Chapter Three, Part Two -- Make The List

(Note: This is Chapter Three, Part Two of my book, White Collar Warrior(tm). You can read the chapters that came before this one by clicking on the links to the right. If you are interested in representing or publishing my book, please let me know at whitecollarwarrior@hotmail.com. Thanks!)

Now, let’s break down The List in greater detail…

NAME

Besides plain old first name and last name, you’ll also want to take note of nicknames. If a guy is known as “Skipper” to his friends, start calling him Skipper as soon as you can. You want to be familiar, friendly and unthreatening to your co-workers, especially the ones you want to ruin. Also, if you can call this guy Skipper in front of executives or during a high-profile meeting, that’s a good thing. There aren’t many vice-president Skippers for a reason.

Now, speaking of names, with The List, you’ll also want to keep track of a target’s email addresses (professional and private), chat program names, and user names for the company website and email programs.

Also, on a separate sheet that you keep secured somewhere, keep track of your target’s passwords. I’m not saying spy or use electronic trickery to get someone’s passwords. I’m just saying if you happen to be in someone’s cube and you happen to watch him open his email program, and you just happen to notice that he types in “Fluffy123” for his password, then that might be a piece of useful information one day. For instance, you might have legitimate need to read his email after he’s left for the evening. It could happen. That’s all I’m saying.

Here’s a fun thing to do with names…Put them into an internet search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or Dogpile. Search not just for website mentions, but also for photos and newsgroup postings. You never know what you’ll find. Could be nothing. Could be your rival occasionally wears a prom dress complete with a tiara and can’t resist posting the pictures on www.dudesinpromdresses.com.

I’m assuming if that’s the case you’ll know what to put in your action plan. Clue: it involves a mass emailing from an anonymous account.

RANK

Out of a choice of five: Employee, Peer, Direct Superior, Superior’s Superior, Big Cheese

Employee

This is someone who happens to work for you, your minion, a person you can boss around, a person whose miserable life you hold in the palm of your hand, someone you can crush.

Don’t get cocky about it. No one, and I mean no one, can ruin your faster than someone who works for you. You need to know your people inside and out. You need to know how to make them make you look good, and you need to know how to eliminate them when they stop doing that.

If you feel one of them digging their heels into your back, trying to climb over you on the corporate ladder, you need to know how best to kill them. Not literally. Unless of course they pull a knife or a gun on you. Then you can do what you need to do and it’s all perfectly legal. Just something to keep in mind.

Peer

Peer means someone who has the same job title as you, the same pay grade as you, the same skill set and almost always the same boss. There are some exceptions to this. For instance, if someone with your job title happens to have a different boss or works in a different department, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want his job, his boss, or his potential promotion. If you work in a big company, keep an eye on peers in every department. If opportunity is lacking where you happen to be, don’t rule out making a lateral move, especially if you spot a weak peer ready to be cut down quickly. Keep your eyes open.

Obviously, peers are your most direct competition. They are the first people you’ll need to eliminate when necessary. You should consider them mortal enemies first and friends only if the need arises. Someone has to take your boss’ job when he leaves. It will be you or one of your peers. Who is it going to be?

Now, what you really don’t want is your peers knowing what you have in mind for them. You want the fight to be unfair, tilted so far in your direction that your enemy doesn’t have a hope in Hell. And more than that, you don’t want your enemy to know he is even in a fight. You want him to trust you, to ask for your help, to solicit your advice. And if your peer asks you to share the workload on a project or two, you say yes and roll up your sleeves. Just make sure your name is in the credits of any documents created, and make sure you give some, or all, of the presentation when the project is complete. You feel me?

Think of your peers as the people you happen to be sharing a cabin with on the Titanic. You all overslept and didn’t even hear the iceberg hit. Now the cabin is filling with ice water. The boat itself is pretty much underwater now. There is only time for one of you to get through the cabin door. Everyone else in the room will die an icy death. One of you will get to escape to the top deck and fight to get in a life boar. You might even get a front row viewing of Leonardo DiCaprio turning blue and freezing to death because Kate Winslett won’t scootch over a little on her piece of wood. Look at that thing. There’s plenty of room.

