Office Politics 201

In My Humble Opinion
41

No, I wouldn’t try to fake it. But a lot of executives do seem to casually toss around their interests for everyone to hear. I don’t need to know you are going race car driving this weekend.

Can I just enjoy a glass of Macallan 12 without being a compendium on scotch whiskey? I would say just don’t look at me bug-eyed if I ask if you prefer single malt or blended.

I would say culture is the key. Ultimately if you don’t fit in, you will never be comfortible and probably not get ahead. You also need to evaluate your roll in relation to the culture of the company. For example, my company is full of MBAs from schools like Wharton, Harvard and INSEAD. They are very good at strategizing because you don’t have to actually produce anything. Sucks for the one analyst who actually does all the work.

Speaking of which, avoid working in IT if you can (unless you really like it or think you will be the next Gates or Zuckerman..you probably won’t FYI). It’s a shit job and generally not respected outside of Silicon Valley. Because shit actually shuts down if it doesn’t work, you have to actually do it right. Better to be in sales or marketing or some other part of the business where “mostly sounds right” is good enough. It’s less stressful.

42

Oh…I used to be in marketing - so did my husband. Hated it because of the “mostly sounds right” - it was WAY to easy to second guess and scapegoat in marketing. Marketing and sales are both high stress places for people who don’t mind moving around and are willing to play games. I’ve been in IT for years now. Its stable. I value stable.

Which I think is part of “land where you will be comfortable.” Some people are really comfortable it IT, or in Operations, or in Financial Accounting. Other people want the fun and excitement of Marketing, Sales or M&A. One thing - don’t go into HR if you “want to work with people.” HR is a policy job. Its covering the company’s butt.

Some people love family companies, and in a family company you can really contribute - but don’t act shocked when second cousin Cathy gets promoted ahead of you with her University of South Dakota English B.A. But family companies can be wonderful places to settle in for the long haul in a mid-level position. Some people want high pressure high turnover high performance companies. They make my own stomach tighten just thinking about them, but the right person can thrive. Don’t be shocked when you get fired nine months after getting hired, even if you are doing a fine job, that’s their nature. But they can be wonderful stepping stones for getting ahead because they take risks, that sort of place will often hire you a step above where you were, and now the title is on your resume.

43

My friend used to say the partners in his firm were fired from some of the top banks on Wall Street.

The problem is that these sort of companies (usually investment banks, consulting firms, startups) tend to have not much of an idea about what they are doing, but they expect people to be “superstars” at doing it. Basically all you need to do is not have a life for a few years and hope nothing you worked on personally got screwed up.

44

I there is some good advice interspersed in the snarking and cynicism.

My basic advice would be to lighten up and get over yourself. You’re not saving the world from nuclear annihilation, you’re just doing business. The facade of self-importance is often due to the insecurity of not being as competent as your position implies. If you try to admit to being just a little bit human and respect your staff, you’ll end up being more successful in the long run. Also, business shouldn’t trump family. Your kids will grow up not knowing who you are, and your only legacy will be doing a good job lining The Man’s pockets for a comparatively trifling trickle-down piece of the pie.

45

Ain’t that the truth. My happy medium there is making sure that the sales and marketing guys consider my information support indispensable, so I get some of the halo effect when they make a big score. :cool:

46

pussy

47

The serious answer to this is that the reason high performance companies hire people in their 20s is the same reason the military does. They can pump them up with bullshit esprit de corps and feed off of their arrogance and natural desire to succeed no matter how stupid the request. The goal is to reach a senior enough level (usually partner or some equivalent) where you either have enough client connections to generate enough work that you don’t need to give a fuck, or you have spent so much of your life working like a pack animal that you still give a fuck only because you have nothing else in your life at this point.

48

Thanks for illustrating why excellent people gravitate towards IT and mediocre people do not.

And thanks again for the raionale as to why the FIRE sector basically constitutes a bunch of greedy societal parasites, taking money for nothing.

And last but not least, thanks for clearly demonstratnig what a cynical, delusional self-absorbed parody of a pompous windbag you really are.

I shall henceforth refer to you as the Over-Generalizing King of the SDMB poseurs: “SDMB OGKP”.

I think you might make a good contestant on one of those Donald Trump reality shows. :stuck_out_tongue:

49

I don’t know that I agree with Nadir, per se, msmith, but as someone from a similar career background, I kinda wonder what you are going for with this thread. I know you have had success in your career, so it feels like you are kicking back in your desk chair, pointing with your cigar while holding a shot of scotch (Macallan 18, with a spritz of branch water) and pontificating. Your basic premise appears to be: I have had success and did so by accepting the basic douchebagginess of worklife and worked it to my advantage.

Okay.

