him, though he was widely disliked as an arrogant ass both by his peers and his superiors. I did not survive the end of this process, but he did and thrived. In fact, he was appointed CFO of the company not long after. I was without work at the time but in an important selection process with one of our competitors. Out for drinks with my old team one night, I informed him I was planning on giving him as a reference. He snorted contemptuously and told me that would not be a very smart decision as he couldn’t possibly give me a positive reference. Everyone else at the table, knowing how much I had invested in him and sacrificed on his behalf, was speechless with disbelief at this very public betrayal.
In retrospect I don’t really blame him. At least he told me this to my face so I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself. There was nothing irrational about his behavior. He accepted my generosity gladly but afterward, realizing that I could no longer either help or hurt him, decided there was no point in risking anything or making any effort on my behalf. Keep this in mind before you do anyone any favors. It’s certainly not a given they will feel any obligation to return them.
Get it in writing. There is a common refrain one hears in many branches of industry and many situations – law, medical procedures, customer care, software engineering, what have you – to the effect that “if it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist”. While this is useful advice in virtually every field with limited exceptions24, you should take it especially to heart where your own career, compensation and future are involved.
Verbal agreements, in any context, are meaningless. This particularly refers to discussions about career prospects, advancement, compensation, or roles and responsibilities. Ask for any changes, promises, conditions or otherwise material matters in writing. If this is not forthcoming, prepare your own summary of the discussion and send it to your interlocutor (in writing) and ask for a response as to whether or not you have summarized the discussion accurately. Even if a response is not forthcoming, you have established a written record as well as the fact that you will not be trifled with through insincere or half-hearted promises. Even your own contemporaneous records can be very useful in some circumstances, if they are sufficiently detailed. Meeting minutes from four or five years ago which are digitally time-stamped and includes date, time, participants, and points discussed can be determinative in a forensic analysis or court proceeding in the absence of contravening data.
There is a certain danger in this, as in anything, of being perceived as someone concerned only with covering his or her own ass. You do not want to be seen and known as the “CYA” type. The good news is that it is very easy to couch this as being conscientious, detail-oriented, and a stickler for clear and precise communication. It is important that when you move from a verbal discussion to “getting it in writing” that you maintain a strict impartiality and neutrality of phrasing and explicitly state that while you are more than sure everything was said in good faith that for the avoidance of doubt you need to clarify A, B, C… If you do this well, you do nothing more than give people comfort that you are thorough and reliable. If on the other hand you allow a sense to seep through that you think whatever has been promised is not likely to materialize, you believe the tasks you have been assigned are unnecessary, difficult or impossible to accomplish, or that you suspect your counterparty is a lying sack of shit, this will not be of any help to you if and when the problem metastasizes and independent third parties begin to review your communications. Read and re-read every CYA mail from the perspective of a third party as best you are able, and tone things down until you seem objectively reasonable and pragmatic.
Always remember that the audience for every mail you write is not only the intended recipient, but potentially whoever else may look at it for whatever reason and potentially at the behest of your superiors, rivals, or lawyers. The nasty stuff you write about a colleague in the heat of a moment may be forwarded seconds later to that same colleague so that they may react. Write for posterity. 99% of the time this effort it is wasted, but the 1% makes up for everything else. Not to mention it’s good practice. No one was ever harmed by learning to be judicious and economical with their words and to keep things documented and well-organized.
Always appear to be working near capacity but not overly stressed, even if you are not. No one really understands how much you work. If your boss does, he or she is spending too much time in the details of your and your peer’s jobs and not enough time managing. You are the final arbiter of how efficiently you appear to be working. Never make anything look easy unless someone else has already made it look hard.
The most successful people are always extremely busy and overloaded, yet somehow find time for you. It is sometimes remarked upon that the busiest people always reply the most quickly. This is the corporate sweet spot where you want to be. You should be known as famously overloaded with requests and difficult to get time with, yet sufficiently responsive that people are not afraid to approach you. Of course there is an element of productivity here; no one will approach you if you never deliver anything of value. You need to find a link in the corporate value chain – cost inputs to business cases, technical feasibility of product features, whatever – and find a way to deliver this in a way which appears complex and difficult but is in fact simple and scalable. Similarly to any real world business, but in the virtual corporate economy of relative utility, you need to figure out a way to deliver something of high value with low input costs but that appears very difficult to manage.
This is the secret of any competent IT architect or demand manager in a corporation. He or she will receive business demands and say, OK, I will need ten days to get back to you. Everyone waits with bated breath for the word of god to fall from on high, how many man-days this feature will take to implement into production, load on the UAT department, where it might fall in the release calendar, etc. These estimates are always the result of a sprinkle of pixie dust and low quality mephedrone into a black box which could most likely be completed in an hour or two with a couple of calls to key vendors, but the ten days imparts the feeling that some sophisticated analysis is occurring that must not be questioned lest the reign of chaos begin.
The previous example I gave for IT works similarly for corporate controlling, internal audit, sales forecasting, or whatever. Anyone can be a hero interjecting him or herself into corporate processes with sufficient balls and brains to make the final product look professional and convincing.
I am not saying anyone can be some sort of alchemist, producing something out of nothing. Again, I am assuming that if you are reading this, you are basically competent, motivated, and productive. What I do want to say is that for the garden variety employee more or less producing what is expected in the role there are ways to spin basic production as a work of genius, completed against all odds and in spite of the iniquity of internal and external enemies. There are those who deliver basic production easily and accept incremental workloads without noticeable complaint; then there are those who seem to deliver heroic results under incredible pressure but actually go home early to play Call of Duty.
Needless to say, you want to fall into the second category, If you appear visibly underworked, work will be given to you until you really are stressed, which is inconvenient. Real overwork may make you snippy, unpleasant and prone to irrational decisions in the heat of the moment. As I have stressed earlier, carrying too heavy a workload often acts as a barrier to promotion, as you cannot easily be replaced by another individual resource when you move up. Paradoxically, some people perform so well in a given role, accumulating so many extra responsibilities, that they ensure they will never be promoted from it. Those people may end up developing a martyr complex, enjoying the sense of being put upon without recognition or reward. I cannot stress enough: do not become this person.
One fellow who worked for me once sent me a mail at 2:45 AM that was pure gibberish. The next day I asked him, “Not to put too fine a point on it but … did you fall asleep and send me an email that resulted from your face hitting your keyboard?” He ruefully admitted that this was indeed the case. I like the fellow a great deal and admire his gung-ho work ethic, but this is not the way. No job is worth a heart attack at 40.
I became convinced in my EVP roles that corporate efficiency is based to a great extent on the backs of long-suffering, masochistic women. The men were always expert in whinging and complaining about how difficult life was and what obstacles needed to be overcome in the course of their day to day operations; then there was the cadre of early middle-aged women, mostly young mothers, grimly devoted to the task at hand, tirelessly and thanklessly laboring to all hours to ensure the job got done. Men storming into meetings seeking conflict to burnish their corporate credentials; women quietly seeking consensus and a practical way forward. Sometimes I seriously think if I ever decide to found a startup, I will hire only women.
One tangential note is that modern technology has enabled people to appear inordinately productive in two ways. One is simply to outsource some or all of your work. Depending on what you need, a stable of Pakistani or Indian programmers or analysts hired via Fiverr or Guru or Taskrabbit or whatever service may allow you to double or triple your productivity while sacrificing five percent of your income. In certain situations this may be a worthwhile investment. Second is automation. There is bound to be a bit of arbitrage in terms of technical savvy between you and your management due to age if nothing else. My whole career I have seen junior people quietly automating tasks with everything from Excel macros to GenAI and successfully pretending that they are doing ten hours of work a day when in fact they need about half an hour to do a bit of QA to ensure the results are correct. How you market this and present it, and what you do with the resulting time surplus, is the key question.
