How to Work for an Idiot, Revised and Expanded with More Idiots, More Insanity, and More Incompetency: Survive and Thrive Without Killing Your Boss

254 Pages·2011·1.66 MB·English

by  John Hoover

Praise for How to Work for an Idiot
“If you have the unhappy experience of working for someone you think is a
real jerk, Dr. John Hoover says there is hope.”
—Bloomberg Television “How to Work for an Idiot is so cleverly disguised,
you might think you’re reading Norman Vincent Peale.”
—Bloomberg Radio
“…an irreverent and realistic look at what people must deal with every day at
work.”
—CNNfn
HOW TO WORK FOR AN IDIOT
REVISED & EXPANDED WITH MORE IDIOTS, MORE
INSANITY, AND MORE INCOMPETENCY
SURVIVE & THRIVE WITHOUT KILLING YOUR BOSS
By John Hoover, PhD
With illustrations by Steve Lait
Copyright © 2011 by John Hoover
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright
Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form
or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter
invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.
HOW TO WORK FOR AN IDIOT, REVISED & EXPANDED
EDITED BY KIRSTEN DALLEY
TYPESET BY NICOLE DEFELICE
Cover design by Howard Grossman/12E Design
Printed in the U.S.A.
Cartoons used with permission of Steve Lait.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoover, John, 1952-
How to work for an idiot : revised and expanded with more idiots, more
insanity,
and more incompetency : survive and
thrive without killing your boss / by John Hoover. -- Rev. and expanded.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: How to work for an idiot : survive & thrive -- without killing your
boss. c2004.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60163191-6 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-635-5 (ebook) 1. Managing
your
boss. 2. Executives--Psychology. 3. Office
politics. 4. Interpersonal relations. 5. Psychology, Industrial. I. Title.
HF5548.83.H66 2012
650.1’3--dc23
2011026934
Dedication & Acknowledgments
At this stage of my life I’m grateful that my boss is not an idiot. In fact, Amy
Friedman, CEO and founder of Partners in Human Resources International,
where I direct the executive coaching practice, is a most caring and
compassionate business leader, well known for her endearing and enduring
relationship skills. My other two bosses at Partners International from 2006
through today, Paul Gorrell and Trish Kyle, are talented, resourceful, and
engaged corporate learning professionals, as well. I therefore send half of this
dedication to all of the Good Bosses out there, like Amy, Trish, and Paul, who
are cutting edge enough to understand that a key ingredient to success is the
ability to make the first laugh of the day at one’s own expense. The other half of
the dedication I send to those who suffer under the yoke of working for one of
the other boss types. Keep the faith.
This second edition would not be going to print if not for the confidence and
leadership demonstrated by my publisher, Ron Fry, who had the prescience to
back this title with public relations and creative marketing. Laurie Kelly-Pye and
Michael Pye of Career Press have also been at the vanguard of this book’s
success since its original release in 2003. Kirsten Dalley edited this second
edition brilliantly, giving my mother, Ruth Schultz Hoover, the gifted writer and
über-editor of the first edition, a chance to simply wave appreciatively as this
edition went to press.
Many thanks to my legal eagles, Mark Merriman and Andy Tavel, at
Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC in New York.
Other acknowledgments could be legion if space allowed. For example, I
send heartfelt thanks to my dearest friend, Paula Hammond, who is always eager
to give helpful advice to this recovering idiot. My sister, Ann Bourke, is an ally
in my mission to rescue people from their inner idiots, beginning with my own. I
am also grateful for the experience of working with talented colleagues
throughout the executive coaching industry, at Fielding Graduate University, at
City University of New York, and at the American Management Association.
Most of all, I thank a loving God who has forgotten as far as the east is from the
west what a nincompoop I have been at times in my personal and professional
affairs. I am blessed.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Confessions of a Recovering Idiot
Chapter 2: Will the Real Idiot Please Stand Up?
Chapter 3: Characteristics and Competencies for Boss Types
Chapter 4: Idiot Procreation
Chapter 5: Banishing Talent
Chapter 6: Success in Spite of Stupidity
Chapter 7: Idiot-Think: The Great Disguise
Chapter 8: A Strategic Partnership
Chapter 9: Idiot-Speak: How to Talk to Your Idiot Boss
Chapter 10: Idiot-Eat: How to Break Bread With Your Idiot Boss
Chapter 11: Idiocy: Some Theories
Chapter 12: Recalibrating Expectations, Repurposing Anger
Index
About the Author
Introduction
This book contains the debris they scraped off the walls after my head
exploded. For years I wrote books on leadership, creativity, and organizational
performance, traveling far and wide while extolling the virtues of innovation,
flattened organizations, collaborative leadership, and shared responsibility in the
workplace. My clients welcomed me and nodded approvingly as I taught the
principles of teamwork and open communication. They even waited politely
until I had finished and left the building before ignoring my advice.
How to Work for an Idiot is my revenge.
Regardless of what you’re thinking, the Idiot I am most worried about is not
the one in the corner or penthouse office—it’s the one in the mirror. Accepting
my personal powerlessness over stupidity and how my life had become
unmanageable, I joined a recovery program for clueless creatures and found
idiot-free serenity. Not a world without Idiots, but a peaceful perspective from
which they could no longer perturb me.
By studying the evolutionary hiccup that resulted in Idiot Bosses (I-Bosses), I
discovered why the females of some species eat their young rather than allowing
them to grow into bosses who impose their ignorance on others with less
institutional authority. Many direct reports from my early days as a boss might
have wished my mother had had a healthier postpartum appetite.