50

[Moderator Warning]Infraction for personal insults outside of The BBQ Pit.[/Moderator Warning]

51

At least I din’t go back and sort through a bunch of old posts looking for the most salacious material I could find find from him, that has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand. :rolleyes:

So just for the record, IMHO, office politics SUCKS. Deep understandings of one’s perceived ability to orchestrate such sophomoric shenanigans reflect.

52

INSEAD? Just curious.

That’s not to say creating strategies is useless, though, right? I thought that’s what higher level management essentially is.

IMO IT is shitty or not depending on what your role is. Tier II support (which I’ve done) usually sucks more than just about anything. Actually building and/or designing stuff is usually enjoyable, although what you say about the stress level is certainly true. One dropped line of code, or unforeseen data anomaly, and you’re hosed.

53

Well, I would say that my much of my success is based on accepting the douchebagginess of worklife and many times where I was not successfull is from an inability or unwillingness to to partake in that douchebaggery. There are certainly people who are more successful than me at my age.

People can choose to either learn from my lessons, or not.

Plus I’m only about mid-career. A bit too early to kick back my chair.

It’s one of the top-ranked business schools outside of the US. There are campuses in France and Singapore.

One might ask why upper management needs someone else to make decisions for them.

It’s not useless, but it is also not as hard as actually building something. I worked on IT strategy projects at a large management consulting firm and I ran a small strategy group at a Fortune 500 company. Basically my job was to look at how the company used various types of systems, research ways of trying to do it better and putting together Powerpoint decks to make recommendations to upper management. It’s a heck of a lot easier than actually building or maintaining those systems (which I have also done).

Plus no one calls you at 3:00 am because they need a Powerpoint slide!

IMHO, in every field there is always friction between the people who come up with “ideas for stuff” and the people who actually build it. The idea people want to see their ideas come to fruition and are only constrained by their imagination while the builders are constrained by physics and reality and catch all the shit for it.

You will find excellent and mediocre people in every field. But people in the IT field seem to be more prone to bitterness and resentment and it is easy to see why. It is not respected in a superficial “my son is a lawyer” or “I’m dating an investment banker” way. Often it is not even respected in a professional way. Most typical IT organizations typically consist of programmer/analysts who are forced to work long or inconsistent hours responding to every firedrill necessary to keep their patched-together systems running. Often their “project managers” are not even considered part of “management” in the sense that they have any real input or decision making ability with respect to “the business”. Their jobs are frequently outsourced or supplanted by external “consultants” from places like Accenture or EDS, sending a clear message that “management thinks you are so stupid at your job that they can replace you with someone halfway around the world or a bunch of overpriced kids that just got trained last week.”
Now I’m going to have to ask you to stop projecting your bitterness on me in this thread. And the mods have already told you to stop. I don’t know who you so clearly I am not your problem. Don’t get mad at me because you are “excellent” and frustrated while some “mediocre” is bringing in $250,000* a year as VP of Bullshit.

And why do you keep calling me “poseur”? I’ve been pretty much up front and honest about who I am and what I do (abliet deliberately vague for privacy reasons).

*Not my salary or job title

54

I can pretty much guarantee that he will stop projecting his bitterness on you in this thread…or any other.

55

I agree to a certain extent; it’s kind of a variation of the Voltaire quote "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities ". I’ve often referred to that concept as puppy farming. But not everyone is that cynical, even in high performance fields. Plus, luckily, there are ways to stay out of that world and still be successful.

56

I think there is a bit of a tortoise and the hare aspect to a lot of those jobs. The high powered fast paced jobs do look good on your resume and open a lot of doors. And they can provide opportunity for rapid advancement IF the company is growing. And the people who work for them often turn down their noses at people who work for more traditional companies in more 9 to 5 roles. But the reality is that companies cannot give meaningful promotions every year forever. Eventually growth stabalizes and you end up like my old company with everyone stuck at some mid-level “manager” title. It’s also a little hard to stand out as a superstar when every single coworker is also an ambitious, highly educated superstar just like you. Basic math says you can’t all get ahead.

Meanwhile, while a lot of these superstars are making lateral moves every 1 to 3 years, some lazy “dummy” who stayed at the same place 15 years is slowly promoted to vice president of their group.

57

Yeah; I think you’re usually better off changing companies every few years unless the CEO is your dad or something. Stick around long enough, no matter how good you are, someone or something is going to derail you, or you’ll get Peter Principle’d. Besides, I find it more enriching to change the water in the fishbowl now and then.

58

Linda, is that you?