Beware the psychopaths. One inevitable consequence of rising in a corporate hierarchy is the increasing proportion of psychopaths at every level. If you have a psyche somewhere in the range of clinical norms and a somewhat developed moral sense, these people can pose a terrible danger to you.
There was an interesting article in Forbes a few years ago where they estimated the incidence of clinical psychopathy in the executive suite to be as high as 12%10. For context, this compares to 15% in US federal penitentiaries. Purely mathematically, in any given C-suite of 8 people you are more or less certain to encounter one or more high-functioning psychopaths. You need to recognize them and deal with them appropriately.
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend Paul Babiak’s wonderful book Snakes in Suits. He goes into the phenomenon in far more detail than I will here, but it is worth taking some time to think about as one pernicious individual can really do an extraordinary amount of damage. They particularly flourish in dynamic environments. As Babiak himself notes, “Rapid business growth, increased downsizing, frequent reorganizations, mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures have inadvertently increased the number of attractive employment opportunities for individuals with psychopathic personalities”. Thomas Erikson’s Surrounded by Psychopaths is also useful reading in this regard. He makes the point as well that there are far more of them out there than people think, and this is particularly the case in corporate environments. They easily find homes in the fast-paced, low-EQ world of high tech populated by owl-eyed libertarian types whose bookshelves groan under the weight of the collected works of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek.
Generally the easiest way to spot them is the compulsive lying and thriving on conflict. A particular marker is the ability to convince themselves and others that their lies are true. It’s a magical thing to see in practice, when it’s done at a really high level. We had one in a company I worked at – she came in as the HRD, incidentally – installed herself at a desk next to the CEO and began whispering poison into her ear. Most of the executive was gone in a year. She was overheard smugly telling an acquaintance that she had managed to gut the team like a trout. She ran a reorganization of the CEO-2 level which was supposed to streamline things but basically eliminated all the long-tenured, well-regarded individuals and replaced them with young, inexperienced but influenceable kids. I commented to the CEO that “You know, the reorg was supposed to make us more lean and efficient, but we have a new cohort of CEO-2 that’s much more junior and much larger than before but with the same tasks and portfolios, so by definition with a smaller span of control for every manager. How is it more efficient to have more people with less experience making the same amount of decisions we confronted before?” This stumped her, as it was clearly madness. But for some reason it still went forward. I only give this as an example of the destructive wizardry this type of person can manage left unchecked.
Having eviscerated the management, this woman promptly left back to her previous employer in pursuit of heaven only knows what agenda. I had lunch with the former CTO of our company after we both had left and he commented about the HRD, “You know, I never would have imagined one person in a back office function could do so much damage to such a large company in such a short period of time.” He had been at the company for fifteen years, was well regarded and personally close with the CEO. Not even deep respect from colleagues and a long track record of success could rescue him.
I had a colleague in the executive team of another company I worked at who was widely hated both within our company, and in the industry as a whole. In our professional context he was rude, arrogant, insulting and during social excursions or events he was a fountain of inappropriate commentary and behavior. Oddly, alone and in person he was actually great fun and a surprisingly interesting and sophisticated conversationalist. It was only once other peers from work were present that he instantly transformed into a raging psychopath.
When I left that company I had an inch-thick file of printed emails from him with highlights of language that in most companies would suffice for immediate dismissal. I have a pretty thick skin and high tolerance for this kind of thing but this guy was truly extreme in both language and behavior, and completely incapable of admitting error no matter the circumstances. I maintained this file for four years, waiting for the CEO or a board member to ask about his behavior. No one ever asked, and he has continued merrily on his way to other companies of the conglomerate. What I want to say is that it is important not to underestimate the ability of these high-level corporate psychopaths to warp reality and bend perception in their favor and survive behavior that would be fatal to anyone with a smidgen of self-reflection and shame.
With such people it’s best to adopt a defensive stance and make yourself a hard target. They will seek to destroy the weakest of your colleagues first. You can at least delay things by being obviously prickly and reactive. Do not initiate conflict however, and avoid it if possible. If you elevate your profile into a threatening posture or attack them, the counter will be at the very least unpleasant and potentially very damaging. Unless you are certain you are able to land a fatal blow, do not get involved. It’s very hard to emerge unscathed from conflict with such people, even if you win a particular battle; if they survive, you can be sure you are marked for death. As Omar Little famously comments in The Wire, “If you come at the king, you best not miss.”
It’s better to wait these people out if possible. They get bored easily and after a couple of years can be counted on to move to greener pastures with fresh victims to attack.
Do not associate with poor, unsuccessful, old or ugly colleagues. Failure is contagious and you cannot afford to have the stink of it on your person. Greene’s 48 Laws of Power is also uncompromising on this point, and he is entirely correct (this book should be required reading for all corporate executives). Associating with poor performers, unattractive people, older colleagues or those generally on a downward or stagnant career trajectory is simply suicide. Stay away from people who are negative or chronically depressed. No good can come of such associations. Spend as much time as you can with good looking, successful, optimistic, vibrant colleagues and you will soon be lumped in with them and bask in your collective success.
There is enough literature on this topic that it’s probably not needed to elaborate any further. Good looking people are paid more, hired faster, promoted quickly, are granted more resources, and forgiven mistakes more easily than their homely colleagues. I made this point previously; what I am saying here is something slightly different – that who you associate with is also a major factor in how you are seen. Be cautious with whom you spend your time.
Beware the DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) police. In recent years, a completely laudable and legitimate effort to recognize and rectify past injustices toward disadvantaged groups – women, racial minorities, gays, the disabled – has metastasized into something grotesque in many large companies.
First let me say I support this agenda and I doubt anyone who has worked with me would claim otherwise. I do not advocate a return to the days of “Mad Men” where a bunch of alcoholic white males ran the world and leered at women in the office over morning martinis, homosexuals were closeted, transsexuals virtually unknown and racial minorities grossly underrepresented in the upper echelons of management. I think the efforts in some Nordic countries to ensure representation of women at Board level is not merely morally correct but also good business. Anyone who has sat around in the standard management constellation of seven or eight testosterone-crazed men yelling over one another and one shell-shocked woman unable to get a word in edgewise (usually running the HR portfolio) knows this is not an efficient or productive way to make decisions. A more balanced group with some gender, racial and background diversity is far more mutually respectful, open to new ideas, and able to come to a more sensible consensus than just going along with whoever manages to talk the loudest and fastest, thereby winning the boardroom dickslinging contest.
That said, anyone who watched the release of Google’s ‘Gemini’ generative AI product and saw it producing pictures of Asian Nazis and transsexual Founding Fathers witnessed the nadir of this movement in real time. Perhaps it is unfair to draw such conclusions from an unbearably clownish product launch. On the other hand, given that this is one of the largest, most profitable and influential firms in human history, it is worth taking a brief look at how this debacle came about. Essentially what seems to happen is when a query is generated, it is fed through a number of corrective algorithms managed by the company’s DEI architecture, with predictably awful results.
One article commented on how the HR DEI inmates have taken over the asylum at Google:
From screenshots I’ve obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity”…16
In our company we had a “+1” requirement in our management teams, which effectively meant you had to add a woman or minority to your team every year until you achieved statistical parity with the population. This idea wasn’t crazy at least, though it led to some predictably ridiculous and painful situations in smaller, stable teams without much turnover. But I’d rather rejig my team unnecessarily than tell an engineer about to give a keynote address at a conference that he needs to insist on pronouns that look like they come from a long-forgotten Mayan dialect.