Publishing a book such as this is not without consequences. I’m an executive
coach, I supervise an executive coaching practice at Partners International in
New York City, and I even helped launch a coaching certificate program at City
University of New York, where I teach Coaching in the Context of the
Organization. Certain people are shocked to hear the word idiot in my lexicon. It
is not generally considered a term of endearment in polite company. Some
people, especially those in human resources departments who might otherwise
hire me to coach and consult, find it pejorative, even offensive. As a recovering
Idiot Boss, I find that using language that aptly describes my history is a terrific
reminder to me as well as a bridge to others who use such language—in their
heads or aloud—when they describe their employers to friends, colleagues,
family members, and coaches.
THE ANGER IS OUT OF CONTROL
Where such language exists, there is work to be done. Many people out there
are angry and self-destructive and blame it on their bosses. They need help from
someone who will press pause on the Polite Machine, roll up his sleeves, engage
with them, laugh with them, and cry with them on the journey to becoming a
changed person who is truly appreciative of others and dedicated to the success
of the organization that employs them.
If you don’t believe there is an underlying current of anger and resentment
running beneath the surface of all the contemporary boss humor—from Scott
Adams’s eternally popular Dilbert and The Office on NBC to The Devil Wears
Prada from Fox 2000 Pictures and Horrible Bosses from New Line Cinema—
you’re not paying attention. Since the first edition of How to Work for an Idiot
was released in 2003, the tsunami of boss bashing has risen to new heights.
Whether you are the boss or the bossed, it’s time to take this boss satire
seriously.
I authored the original edition of this book mostly for comic relief, only to
find that many people were buying it out of sheer desperation. The reader
reviews posted on Amazon.com from the first edition became a curious debate
between readers with a healthy sense of humor versus those who nursed
homicidal fantasies about their bosses. There were those who purchased the
book expecting humor, and who got humor and raved about it. Five stars. There
were also those who expected the first edition to contain previously unpublished
secret methods and techniques for taking the boss down without detection. Some
readers thought I was going to share powerful ways to take on the boss, stomp
him into a pulp, and be rewarded handsomely by the corporate Kahunas with pay
raises and all-expense-paid trips to Philadelphia, or perhaps cheered with
standing ovations and cornered for autographs as they walked into meetings, the
employee cafeteria, or industry trade shows.
These latter readers were seriously disappointed and said so in their scathing
reviews, calling me a fraud for promising to teach them how to work for an Idiot
only to teach them the most successful way to work for an Idiot is to not to be
the Idiot. Some Amazon.com reviewers who liked the book began critiquing the
reviewers who hated the book, pointing out that they missed the point, thus
turning the Amazon.com review page into a forum.
Sadly, both sides of the debate missed at least part of the point, which leaves
the responsibility squarely on my shoulders as a less-than-stellar communicator.
Those who read the first edition and split a gut laughing (which led to a few
Transportation Security Administration incidents) appreciated the satire and
sacrilege, but skipped over the substantive messages about materially
transforming how one deals with one’s boss. Those who bought the book and
read between the lines in search of invisible ink and secret, clandestine
instructions for a foolproof bossicide—the perfect crime that no jury in the land
would hold against them—found nothing between the lines and felt cheated.
The greatest heartbreak of all came in e-mail after e-mail from all over the
world (the first edition was published in 19 languages) to
www.howtoworkforanidiot.com informing me that people had purchased the
book, loved the book, laughed with friends over the book, even left the book on
their worst enemies’ desks while their worst enemies were at lunch and the boss
was sure to see it, yet failed to appreciate that the boss management information
on those pages was legit. After some of them lost their jobs or were passed over
for promotions, they wrote to me describing the epiphanic moment when they
realized, Oh, there really is an art and science to boss management and I was
supposed to actually do this stuff. It happened to a talented journalist who ran a
popular feature on the book, then turned and defied his new, younger editor and
got a pink slip for his efforts. Ouch.
MAKING MONKEYS OUT OF YOU AND ME
The tone in this book is decidedly irreverent because other than outright waste,
fraud, negligence, or stupidity, nothing will consume an organization’s precious
resources faster (with no return whatsoever) than a sacred cow. Sacred cows
graze on sacred ground in nearly every for-profit or against-profit organization
I’ve ever been exposed to. Sacred cows and sacred ground are part of the
undocumented culture that no one is allowed to acknowledge, let alone
challenge. Only a few corporate leaders bought copies of the first edition of How
to Work for an Idiot in bulk for their employees to read because most Kahunas
felt that it expressly violated the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”
corporate code. They were correct. It did.
But just because people aren’t walking around the company calling their
bosses Idiots to their faces doesn’t mean they’re not thinking it. Just because
people aren’t coming to blows doesn’t mean they’re working well together.
There is more power and thereby more potential danger in what people seal in
their hearts than in what they choose to show. Anyone with an ounce of tenure in
an organization is aware that the organization operates on unspoken rules and
follows an unpublished org chart. Pretending otherwise is to become one of
those cute little monkeys who neither hears, sees, nor speaks any evil.
CHEESEBURGERS IN PARADISE