59

My company you can get called late at night or on weekends to deliver a well researched powerpoint pitch first thing in the morning…

IT is a great point for Office Politics 201. Young’ens, pull up a chair. Working for a cost center, *any *cost center, is one of the most unlikely ways to get ahead in a corporate culture. It’s like walking around with a giant LOSER tatoo’d on your forehead. And if you must work in a cost center, work in one that is patently critical to something everyone values like being on the compensation committee or quota setting. You’re stigmatized a loser because you haven’t figured out how the game is played and parlayed your cost center ass to somewhere closer to real power. (Note: it’s a completely *different *thing if you have conciously decided that you don’t want to be on the fast track or are more interesed in the “life” part of “work life balance” and that’s played in a different way. For a tortured analogy, just know you’re a guard on the punt return team instead of the starting backfield.)

IT is it’s own particular brand of hell. The only indespensible people are low level technicians or outsourced Indians on the helpdesk who get worked to death and no appreciation. To anyone outside of IT, just about any other role in IT can be at least temporarily killed off. The sales guys don’t understand the battleship that is most IT groups and projects that must be turned, and they frankly don’t care, but will loudly proclaim how IT is preventing them from making more profit for the company. Most IT groups are grossly underfunded and their default answer is “no, you can’t run xxx (Oracle CRM) on anything but your souless Dell laptop.” All projects take forever and IT usually implements a system designed by clueless HQ drones for the “business users” with “input” but without the necessary background to do it right.

Now, i don’t mean to say that IT is full of losers and are not critical to the success of the company. But that’s how 99% of the corporate world looks at it, and that makes it really hard if that’s your ladder to success.

I started my career in investment banking research. It took about 2 weeks to figure out the traders and the sales guys made 2-1000x more money (2x just as a starting salary), could swear as much as they wanted, behavior would be tolerated that might put one into jail anywhere else, expense accounts were amazing, there was no dress code, and the list goes on. If you’re not driving revenue, you’re an amateur team competing with the pros. Not impossible to get ahead but it’s a lot easier to catch the superbowl touchdown pass if you are on a winning team.

60

I will use this thread to ask advice, I am glad msmith started it because I would like his input as well as everyone else who may want to chime in (warning: potentially long).

I work in a smallish office for a huge company. I am the leader of a team of four people. I take on clients and am responsible for bringing them into the organization and starting the relationship. By any measure one cares to use I am among the most successful people in my job role within the company. Everything I do can be measured and quantified so there is little ambiguity to this statement. I generally end the year somewhere between the top 10-15% of the rankings.

I have been working here five years and since the very beginning I have been paired with a considerably younger (I am 37, she is 27) junior member of the team. I am a financial planner and her role is to take on the maintenance of our clients with less complex needs. We are a non-commissioned planning firm, so we are not paid directly on sales or production. Generally though I earn at least twice what she does. I like her very much. As far as likeability goes, she is near the top of people I have worked with in my career, however she does nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing all day.

In the infinite wisdom of our management structure, I am not her boss, nor am I the boss of anyone on my team, that is delegated to a manager who works in an office two hours away. I speak to him maybe five times a year and he is my boss as well. As my responsibilities have grown so has the amount of work I have to do. The presumption is that having her on my team makes it doable, though I would have to work hard. The reality is that I am working every night at home and at least part of every weekend as well and still falling behind.

If I ask her to do a task it simply isn’t done, ever. She has met with 39 people all year, I have met with 220. Her refusal to pick up the phone or call people back has become embarassing. These are my clients and my responsibility and I have told them she will be taking care of them. She has made it look like she is productive by doing several things which create obvious problems:

She has taken credit for my work, hoping I wouldn’t notice or object. I did object and our manager formally reprimanded her and that created frosty relations as she felt betrayed I didn’t go to her first. I felt it was a sufficient betrayal of trust that I had to do it.

Now she has taken to faking meetings that aren’t taking place and ‘working from home’ a couple of days a week. This does not directly effect me, but it does make it appear she is somewhat productive when she is doing nothing. I can’t stress enough how little work I mean by nothing. Come in at 11:00, chat for an hour with a co-worker, go to lunch for two hours, call one client and go home around 5:30. My boss is overworked and clueless. The only way he would know about this would be if I told him. The likely result would be that she would be fired.

Her mother died last month after a long illness and some of this may be related to that, but she has done very little work for the last two years and I have coped with it figuring her manager would eventually notice. He hasn’t. So if I lay it all out, then I get her fired. Everyone else in my office is aware of how little she does, and wouldn’t blame me if I did this, but I am having trouble pulling the trigger.

I feel bad as her mother’s death was hard on her and she may be somewhat depressed, but I have talked to her about her lack of work several times already with no lasting result .

Do I owe it to her to give her one more chance to shape up?

Have you ever worked with someone who was able to change from unproductive to productive?

I hate to see someone with a good personality and a decent amount of talent go, but if I do nothing I will continue to be buried by work and it is affecting my family life and my productivity. I hate the cluelessness of management both in declaring me the leader of a team over which I have no authority and then placing the actual manager in a position where the only way he can understand what is actually happening is through my tattling.