At any rate, stay as far away from this topic as you can when it comes up. As I said, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for a company to pursue a thoughtful, productive DEI agenda. Then there are those that go completely off the rails. Whatever the case may be in your company may be, smile and go along with it. Either it’s right or it’s not. This is not a fight you will win, so don’t try. If things are really heading in a disastrous direction, you can surely count on someone else to intercede instead of you. There is always some idiot with more self-confidence than self-preservation instinct who will stand up and take the heat for everyone else. Don’t be that person. If no one does this, don’t exclude the possibility you might be wrong, and the policies are actually reasonable, and make sense. The other possibility is that retribution is so certain to be swift and fatal that everyone is petrified into silence. Whichever is the case, the chance that engaging on this topic will bring you any benefit is exactly zero.
One time I was standing at a coffee break at a DEI workshop with a male colleague where we had spent hours scratching our heads and speculating why on earth, when we had an even split of men and women in our management team, the levels below were 80 – 90% male and women universally complained about a hostile environment that stymied their advancement.
“What will you give me if I point out the fact that the four men in this room have four wives and nine children between them, and the four women have exactly one husband, one child, and two made-up boyfriends?” I asked my colleague.
He shrugged and continued munching his croissant. “Go ahead, if you want,” he said. “I’ll help bury whatever’s left of your body.”
Again, I am conscious of and have a lifetime’s worth of observing the astonishing advantages that one is handed as a straight, white man in the world of business. Nothing is more irritating than listening to some privileged young whelp whine about the benefits conferred upon ‘minorities’ and how he’s discriminated against when governments or corporations make the least nod toward promoting gender or racial equality. At the same time, this entirely laudable intention sometimes turns into a sort of performative theater which helps no one and only acts as a balm to salve the conscience of those trying to avoid taking real action. What I want to say is that while the latter may rouse even the most well-intentioned person to justified indignation, there is absolutely no point in getting involved in this topic. If forced to engage, smile and go along with the prevailing mood in the room. Anything else is pointless, unproductive risk.
Stay connected. Religiously maintain contact networks, particularly with ‘connectors’. There are people in any organization and industry who take the role of facilitating contacts between people who find one another useful. Being one of those ‘connectors’ is a useful role to play; if you do not have the emotional or social disposition for it, at least identify a few of these people, befriend them and go out of your way to respond to their requests and occasionally ask them for advice. This is an easy and inexpensive way of accumulating favors which can be called in later to gather needed information, spread or halt rumors, or whatever other purposes suit your agenda at a given moment.
This is by far the easiest and most likely way to land a new job. Mark Granovetter wrote a famous paper in the 1970s about the role of ‘weak ties’ in securing employment. While his study made intuitive sense from everyone’s day to day experience and has been cited 65,000 times, it lacked quantitative underpinnings until LinkedIn came along – the digital foundry of weak ties. Analysis of job mobility on this extraordinary dataset clearly demonstrated the effect of weak ties on moving into new roles12.
Ask a few of your friends at director level or higher how they were hired the last time they moved companies and you will most likely detect this pattern – a friend or acquaintance recommended them for a role before it became public, or they applied to an advertisement or were recruited but their application was given much more credibility due to people they already knew in the company.
One of the extraordinary trends in modern employment is the continuing arms race between HR departments and applicants, touched off nearly thirty years ago when Monster and similar online sites appeared. A company used to getting single digits of applications might have started receiving hundreds as the internet took off. Companies responded by using ever more intelligent algorithms to screen candidates and discards unsuitable ones, usually never bothering to reply. As success rates fell, candidates responded by drastically increasing the amount of applications, further swamping HR departments and further increasing their dependence on automated tools. Today for a few dollars you can buy a license for an AI agent that will spam thousands of companies with your CV and customized cover letters. My point is that in this ever-escalating technological recruitment arms race, the one thing that remains constant (and hence relatively more essential over time) is the personal recommendation from an insider.
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the terms of ‘connectors’ in his fascinating book, The Tipping Point. It is really vital either to be one or to be on good terms with them (by definition, if you function as a connector you are likely on good terms with many other connectors). Honestly, I hadn’t realized what I was doing until I read the book. I instinctively went out of my way to help people when I could without expectation of any quid pro quo. By staying in touch with these people and keeping information karma in positive territory means that over many years I have built up an extraordinary contact network as people I did favors for years ago dispersed around the world and moved up the ranks of various corporations. One of the CEOs I worked for once commented to me, “You know, any question I have about any company in the world, you either know someone there, or you know someone who knows someone, and in any event you always get me an answer in a couple of hours. You’re the only one of my guys who can do that. It’s kind of neat.” This has served me well in my post corporate consulting life. I get a question from a client, chat with a couple of people in the right places for a few minutes, send the answer and bill two days of work. Everyone’s happy.
One young fellow I was mentoring was getting ready to leave a company and asked for some advice. I told him to make sure he was in good standing with connectors at the company as this was the most likely source of new jobs or other opportunities. He nodded and began listing off executives he imagined that he was close to. I stopped him. “No, these people will never help you. You’re like an irritating gnat for them, or a scrap of pocket lint. They’ll forget you exist the instant they find out you’re leaving. You need connectors. The people who make things happen and solve problems by putting people together.” I listed the three or four most important people in his company at CEO-2 and -3 who fulfilled this role in our field. He subsequently remarked that this had been quite an eye-opening conversation for him, as he had not realized how important such people are in the industry ecosystem.
By staying connected, I am not talking about getting overly involved in the global self-congratulatory circle jerk that is LinkedIn, where everybody on the planet is celebrating success after participating in some mind-numbing panel discussion about the latest green hackathon in the industrial packaging sector or whatever it might be. LinkedIn is useful for figuring out where people are and who can help you get a job or land a sale, and that’s about it. For the love of god don’t spend any more time than you need to on LinkedIn and don’t contribute anything to the continent-sized mountain of affirmative, self-actualizing twaddle that’s already there.
While I am naturally relatively introverted, I do make a point of at least once per week emailing a couple of former colleague on some topic which puts me in touch with at least 100 people per year. These are people I like and respect but the reason I do this is to keep the bond to some degree fresh and current. Sometimes interesting follow-ups to this occur – not often, but a few times per year. Whenever I travel to a foreign city (which is often, I fly 200,000 km per year) I maintain some discipline to look up and meet old connections which tends to be more interesting, insightful and fruitful. People are genuinely pleased you remember them, made the time to see them, and are doing something interesting in their (usually) home market. In any event your only alternative was to lie on the bed in an anonymous hotel room listlessly flipping through television channels. Such situations are far more likely than a random email to lead to an opportunity, or some unique nugget of information you would not otherwise acquire, or a subsequent offer of cooperation.
I read a book in university with a short comment about President George H.W. Bush and his ‘Rolodex’ where he kept information on everyone he met. Apparently he was famous for his attention to detail in maintaining relationships with people he’d only met briefly or tangentially. He might meet some precinct captain in South Carolina but if for some reason he or she made it onto ‘the list’, Bush would be there to congratulate them many years later on a child’s graduation or marriage or whatever it happened to be. This list encompassed thousands of people in an era without computers or the internet. While the entire family is a clan of war-mongering, illiterate creeps, I have always admired the relentless determination and dedication it must have taken to keep such a system in place over many decades with the Rolodex as the pinnacle of technology at the time. He was not a charismatic man, or a passionate man, or well-spoken, or even possessed of any form of rudimentary intelligence; but he did achieve the absolute pinnacle of political power, and there is a reason this happened. The reason is pure tenacity and doggedness of building relationships over time. Again, he started with every advantage (in addition to being a war profiteer, Prescot Bush was a US Senator) but many people with far more native talent squander similar advantages and never become President.
