Introduction

(This is the start of the book I've written called The White Collar Warrior. It is satire, but some bits of actual advice snuck in there somehow. So far, it is unpublished, but if you would like to publish it, and happen to be a publisher, let me know!)

Do you have the balls to be a white collar warrior? The symbolic testicles that are the source of all courage and desire? It doesn’t matter if you have ovaries, you still need balls. Call them power orbs, brass ones, or Little Sweaty Freddies. I don’t care. The question is: Do you have what it takes? If so, prove it. Buy this book, strap on your Brooks Brothers cod piece and prepare yourself.

Or are you just a white collar worker?

If your job description does not mention activities involving sweat, dirt, grease or lifting heavy objects, then you are probably a mere white collar worker. Good for you. You are of the class that runs the world and will inherit much more than the meek. But you are probably not a warrior, not yet anyway. Not until you read this book, digest it, and let it soak into your soul, transforming it into something hard, cold and shiny.

No matter how nice a person you think you are, no matter how many books you’ve read about “making friends and influencing people” or “win-win situations” or managing people in one-minute increments, your job is to step on the people below you, climb over the people beside you, and eliminate the people above you.

In business, success demands you wage war. In fact, just survival requires you to keep your knives sharp and guns well maintained. (Metaphoric knives and guns. In most cases.)

Don’t believe me? Do you really think the people working in the cubes around you wouldn’t slit your throat for a few extra stock options? Put yourself in this situation…

Your company is about to lay off four people and keep just one at your rank with your skill set in your department. All five of you were hired the same day, so how will the company decide who to keep?

They put all five of you in a locked room give all five of you baseball bats. The last one standing gets the job, and a ten percent raise, and just for good measure, a parking space at the front of the building with your name stenciled on it.

Do you really want to be in that room? Do you really think you’ll get out of there without your head cracked open? Would you try to negotiate your way out of there by finding the “win-win” conditions, or wielding “situational management” skills or explaining the metaphor of cheese being moved?

Now, don’t take this all the wrong way. Warriors do need allies. It’s too big a corporate world to try and conquer it all by yourself. For instance, in the above example, it would be good strategy to team up with the three weakest in the room and take out the strongest guy in the room. For those few minutes, you and your smaller comrades will be a well-oiled team, united in the single-minded purpose of taking out a bigger foe. It will feel great, you three working toward a common goal.

Of course, once the reason for the teamwork has ended, and the big guy is now quietly napping with a knot on his head, your allies will turn against you, which is what happens every day in the corporate world. Allies become enemies as soon as is convenient. You need to be prepared for that, and you will be if you follow the ways of the White Collar Warrior.

Look at it another way…

At the top of every corporate pyramid is one guy, below him two or three guys, below them ten or twenty guys, and so on. At the bottom of the pyramid are thousands of people, all of them looking at the top guy, wondering how the hell he got up there.

Here’s how he did it: He stepped on the backs of everyone else, walked right up, while wearing big black combat boots with steel toes. Whenever someone got in his way, he threw them down the side. The corporate world is a giant game of King of the Hill and the hill is made of people wearing dress shirts and ties (or skirts and starched blouses).

If you’re not willing to climb that hill, and get a little bloody on the way, then stop reading this book, quit your job, and take up digging ditches or selling apples at the organic food co-op or whatever the hell it is you did before sitting down in a cube and turning on a computer.

Keeping that in mind, acknowledging that only a White Collar Warrior makes it to the top, or even gets close to it, read on, Dear Student. You have much to learn.