Why would you want to miss that? Do you really want to be one of the ones left in the cabin wondering what that really loud noise was?

Direct Superior

This is your boss.

A long time ago, a grumpy preacher from a red state gave a sermon about how people are sinners in the hands of an angry God, and at any second, God could dip them in a pit fire, roasting them alive, and then pull them out again, heal them, make them feel better, give them ice cream and a hand job, then dump them back into the fire just for the fun of it, laughing while their skin crackles to a golden brown.

Think of your boss as that crazy, power drunk God. Benevolent and kind one second, cruel and sadistic the next, your boss can you make you miserable like no one other than your spouse.

Make sure you add you boss to The List. His page is going to get a lot of attention.

Superior’s Superior

This is your boss’ boss. Your boss hates him (or, poor soul, her). He might act like he doesn’t but he does. Your boss wants nothing more in this world but for his superior to go away and let him feel like he actually has some power.

You see, as a middle manager, you get to sip from the cup of power. You get to boss people around. It’s a rush, and the more employees you have, the bigger rush it is. You can make a direct report feel like a million dollars with a few kind words, or you can crush his spirit with one snide remark. It’s like being a god. A really small god with no cool powers but one, you have the power to make your underlings taste heaven or hell, depending on your mood.

And what does a god resent more than anything else? A bigger, tougher more powerful god. All by himself, he feels pretty divine. But when a higher god walks in the room, his divinity looks pale and weak in comparison. That bigger god can even undo all his work, tell his employees to do something completely different, send them off on errands that have nothing to do with their original commands. And then, after that humiliation, his boss can then tell him exactly what to do and how to do it, reminding him of how powerless and pathetic he truly is.

That’s why a little power is a curse. You get a taste for how good it feels, and afterward, all you can think about is how you don’t have nearly enough. A heroin addiction is tougher to kick than a hunger for power.

So, that’s why your boss hates his boss. However, do you know how you feel about your boss’s boss? You love him! (Or, if you’re lucky, her!)

Think of your boss’ boss as a kind of grandparent. Grandparents always love to spoil the grandkids. They love saying things like: “Let’s take off early and grab a steak on the expense account” or “I bet you’d love to get a new computer next quarter” or “How would you like to come with us on the next trip to Fort Lauderdale? We could use a hand during the next executive retreat.”

For some reason, I’ve always found my boss’ boss to be one of the most delightful and generous people on the planet. He’s overly benevolent to his employee’s employees because it gives him a double buzz: 1. He gives joy to someone who probably has little. 2. Giving that joy gives great pain to someone else, your boss, who is busy screaming profanities into a pillow as you walk to the bar across the street with his superior. Your boss’s boss is having all the fun of being Satan combined with all the power of being a god.

Another thing you need to think about: You want one day for your superior’s superior to be your superior. Your boss needs to go, and one day he will, and you want to replace him. To do that, you need to be ready to step right in. You need to make sure it’s inconceivable that anyone else could do the job. And the person you need to think that is your boss’ boss.

And that’s why he’s on The List. Not because you want to destroy him, but because you want to know what he likes and dislikes so you can embody everything he favors and reject everything he doesn’t. You want to be the grandson he wishes he had (not the snotty, pot smoking, money-grubbing troublemaker he has to bail out of jail once a year). If he likes paisley ties, find yourself some ameba-covered silk. If he likes to talk football, you are now a fan of his teams, and you are going to spend a few hours every week studying them to the point you know where the quarterback went to high school and who he lost his virginity to. If he’s gay, you’re not going to turn away when he puts his hand on your knee. Of course, you’re not going to do anything you don’t want to. But you’re not going to make him feel bad. Christ, it’s just a friendly hand on a knee. You big baby.

A Big Cheese

These are the true gods of the corporate world. These are the guys who can fire you without even meeting you. If they don’t care for your division anymore, bam, you’re gone with one email.

These are the guys that before they arrive on your floor, someone calls ahead so you can prepare. “Hey! The big cheese is on his way. Get ready.” And at that point, there is a flurry of tidying up and men in $3,000 business suits are suddenly wielding brooms and dust rags. Such is the power of a Big Cheese.