The Clintons have a similar but more technically advanced system. It started as “Lynda’s List”, a database that was maintained by Slick Willy’s eponymous executive assistant from the wild and crazy days in Little Rock. Similarly to the Bush’s, it let the Clintons react credibly and in real time to various marriages, births, deaths or indictments of their old circle of pals. After they left the White House this morphed into something known as “Friends of Bill”, a database of thousands of donors, power brokers, celebrities and politicians the world over. One time when Bill himself was on a plane to Davos funded by some Saudi sheik, an advisor observed that joining him were Chevy Chase, John Cusack, Sergey Brin, Lula de Silva, and Enrique Pena Nieto. “Only Bill Clinton could bring this group together,” he thought. Legend has it that was the moment they realized Clinton didn’t need Davos, Davos needed Clinton. And so was born the Clinton Global Initiative28.
Get out there. As they say, half of life is just showing up. Attend conferences, go to Chamber of Commerce mixers, accept invitations to roundtable discussions. Go for drinks with your colleagues. Volunteer for business trips or to go visit clients in the field. An hour long car ride with a sales rep or field engineer on the way to a site visit can yield some extremely surprising insights if you ask the right questions. Exchange business cards with people you chat with on plane flights. The more people you meet and the more situations you get into, the more chances you have for a serendipitous encounter that may yield benefits in the future. As Seneca tells us, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Do not focus on preparation to the degree that you do not make time for opportunities where that preparation will actually pay you some dividends.
If you have a chance to speak openly with a few high-level executives, you will probably discover that many of them have one or more absolutely formative or determinant events in their career that were purely random happenstance. A cursory examination of related literature will tell you the same. The thing is, these opportunities happen to us all the time if we put ourselves out there: the major distinction is what we do with those opportunities.
Take Pedro Pascal as an example. The man is surely one of the most talented actors of his generation, and widely beloved. I am a huge fan. But fifteen years ago he was down on his luck, not getting great roles, and was working as an acting coach. One of his students came and asked him for advice about a casting call for an up and coming television show on HBO called Game of Thrones. The role being cast was that of Oberyn Martell. After reading the script, Pascal collected a coaching fee from his student and then proceeded to send his own unsolicited casting tape to the showrunners. The rest, as they say, is history.
Winners make their own luck. Go make yours.
Flatter everyone. There is more truth to the old saying that “flattery will get you everywhere” than people like to think. People in the executive ranks and just below will most likely have trained themselves to ignore this as much as they can. However, no one can ignore it when it is done well. Even when people would approach me with flattery which I was 100% sure was purely manufactured out of self-interest, I found it impossible to ignore. If you are confronted with two equal propositions from two individuals, and one maintains a perfectly reasonable, professional approach and the other goes out of his or her way to gush with inane praise, I can assure you ninety percent of your targets will choose the latter.
This has its limits of course, and you should be careful with it in terms of professional performance. Anyone who has gotten to any position of importance in a corporate hierarchy must have some self-reflection. I know, objectively speaking, when I or my teams have done quality work or delivered a pile of shit; I can tell in real time if a talk I am giving is hitting the mark or sending everyone to sleep. Undeserved flattery of professional performance is transparent, offensive, and counter-productive. Being a notch or two more positive than reality is fine: if someone has really screwed up, telling them “well it wasn’t that bad, come on, you were all right,” may make them feel a bit better about life and about you. But showering someone with effusive compliments they know perfectly well they don’t deserve is not beneficial to anyone.
People are much less objective about their personal characteristics, however. No one – or very, very few people - is really sure to what degree they are attractive, smell good, excite the opposite members of sex when they walk into a room, have a well-received sense of humor, are seen as an industry guru or intellectual force. In such areas you may flatter without any sense of limit or proportion. These are subjective areas, so who is to say you are right or wrong? It’s only your honest opinion that your boss has the eyes of a Siberian husky, and you stand by it. If your boss has hired a personal stylist nothing, and I mean nothing, will be considered too much in terms of praise of the new wardrobe, haircut, makeup or whatever you happen to land on.
I once had a guy working for me who was honestly not great at what he did. Nevertheless he made a point of occasionally dropping off neat little toys at my desk for my young children. No one ever saw him do it and we never spoke about it. It was clear that the only reason he did this was to influence me; I found it amusing he thought I would be swayed by such trinkets. Nevertheless in retrospect I have to say that when in the end he did come under heavy attack, I probably defended him more than I would have otherwise. Such moves, even when they are painfully transparent, can still have a small nudging effect. And if you are able to slightly nudge a powerful and influential person, this may actually make dramatic differences in certain outcomes.
The converse is also true. Never adversely comment a superior’s or even peer’s weight, homeliness, wardrobe, hygiene, odor, haircut and so forth. You will make a dedicated enemy, as well as appear mean-spirited and spiteful, and for no tangible reason or gain. Even if your colleagues are out for drinks and engaged in a session of ribald mockery of colleagues not present, do not engage in this. Do not stop them, as they are only digging their own graves and will present you with less competition in the future. Smile, nod, and remain silent. If forced to participate, dissemble and say that you have not noticed the atrocious haircut of the new in-house lawyer, the fact that the VP of engineering wears so much cologne that he stinks like a Parisian whore, or whatever it might be.
I reiterate that corporations are large animals and getting things done is much a matter of statistics as anything else. Making a habit of constant low level flattery and assiduously avoiding negative commentary on people’s personal characteristics will over time lead to every meeting room being more and more positively inclined toward you and your ideas. You do not want to find yourself on a project and suddenly confronting an impassable roadblock from some random individual who was the subject of mockery from you and your colleagues over after work drinks a few weeks earlier.
Avoid attractive female executive assistants/ secretaries. They reduce efficiency in the office as the men spend time flirting and chatting with them, while the women who form the backbone of any professional organization become jealous and embittered. Additionally, this is a very common source of extramarital affairs and divorce. No good can come from any of the above. The best EAs are gay men. Males in the office ignore them, women enjoy their company, you will not be tempted into an affair (assuming that is your orientation), and they are prodigiously useful sources of office gossip. They will often become enamored of you and may prove to be unexpectedly devoted and loyal.
Never share cleaning staff with colleagues. For a while my wife and I had a cleaning lady who also cleaned the home of one of my colleagues on the executive team. This was a terrible error. Cleaning staff know everything about you, including many things you believe they don’t. And they talk. I know far more about my colleague’s and his wife’s fertility journey and mind-bogglingly expensive travel habits than I should or would like as a result. I don’t care to speculate what he knows about me for the same reason.
Don’t be afraid to trust your gut. There is too much information out there to be analyzed and this can lead to paralysis. Paralysis is what leads to spiders having wasp eggs laid inside their bodies and slowly being consumed by the larvae as a result. You do not want this to happen to you.
You got where you are because you know something and are good at something. Don’t be afraid to trust that skill to inform your decisions.
