Look around your office. Over there, in the corner, is Jim. Jim with the senior grade, the big car, the extra holiday allowance, presumably on a salary at least twice yours. Jim, who never delivered anything, whose projects never seem to succeed, who never meets his targets. How is it possible that Jim could be in such a senior position? Was he once a bright young thing, brimming with energy and ideas, capable of cycling to the summit of Everest every second Tuesday? Of course not. He’s always been useless. So how come he has the senior job?
The answer is that Jim is the ultimate Alternative Manager. If he really is that stupid, he probably does it instinctively. Maybe you can get ahead by instinct too. If you can, you are one of the lucky few like Jim. Most people have to learn the hard way, or never learn. Meanwhile, they persist in the fallacy that people climb the corporate ladder by doing their jobs well and exceeding their targets. They devote all their energy to climbing the ladder when it would be so much easier to use the elevator. But then most people don’t seem to realise the elevator exists.
This blog was inspired by two things. Firstly by sheer frustration with many of my staff and colleagues over the years whose careers have been damaged or limited by their determined attempts to progress merely by being good at their jobs. Some of them are good at their jobs, some of them are outstanding. They deserve, really deserve, to be very successful. But they are still plod plod plodding up the ladder. All it needs is for them to master some Alternative Management basic techniques for climbing that elevator, and that success they deserve would drop into their laps.
Secondly by my experience, especially early in my own career, with the Jims in the corner. How could they be so stupid? How could they make such bad decisions? How could they be highly rated by the company? How could I be so naïve? Battering my head ridiculously against the Jims, it eventually dawned on me that actually they were a lot less stupid than me. So I started to identify and describe their behaviours and tactics.
The Alternative Manager is a systematic introduction to the basic tactics and strategies of corporate or office life. It looks at how to deal with those around you – staff, bosses and colleagues – in effective ways. It looks at the bread-and-butter of daily office life – meetings, suppliers and projects – and how to deal with them.
It is not a blog about management technique. There are lots of blogs and books already available, plus your corporate training programme. It does not, for example, tell you how to chair a meeting. It tells you what behaviours and tactics to look for in the meeting participants which are either a threat or opportunity to you. It does not tell you how to carry out a staff appraisal. It tells you which staff are important to you and why, and how to make maximum use of them.
It takes behaviours and tactics which people often understand instinctively, but are not able to respond to intellectually, and provides classifications and logical approaches to dealing with them. In short, it is a management textbook, but not a textbook about management. It is a map for finding the elevator in the jungle.
And a guide to how to join Jim.