I especially appreciate all the fake work that happens once the big cheese finally arrives and the air becomes filled with keyboard clacking and inside every cube is a person trying to desperately look to importantly busy. The braver souls actually take part in fake phone calls, haggling down prices, chewing out vendors and taking imaginary orders. Only a truly important person can cause this much spontaneous dishonesty.

So why is the Big Cheese on The List? Isn’t he so far above your head that it’s not even worth thinking about him? Of course not, idiot.

The guy has the power to do whatever the hell he wants, including promoting you to King Jr., if he wishes. Sure, it’s a long shot, but it has happened before. If the Big Cheese presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and you need to be ready. If you put him on The List, you’ll be just that.

The problem with the Big Cheese is that you aren’t going to know much about him unless he’s one of those CEOs who insist on writing books about himself. If that’s the case, then read his book and make your life easier.

What you want to do is talk to old timers who have been around the company for a few years, the folks who have stories to tell and will tell them all for the price of a steak and a Jack on the rocks. That might be your boss, or it might be your boss’ boss, or it might be a co-worker. Either way, there are people around who know the king.

Also, feel free to search the internet as well. Big Cheese’s leave all kinds of footprints, where they were hired, where they were fired, what house’s they’ve bought, and who they’ve married. Big Cheese’s are addicted to PR, and thanks to the Internet, PR is permanent.

Look, if you Google yourself and get a few hits (the pictures of your dog on your Facebook page, your listing on your high school alumni page, a guy with your name who is doubtless more successful and better looking than you), then there will be plenty of articles about any Big Cheese worthy of the title.

In fact, I just Googled five CEOs from 5 company not even in the Fortune 500, and got plenty on each one to fill up The List. There are Q&As covering everything from their visions for the future to what schools their kids go to their pets’ names. I have almost enough info on these guys to steal their identities (too bad there are no Social Security numbers in any of these listings) or pretend to be the son of a long lost high school buddy long enough to scam a free night in the guest bedroom and maybe a loan.

One quick note about Big Cheese’s: They are almost always smart and ruthless, which should be obvious, but can also be bat shit insane, which might be surprise to you, as one might expect sanity to be basic requirement for holding that much responsibility. All that money does something to their grasp of reality. Howard Hughes is an easy example, a guy who didn’t cut his hair or finger nails for the last 20 years of his life, and who bought a TV station so he could make it play the movies he wanted to see. (They didn’t have DVDs or VCRs back then.)

But he’s far from alone in the Big Cheese Funny Farm. I know of one CEO who eats nothing but white toast and drinks nothing but whole milk. Other than that, nicest guy in the world. Another Big Cheese I know of will fire you if you don’t argue with him. Doesn’t matter what about. He just likes to argue. He likes conflict, be it over football teams, Stephen Spielberg’s best movie or whether OJ did it or not. Not arguing with him is your ticket to the unemployment line.

Another Big Cheese, this one from the entertainment industry (which does seem to spawn insanity in executives more than any other), would tell specific chosen employees how to dress, everything from suit colors and cuts, to ties, to shirts (French cuffs with elegant cufflinks), to shoes (nothing Italian and light, he liked bulky English heels, laces, and wing tips). And yes, even underwear (boxers, Egyptian cotton or silk). The employees he graced with wardrobe advice were always the ones who ended up being promoted and doing well in the company. If he never bothered to teach you how to tie a Windsor knot, then you might as well have started sending out your resumes.

So, when you add a Big Cheese to The List, make special note of his eccentricities. Be ready to have your cube stocked with white bread, a toaster and a fridge full of milk. Know what to argue about and what to chat amiably about. If a Big Cheese favors those horrid, multi-colored, $300 sweaters that look knitted by Stevie Wonder, then by all means, have one ready to slip into should a BC visit be ready to happen.

And for the love of all that’s holy, if you start fake typing to make yourself look busy during a BC visit, actually type something that looks like work. You don’t want the exec to walk by your cube and see you intensely typing out: “aa;vubrev;iqebeqibwrv;uwvb;bw.”

(To be continued in Chapter Three, Part Three)