Once I was hiring for a difficult position. I was selling and delivering projects, but I’d hit a wall. There was not enough time in the day to do both business development and delivery. But I had to stay involved in delivery as too much of the value proposition was tied up in my personal contribution. So if I wanted to grow, I needed someone else who would also be able to sell and deliver projects. I kept finding candidates who looked suitable on paper, had the right qualifications, experience and credentials, but from whom I had a kind of uneasy feeling during the interviews. We would hire them they would proceed to show up, sell nothing, collect a salary and after a while quit or I would fire them. It was enormously frustrating.
One day I met a kid who manifestly did not have the right qualifications. He’d dropped out of university out of sheer boredom. He had the craziest, cheap polyester suit with a horizontal seam on the back I ever saw. But he was magnificent in the case studies and interviews. He came across as pleasant and personable, but also serious and convincing: the kind of fellow you feel good or even relieved about buying something from. My gut told me this was the guy.
I met a headhunter buddy for drinks and asked him for advice. Basically, I’d been trying to be objective, rational and data-driven, ignoring my subjective feelings, and fucking up badly. Now for once things were reversed: the facts and data told me no way, no how; my gut told me to go for it and it was the best chance I would have to make this role work.
He heard me out, and asked me, “So, you want this guy to do a lot of what you do? I mean, business development, delivery and so on.”
“With some guidance, but more or less, yes.”
He peered at me intently. “Are you good at what you do? Be honest.”
This question took me aback. I had not really considered this aspect of things. “Well … I think so. I sell, I deliver. We deliver good stuff. Clients are happy. Yes, I am good at what I do.”
He shrugged and hefted his drink. “So follow your gut. If you’re good at something, it’s often the case you don’t know exactly why you’re good at it, and hence can’t describe it properly or put it in a job description, but you can recognize it when you see it, even if you can’t put a finger on what it is. This is probably the case here. You can see plain as day this guy can do the job, but that hyperactive brain of yours is trying to talk you out of it. Just go for it.”
I did just that and this turned out to be one of the best hires of my career. He was a companion for many years over several companies and remains a good friend to this day. I don’t know why at that moment I needed to have someone give me a bit of a slap so that I would permit myself to trust my gut, but I did, and I’m a better person for it. If you need that slap as well, here it is.
12. Hell is HR
“You are once again about to be told that you are the country’s most valuable natural resource. Have you see what they do to a natural resource? Have you seen a strip mine, or a clearcut in the forest? They’re gonna strip-mine your soul! They’ll clearcut your best thoughts for the sake of profit … don’t ever let them call you a valuable natural resource!”
- Utah Phillips, to a group of bemused schoolchildren and shocked teachers
Jean Paul Sartre commented wisely that hell is other people. HR is the purest distillation of this formula.
First, let me say that there are many nice people in HR. They are often personable and easy to get along with. It’s part of the job, after all, so it’s not odd. Fleas probably like dogs as well, as P.J. O’Rourke once noted in reference to politicians. Generally, they like people and can be great fun. I have several friends in the field and always had good relations with my departmental business partners.
That said, let’s consider HR as an institution. To begin with, get one thing straight. Human Resources is not your friend no matter how pleasant they might be individually. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. HR is what it literally says in the name– the group that ensures, you, the human resource, are exploited as fully as possible and quickly identified and liquidated when you potentially become dangerous to the smooth functioning of the machine.
Reading advice columns in mass media when the topic comes to professional conflicts, assaults, inappropriate behavior, discrimination, unjustified evaluations, etc the suggested first step more often than not is “speak to HR”. This is unbelievably stupid advice. Do not ever take it. Many people operate under the mistaken assumption that HR is somehow there to act as the advocate of the employee, or labor in general, or protect worker bees from the depredations of rapacious, sex-addled management. Nothing could be further from the truth. In such situations, HR is there as the first line of defense to protect the company and its executives from you, the employee.
Do not bring any complaint to HR, no matter how well-documented and justified, unless you are prepared to be punished and potentially fired over it. Never contact them on such a matter without sufficient documentation in hand to bring to a lawyer to initiate a lawsuit once they have initiated the inevitable attack on you and your credibility, and to successfully prosecute a subsequent case for wrongful dismissal. Most managers will rather settle and make a significant payout once they see there is enough evidence to compromise their reputation, and will do what they can to convince the company to play along.
If, heaven forbid, you are the victim of assault or any other kind of illegal activity in the workplace, report this immediately to the police. Do not contact HR. Again, HR will tell you that they will handle it internally. This may or may not be the case. Often it is not. If they really intend to “handle it”, a police record of the incident will only assist them by establishing facts of the matter. This will also focus their thinking as the clock is potentially ticking down to an arrest or indictment. If they decide to retaliate against you – an unfortunately common reaction – you will have substantially better grounds to litigate against them if there is a police record of the incident. Finally, a message will be sent loud and clear to management and other potential allies of the abuser that you are not to be trifled with.
Make friends with the people in HR if possible. Again, they are largely nice and fun so it’s not that onerous a task. They are invaluable sources of gossip and information. Their discretion level frequently asymptotically approaches zero, especially when alcohol is involved. They know who is up and who is down, who is angling for a promotion and who is having walking papers prepared. They know what salary increases are on the table and for whom, and what exit packages are accessible under what circumstances. They know the shape, scope and timing of impending reorgs long before they occur. Equally importantly, if you are sufficiently skillful you can occasionally stovepipe curated information about your friends and enemies via them to the HRD. HR is always a small department and most people are in direct contact with the director. If you become a trusted source, they may come to you for frank opinions about other individuals in the company whom you may or may not wish to assist or harm.
That said, they cannot be trusted. This is particularly the case the higher they rise. There is no ‘skill’ involved in HR the way there is in sales, finance, technology etc. The only relevant skill is dissembling and bloviating. Since there is no real way to differentiate people in the field according to any objective talent it tends to become a race to the top between those who are the most skilled in lying and figuring out how to tell people what they want to hear. The field is similar to politics in certain respects. The most effective and charismatic liars rise to the top. The more senior the person you’re dealing with, the more caution you must exercise. They will smile and convince you to bring down your guard and use everything you say against you at a later date. And again, do not underestimate their skills in these matters: they didn’t get where they are by being bad at what they do.
HR looks after HR. One piece of information from a certain company I was associated with leaked to me that probably shouldn’t have. The HRD who had been in role when I was hired had been with the company for two years and then been let go. It turned out that in her contract she had implemented language to the effect that in the event she were to be let go she was entitled to claim her full (several hundred thousand USD/ year) salary until she found equivalent employment somewhere else. Like any red-blooded young woman, she is still sitting quietly at home, collecting her salary, tending her tulips and financing her husband’s solar panel installation business or whatever he’s up to. Apparently there has been a footnote in the company’s annual reports for a decade now concerning accruals taken due to historical executive compensation agreements that is there solely due to this one woman’s brilliant gambit.
She had been gone from the company for ten years at that point. She was about fifty then, I believe. They will probably have to pay her until she’s 65. Twenty-five years of very high pay for two years of work. What a score.
I don’t say any of this to disparage the lady in question. On the contrary I quite enjoyed working with her. She’s a kind, earnest and straightforward person, which is rare in this field. I applaud her initiative in getting such a mind-bogglingly advantageous agreement signed. I only want to point out that if I or anyone else in the executive team outside of HR had demanded such languages in our contracts during hiring negotiations, we would have been laughed out of the office on the spot and blacklisted from future employment.
A buddy of mine works in HR on the recruitment side of things. He once had a very short tenure at a well-known technology company. Short as in the sense of leaving in less than six months. Over drinks he told me he was leaving and mentioned he was still “negotiating his package”.
“Package?” I asked. “You were only there four months, and I thought you resigned? Why the hell would they give you a package?”
