Workplace Poker: Are You Playing the Game, or Just Getting Played?

Written by Dan Rust

Narrated by Dan Rust and Rick Adamson

A career advisor explains why many talented, hard-working people often miss out on their full career potential, revealing the tells, blind spots, secrets, and unspoken rules you need to know in order to play the game to win.

While many careers have been impacted by economic downturns, failed projects, downsizing and restructuring, or just bad bosses or bad timing, we all know of colleagues who continue to rise through every tough situation. Most assume that they have an advantage that protects them—degrees from the right schools, great mentors, influential friends and family, or just better luck. But these hyper-successful professionals have faced setbacks, too. Instead of allowing challenges to derail their rise, they’ve learned how to manage them better.

In Workplace Poker, Dan Rust gives you the strategies you need to accelerate your career, and prevent setbacks from stalling your progress or spiraling it downward. The trick, he reveals, is to “play the game under the game,” to think more deeply and act more strategically. If you are talented, ambitious, and hardworking, but feel your career just isn’t accelerating as rapidly as it should, or as fast as you would like it to, this book is for you. If you have been frustrated to see others (less talented, who don’t work as hard as you do) achieve rapid professional progress while your career stalls out, this book is for you. If you’ve been annoyed by those who are successful primarily because of where they went to school, or family connections, or financial resources, this book is for you.

Rust gives you the insight and skills you need to transform yourself and adapt and survive any hurdle—to turn every adversity into advantage, and every struggle into strength, including:

• Recognition of your own “blind spots” and what to do about them

• Mastering strategic and authentic self-promotion

• Enhancing your personal charm and likeability

• Achieving the high energy, both mental and physical, necessary to drive an exceptional career trajectory

• Developing an interest in “corporate anthropology” and the complex human dimensions of business

• Neutralizing the career-stalling impact of difficult or dysfunctional colleagues

• Deeply “owning” and learning from career missteps and failures

In his smart, funny, relatable voice, Rust shares stories of individuals who have applied these capabilities in real world situations, and provides short, focused exercises to help you think about yourself and your own career. With Workplace Poker¸ you’ll learn how to get out of you own way, and find the success you deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780062456663

Dan Rust

Dan Rust is the founder of Frontline Learning, an international publisher of corporate training resources. His award-winning keynote speeches and workshops focus on employee engagement, productivity, and career management. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Reviews for Workplace Poker

[Poku · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It allowed me to see social situations more startegicly, must read if u want to have better insight on u and ur career, i just wish there was more poker analogies.

[daniel5estes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the stories in Workplace Poker profiles a young man who is a natural salesman but when offered the chance to take sales training he declines. His reasoning is that it sounds dreadful and besides what could it teach him if he's already good at sales. Turns out, he still had a lot to learn and his dismissal of the training course was more about avoiding the hard work required to better himself. That story mirrors my own approach to this book, Workplace Poker. Would I like to read a book on how to navigate office politics? No, thanks. How about a book that plainly states that you, and you alone, are largely responsible for your own career shortcomings? Not interested. But you know what? I needed to hear this advice. I didn't like it most of the time, and I didn't agree with several chapters at all, but spread throughout there were moments of brutal truth. And those moments hit home hard. The chapters on personal accountability were the most illuminating. I'm not one to victim blame, not even for myself, but it's hard not to think that life's deck is stacked against you sometimes. Workplace Poker's response would be, yes, it is stacked against you but so what? That's not an excuse for you not to act. That's a harsh pill to swallow.

[anniehidalgo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading a book about work is like taking some kind of bitter medicine for me. Of course I want to succeed in life. But the ideas that the author lays out, while I actually do believe them to be true - depress me. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with knowing how to promote yourself, or networking, or learning to persuade and take risks. It is just that the skills that you learn in school appear to be so absolutely antithetical to those needed to get along in your adult life. If I learned to play a game for years, only to find out that the end rules would be different, I'm not sure that this is something I want to stare in the face. And workplace lingo also makes me want to jump off a cliff - 'just keep your head down', for instance. It is like the corporate workplace is a tornado drill that goes on for years. I'm not sure that it necessarily is, or that it has to be that way. But the entire book leaves me simultaneously thinking - 'if only I could follow this advice, change everything about myself and become a real power player' - and, 'Really? There isn't another way? ALL the jobs are like this?' This book is the work equivalent of Queen Bees and Wannabees. I dislike hidden agendas, and I can't decide whether learning about people who have them is ultimately beneficial, or enabling something that I don't want to be a part of. When I decide which it is, I'll let you know whether I like this book.