He burbled and stumbled a bit about how it’s standard practice… I said “Look, if you’d recruited me into that same company at the same level but in technology, and I resigned in less than six months, would I have gotten a package? No way. You would have sent me an email telling me not to let the door hit my fat ass on the way out and reminding me of your company’s vast resources and litiginous nature should I even consider violating any clauses about sharing proprietary data.” We had a good laugh and he had to agree with me, that yes, there is no conceivable situation anyone outside of HR would have gotten the deal he did.
Be cautious with recruiters. They are the farmers of human souls. Remember they work for themselves first, their client second, and you not at all. You are their product, not their client. They can be useful if you have an easily defined skill set and are a clear fit for common roles. Any profile which is a bit out of the ordinary they will generally discard as being too difficult and time-consuming to fill. Lots of engagement with recruiters leads nowhere unless this has been specifically arranged via the hiring party on your behalf as part of their standard process. Personally, most jobs came via personnel connections and was based on recommendation due to my peculiar skill sets. I am wary of overgeneralizing my experience; headhunters exist for a reason. Nevertheless keep in mind that the less typical your profile the less likely you are to get benefits from recruiters or agencies. Their discretion level is zero, and it’s possible to waste an incredible amount of time with them. I advise you to maintain a very limited amount of patience for such people unless you personally know them to be serious.
When negotiating with HR, never reveal current compensation during a discussion about a future role. Explain that this is privileged information you are not allowed to share. This will give confidence to your prospective new employer that you can be counted on for similar discretion where they are concerned. In reality of course your intent is merely to compensate the information asymmetry in your negotiation.
The one thing HR fears most is open discussion among employees about compensation. They will do everything they can to discourage this. Make sure you understand your legal rights in this regard in your jurisdiction. HR and management will often try and impose rules or norms in this regard that are in fact illegal. While it is beneficial to everyone if compensation levels are known and discussed, it does not pay to be seen as the instigator of such discussions. HR will mark you for liquidation if they see you as the source of such existential troublemaking. Ensure that you have plausible deniability and that it will appear that some other gullible sucker in your department kicked off the discussions and hence will be assigned the inevitable blame.
When dealing with HR always remember their priorities: their own skins first, the company second, and you are way at the back of the line.
13. Don’t worry: you’re not an impostor
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
- Laurence Peter, The Peter Principle
One thing I have frequently noticed as people rise through the ranks of a corporation, the more empathic and self-reflective individuals are sometimes beset by impostor syndrome. They feel that they’re in over their heads, that everyone around them is smarter, more experienced, better looking, smoother talking and always know exactly what to do. They are a ridiculous example of the Peter Principle. Those unburdened by doubt in some ways have things easier, steamrolling through life and never considering that they may be heading (and steering the company) in the completely wrong direction.
Don’t worry about it. Everyone is muddling through as best they can. Everyone makes mistakes. There is too much information out there to be absorbed, the pace of technological development is so fast, the impact on any business environment so fundamental, that the lessons learned from long experience are at best dated and sometimes wildly misleading. The people most convinced of the value of their experience are sometimes led terribly astray and incapable of admitting error until it’s far too late. Nokia was a famous victim of such a culture where neither error, dissent or doubt was ever acceptable and the result was one of the most spectacular corporate conflagrations in history. Don’t forget, in the end people are just people. Underneath the tailored suits and expensive jewelry and haircuts, everyone has monsters running amok in their psyches.
I commented on this once to a friend of mine, who’s had a truly stellar career – CEO of some important global concerns in multiple countries, etc. I called it “the wall of professionalism” behind which everyone was hiding their weird little foibles and idiosyncrasies and how it’s remarkable that if you scratch underneath the surface, you find that people are just as odd and crazy and irrational and occasionally self-destructive as you’d expect from your friends in university.
He found the term and the concept amusing, and it inspired him to tell me an intriguing story in a similar vein. When he graduated from university, he went and saw a psychiatrist as he thought some of his ideas were potentially unhealthy (to be fair, he is an irrepressible pervert). “I lay there for hours and told him about my dreams, my fantasies, my intentions … I really opened up to this kind old man, the way I never had to anyone before. Not my parents, not my fraternity brothers, not even my wife. And he said … well, he said normally upon hearing all this he would have me forcibly institutionalized.” We both laughed. He continued. “Really, I’m completely serious. He said look, you’re in a terribly bad way and potentially extremely dangerous. But you’re a young guy, and you might change, and I don’t want to ruin things for you just as you start out in life. So try and hold it together as best you can, and for the love of god and humanity, come back and see me if these thoughts recur.”
“Wow,” I said, nonplussed. “I would never have guessed that. So what happened?”
“Well, I forgot about it for a long time, and went about my life, as one does. Later, in my first major executive role, the company paid for a really high level of medical service for me, including psychiatric or psychological help if I wanted it. At that level they try to do whatever they can to make sure you maintain maximum productivity and focus. They can’t afford to have any physical or mental issues distracting you. So on a lark I went to this extremely well-known psychiatrist. He’d authored bestselling books and so forth. Well, again I laid down and opened up to him about what was going on in my head, much as I had to that other doctor, many years before. I didn’t mention the other guy’s diagnosis, by the way.”
“And… what did he say?”
My friend burst out cackling with glee. “He said exactly the same thing, that I should be institutionalized immediately, involuntarily if need be. And if I hadn’t walked in there as an officer of a major corporation and apparently functional, he would have had me taken away and locked up on the spot.”
Anyway. I just want to make the point that no matter how crazy and out of place you feel, there are CEOs out there with every bit as richly bizarre an internal life as you have, and some a great deal more.
It’s not even as though the people at this level are universally making intelligent decisions. I keep a video on my computer that I play for a graduate seminar I occasionally give, where Steve Ballmer hoots with laughter about the iPhone and what a monumentally ridiculous product it was. If you ever see the video, it’s clear that he really means it, this isn’t just someone going through the motions for marketing purposes. He truly thought this was one of the stupidest things he’d ever seen in his life. Ballmer was and is obviously one of the savviest technologists on the planet, but even he could not see what was in front of his face at the right moment in time.
I was recently doing a study on Vodafone for a variety of unimportant reasons and I was reminded of the staggering scale of value destruction achieved by that company in spite of the fact that it operates dozens of legalized oligopolies. Vodafone bought Mannesmann Arcor in 2000 for $180b, the largest M&A transaction in history. The market capitalization of the combined entity at the time was about $350b. Vodafone’s current market capitalization is about $25b. They run all of their procurement through a subsidiary in Luxemborg since it’s the only tax jurisdiction on the planet which has no statute of limitations on tax shields from corporate losses; Vodafone’s tax shield from the Mannesmann deal is so large that we will probably see the heat death of the universe itself before it runs out.
Early on in my career I was working for a telecommunications company and we went into the infamous 3G spectrum auctions in 1999 and 2000. Now, the spectrum was projected to cost billions and we had absolutely no idea what to do with the technology or the spectrum, so it was obviously very difficult to value it. Of course, valuing it appropriately is sort of necessary in an auction process so that you can well, place bids. The team working on this was at a loss in terms of how to proceed, so they sent an email to the responsible BoD member asking for guidance about how to come up with a sustainable and defensible valuation. The email that came back was exactly three words long:
“Make it work.”
To make a long story short, the valuation worked in the auction in the sense that we won the spectrum we wanted. It didn’t work in reality, as we unfortunately couldn’t afford to build a network to use the spectrum afterward, careened close to insolvency, and had to be bailed out by the state and endure mass layoffs. You may file this story under the rubric of “fuckups that were both predictable and predicted”. I remember sixty-year old men sobbing in the restrooms during this period, convinced their pensions had evaporated overnight. In case you were wondering if there were any adverse consequences for the architects of that particular fiasco, let me reassure you that there were not. They are all safely ensconced in various boards of companies and charitable organizations to this day.
There are numerous other tropes such as Yahoo failing to buy Google for $1m or AOL merging with Time Warner at an astronomical valuation only for AOL to be sold off for scrap years later. Even from a broader perspective, only 52 of the Fortune 500 in 2020 had been on the list in 1955, showing how difficult it is for even the largest and best run companies to survive long term11. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty as they say, and of course it’s easy to poke fun at such mistakes in retrospect. My intention here is not to make a greatest hits list of corporate greedheads leading companies to ruin and waltzing off with sacks of money, leaving employees, shareholders and bondholders in the lurch. We’d be here all day. The point I really want to make is that there is a sort of Gauss distribution of corporate results in any given time period; those executives who end up on the positive side of the curve claim it was due to their vision, genius, and flawless execution; those on the losing end blame the exigencies of the market, regulation, technology, or whatever other plausible scapegoat happens to be close to hand. Only suckers share the glory of success or accept responsibility for poor results. But they universally remain convinced, irrespective of results, that they completely deserve their position, status, and eye-watering compensation levels.
I’m just trying to say that all these cold-eyed, effortlessly fluent executives with their bespoke suits and uncontrollably tumescent egos are probably not really making better decisions than you would if you were in one of their chairs, with the same information at your disposal and the corresponding scope of budget and authority. So don’t be afraid to go for the gold if the opportunity arises. You deserve it every bit as much as they do.
14. Pay it forward
“A society grows great when old people plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.”
- Greek proverb
Generally in this book I am trying to encourage you to be ruthless, rational and self-interested. My mantra to my children is that “no one is gonna take care of youse except youse” and this is for the most part true. Look out for number one, kids. Nobody else will.
Nevertheless, here I am going to take a moment to contradict myself a couple of times. I’m OK with that, I hope you are as well.
Back in my EVP days, we constantly had to go to corporate trainings with our peers from other countries. These were pretty insightful in fact, and of course one met an absolutely stellar set of people. While I could talk about these at length – and it would be a worthwhile topic, but for another time – there is one moment I’d like to share with you that has stuck with me for many years.
The global HRD – you may remember him from the foreword to this small tome – was there and gave a talk about our responsibility as executives working for a storied company that spanned decades and straddled the globe.
First, he asked us to think of ourselves as a family inhabiting an ancestral home we had owned for many generations. You would think of yourselves as stewards of this home, he said, and as good stewards you would make sure it was in better shape for the next generation than it was when you found it. None of us will be here forever: we all know that, and that’s fine. But in addition to keeping the day-to-day business running in whatever role you have, keep in mind that you have a larger duty, which is to leave the place as a whole in better shape than you found it.
He said something else during this discussion that I think about often. He said, “Look, I see all of you people out there, seasoned executives, with many accomplishments and achievements of which you are justifiably proud. You feel important, and in fact you are all important: you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. But keep in mind that you weren’t always knowledgeable, and experienced, and important, and proven. Once upon a time, you were young, dumb and foolish. We all were. In spite of that, in spite of everything, someone a long time ago looked at that young, ridiculous kid and saw something special, some unique spark of potential and talent, and took a chance when they didn’t have to. It was a risk they didn’t need to take, effort they weren’t required to put in, and hassle they probably didn’t really have time for. Nevertheless, they did.
I suspect you all know instantly who it was in your career that took that decisive chance on you early on that turned out to be your big break, even if perhaps you didn’t realize it at the time. You’re probably thinking of him or her right now as I’m speaking. And you’re feeling grateful. And you should feel grateful. Because you wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t taken that chance, way back then.
This is the challenge I am going to leave you with today. As part of leaving the house in better shape than you found it, take a chance on someone. Because our next generation of leaders depends on people in your positions taking those same chances, today.”
I can’t say this any better than he did, and I won’t try. I only want to reiterate that everyone who broke the cycle of servitude did so because someone saw something in him or her and took a chance they shouldn’t have, didn’t have to, and from which they had little or nothing to gain. Everyone started out as a young, vacuous, know-nothing trying to punch above their weight. If they succeeded, it’s because someone more senior saw potential in that insufferable young jerk, took them under their wing, nurtured and guided them, imparted vital lessons and forgave mistake after mistake. The cycle of servitude cannot be broken if higher managers do not accept this duty to the next generation.
If you take anything from this book, make it this: do a creaky old man a favor and pay it forward, if and when you ever have the chance.
15. The Garden of Thanos
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again…This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sysiphus
At the beginning of Avengers: Endgame, we join Thanos strolling through his garden, plucking some alien breed of turnip. His enemies lie vanquished, or in many cases evaporated; his mission is fulfilled, his journey at its end. I expect I was not the only person watching that scene and thinking, “You have the powers of a deity in your hand, and you’re spending your time slopping around with a bucket of muddy tubers? Come on Purple Man, show a bit of imagination. At least fire up the grill and make yourself some unicorn steaks cooked on plasma from a neutron star or something interesting.” Yet, he seems content.
The last season of that incomparable television series The Good Place touched on this quandary explicitly. When Eleanor and her band of misfits finally make it to the titular heavenly reward, they are nonplussed to find out that it resembles nothing so much as the world’s most depressing seventeenth annual high school reunion in a filthy basement located somewhere deep beneath the auditorium next to the boiler room. When Chidi there meets one of his most beloved philosophical heroines, Hypatia, she has this to say about paradise:
“…I came here, where time stretched out forever, and every second of my existence was amazing, but my brain became this dumb, big blob… you get here, and you realize that everything’s possible, so you do everything, and then you’re done. But you still have infinity left. This place kills fun and passion and excitement and love, til all you have left are milkshakes.”
At the beginning of this book I made some casually flippant remarks about what to do with one’s time once financial independence has been achieved. I made them because in some ways, it is entirely immaterial and doesn’t really matter; but in some other, important ways, it matters very, very much. I don’t want to imply we are in the same existential quandary as Hypatia in her dreary, pointless heaven or Thanos puttering around his garden, but it does bear thinking about. Once you have put in the work, made the money, and achieved independence; you have your millions in the bank, your surly, ungrateful teenagers have fully paid up college funds, the mortgage has been settled … what then? What does the dog do when it finally catches the car?
A cursory perusal of websites and subreddits devoted to early retirement and financial independence will show you that the question of what to do once one stops working is not an easy one. Many people end up going back to work for the simple reason they miss the daily structure, the sense of periodic fulfilment of goals validated by some external authority, or simply for the sake of regular social contact with intelligent, professional people. This seems to me an unimaginative solution; on the other hand, not everyone is imaginative, and that’s both fine and unavoidable. I like to think there’s a major difference in going to a job cheerfully and contentedly because you enjoy the structure, mental challenge and the social elements, as opposed to a gnawing dread that if you lose your job, you will also lose your health insurance and someone you care about may die as a result. This is also a win, and not a trivial one.
There is no perfect solution. 30 Rock made light of this brilliantly when Jack Donaghy attempts to solve the problem of “what next” through the ‘Six Sigma Wheel of Happiness Domination’. But getting a black belt, rescuing random homeless folks from the street, and talking your itinerant lady friends into creatin a “vanilla caramel sex swirl” only goes so far. After filling in the wheel completely, the mighty Jack himself finds himself with no other option but to return to work after a brief sojourn around the harbor in his yacht suffices to deliver inspiration about the next generation of microwave oven technology. Many people end up taking this path. They like to go to work (or at least enjoy telling others how much they hate it) can’t imagine what to do without it, and so keep plodding into an office until someone makes them stop.
Even the most dedicated fitness freak can only work out for two hours a day or so before a law of diminishing returns sets in. You can only make so much kimchi; at some point you run out of room to expand your model train empire; the garage only has space for so many cars; you can only spend so much time tending your tomato and pepper plants. I know several people who intended to retire to their Tuscan villas, or opened a surfing school in the Faroe Islands, only to find them back in the game months later.
There’s no shame in any of this. Everyone needs to find his or her own path toward fulfilment; as Nietzsche put it, to release an “arrow of longing for the other shore”. As I wrote earlier, some people find this in owning a fitful business that one can attend to as it suits. Real estate is a convenient enterprise from this point of view. You can always hire a property manager to take care of things, but if you want to refinish a terrace on your own, or spend a couple of weeks helping out your guys refurbishing a couple of units, no one is going to stop you, no matter how much you get in the way.
It's never too late to start your second or third act in life. Julia Childs was fifty-one when she first appeared on television. Mitt Romney left Bain Capital a very wealthy man at forty-seven years old and had several successive chapters of success in public service. Ronald Reagan also famously entered politics in his fifties. Vera Wang decided out of the blue at age forty that she wanted to be a fashion designer. Harlan Sanders was a fireman, farmer and streetcar conductor before he signed his first KFC franchise agreement at age sixty-two. Age is less of a limitation to your ambitions than energy, talent or luck. If you enjoy a surplus of any of the latter three, then feel free to ignore the first.
I stressed the point at the beginning of this book that from the broadest perspective, humanity is hell bent on destroying itself and there’s not much use in pretending otherwise. You won’t change anything in the greater scheme of things, and this is and will remain, - unfortunately - true. That said, in the smaller scheme of things, you can make a difference, and there’s surely no reason not to try. A chunk of accumulated capital will give you far more latitude to make an impact than one can with only time, effort, and determination.
Some people go into academia. I have relationships with a couple of universities and periodically give guest lectures to MBA students. This is fun and stimulating. A more structured relationship would require going to staff meetings and what not which I don’t think I would really have the patience for, but to each their own.
So run a local business and pay people a living wage. Deliver something in your town that’s missing. Sometimes being able to afford to take a risk that others cannot is an asset in and of itself.
Just because you’re wealthy now doesn’t mean you have to wallow around in your coin-filled treasury like Scrooge McDuck while starving orphans peer in hopelessly through the windows. Work for a charity close to your heart. If you have enough cash, sponsor them. Money isn’t everything in life, but again it is surely much easier to have an impact with some financial firepower at your disposal. As I said, you won’t change the world at large, and it doesn’t pay to try. On the other hand, you may change someone’s world, and that’s something. The worst that can happen is you’ll waste some time and money that you didn’t know what to do with in any event.
My father was a lawyer and died very young. When I was an infant, he showed up at our house one night with a sixteen-year old thug in tow. Apparently he’d gotten the case as a result of some pro bono work his office did. My mother asked him what in god’s name he was up to. He shrugged and said “well, the boy was headed to reform school if we couldn’t come up with a place for him to stay and someone to accept temporary guardianship. So I stepped up and did it.” Despite my mother’s incandescent but short-lived fury, he lived with us for several years. Much later, I met him and his wife in California, where he is a proud father and successful realtor. At dinner he made much of my father’s virtues and spoke at length about the criminal hooliganism that had resulted in his arrest. His wife, visibly shocked, asked how he had managed to turn his life around to such a dramatic extent. He turned and pointed at me. “This guy’s dad. He’s the only reason I’m not dead or in prison right now.”
All I want to say is that small acts of gratuitous kindness, while surely immaterial in the greater scheme of things, can still have existentially fundamental impact on somebody in the here and now.
No one will tell you what to do with your newfound freedom. That’s the whole point. Do good, do ill. Do whatever you want. But make it so the choices are yours alone, and that you will be happy you made them as you did.
You are the final boss in the great game of life. Win or lose, make it a fight to remember.
- FIN -
Notes
1. This is not an isolated event. A study in Austria showed that early retirement increased mortality by nearly 7%. https://www.nber.org/digest/jan19/early-retirement-and-mortality-rates-blue-collar-men
2. See Bradley et al Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick
3. See https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rising-inequality-a-major-issue-of-our-time/
5. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2019/ceo-turnover-record-high.html
6. https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/
7. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25442/w25442.pdf
9. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2307-1.html
10. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/
13. While this is not really the point of this book, there is a quite straightforward solution to the climate crisis. If you think of the planet as a property, we have discovered something compromising it that needs to be fixed. Obviously the owners should pay for it. Of the 1.5 quadrillion dollars of global wealth, $500 trillion is in the ‘real’ economy – land, buildings, ports, railroads, etc. 82% of this is in a few countries in North America, western Europe and Japan, and of that the top 1% of households control 45%. Most of the world’s wealth is held by a few million households who are easy to identify and tax. Morgan Stanley priced fixing the global climate problem at $2.5 trillion per year for twenty years. This could be financed by a .5% annual wealth tax and distributed on appropriate projects by a repurposed World Bank with directors appointed by countries with the most exposure to dislocation from climate change.
14. This was one of my first lessons in public speaking. I spent a lot of time in my first job talking to hostile audiences. Someone taught me a trick that when someone starts being a dickhead and getting aggressive, walk toward them as they talk, nodding and smiling. It turns out it’s very difficult to attack someone in front of a bunch of people who has such open and welcoming body language. They feel suddenly impolite and ease off. It was my first experience with how simple and effective some of these tools can be.
15. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/02/the-age-at-which-youll-earn-the-most-money-in-your-career.html
16.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear
17. https://www.fastcompany.com/90961778/lying-resume-college-degree-consequences-hiring-managers
19. https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/
20. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/this-is-the-real-reason-most-americans-file-for-bankruptcy.html
21. https://www.abi.org/feed-item/how-athletes-go-bankrupt-at-an-alarming-rate
22. The exception to this is if you are in sales. For some reason sales people always get a pass. No one is under the illusion they are motivated by anything except cash.
24. For example, see Stringer Bell’s comment in The Wire, “…is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? What the fuck is you thinking, man?”
25. Do not do this. This was a mistake.
26. This fellow likes to drink, a lot. When he greeted me at the office, he took me aside and said, “You know, the strangest thing happened to me on the way here. When the plane landed [note: the flight in question was a business class flight from Tokyo to Copenhagen], apparently I’d had a bit to drink on the way and the stewardess asked me if I would be requiring wheelchair assistance to the baggage claim area. I’ve never heard of anyone being asked that before. What do you think she meant by that?”
27. I once worked for a company as a consultant and went for drinks with the executive team. I left but accidentally switched phones with the HRD as I left. I met someone else for dinner and in the meanwhile received several risqué messages from a contact in the phone labeled in the local language – it doesn’t translate well – as “Secret [rude word for female anatomy]”. Eventually he called the phone and we agreed an exchange. When he arrived, quite out of breath, he asked me if anyone had called or written. “Yes.” I responded without elaboration. He looked at me, and I looked at him. We nodded and exchanged phones. I always had a fantastic working relationship with him after that evening in spite of considerable difficulties we’d had previously.
This is the most fucking fantastic thing I’ve ever read from a link on Reddit. Great advice!