Read It Secretly: A Veteran Shark Teaches You How to Dominate Office Politics. Ultimate Tactics for Employees in Order to Beat the System and Achieve Your Life Goals.

By John J. Smith VII

A wolf in office politics unveils the secret tactics and strategies that allowed him to survive, crush his opponents, and climb the hierarchical ladders of many organizations around the world. Read It Secretly does not include the traditional management and leadership concepts that are usually taught in the classrooms of the business world. Read It Secretly includes sharp advice that will be beneficial to you in the first place. It will also benefit your employer if he gets ahold of it.

Whether you are a top executive, a manager, or have just started your career, Read It Secretly will necessarily change something in your professional life.

Read It Secretly includes key topics such as

objectives and decision-making, how to deal with your opponents, how to manage nasty emails, how to decrease your workload, the octopus tactic, whistle-blowing, numerous real-life study cases, and much more.

The only job you have now is to read it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543437645

John J. Smith VII

John J. Smith is a veteran shark and expert in office politics. John is neither a consultant nor a university professor nor a retired employee. He is not the kind of author writing either theoretical concepts or faraway experiences based on memories. John is an active, high-ranking professional who has worked for many organizations (large and small) and has been posted in many countries across the globe. His advices are therefore based on real, practical, and actual experiences.

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Copyright © 2017 by John J. Smith VII.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017911244

ISBN:      Hardcover            978-1-5434-3762-1

                Softcover             978-1-5434-3763-8

                eBook                  978-1-5434-3764-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/25/2017

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CONTENTS

Introduction

To Whistle-Blow or Not to Whistle-Blow?

Personal Objectives vs Employer’s Objectives

Making the Right Decision at Work

The Octopus Tactic

Dealing with Nasty E-mails

The Importance of E-mail Archiving

Bad Surprises

Decreasing Your Workload (and Your Stress)

How to Avoid Creating (Too Many) Opponents

How to Deal with Your Opponents

Epilogue

Disclaimer

This book is geared toward providing helpful information to employees in general. It is clearly stated that the author of this book is not providing here any type of qualified service. If a reader is seeking to obtain personal counseling where the applicable laws require a professional, such as a lawyer for example, then that reader should consult such qualified professionals.

Any liability by use or abuse of direction, suggestion, or guidance is the sole responsibility of the reader. Under no circumstances is any legal responsibility held against the author or publisher for any damages or loss due to the information contained in this book.

The information provided in this book is solely provided for information purpose only and does not offer a guarantee of result or outcome for any purpose.

Introduction

Read It Secretly does not include the traditional management and leadership concepts that are usually taught in the classrooms of the business world (academia and corporate). If you are searching for the conventional tactics, then I will say it very frankly: Read It Secretly is probably not what you are searching for.

On the other hand, Read It Secretly will be of high interest to you if

1. you have already been acquainted with the traditional leadership methods, which are described in the mainstream business books and have applied them with little personal success until now;

2. you have discovered that the majority of the highly successful people in any organization do not really behave like the perfect leader that is described in an organization’s guidelines;

3. you do not see the employment world as an idealistic environment in which university-taught management techniques are the norm; and

4. you are facing specific situations at work where classical leadership methods do not give the expected results.

Read It Secretly includes:

• unusual methods and concepts to succeed in office politics and boost your chances to achieve your life goals;

• unconventional tactics that are not tainted with the usual politically correct wisdom;

• sharp advice, which will be beneficial to you in the first place and to your employer in the second place, therefore, still benefiting your employer, but not the opposite, as advocated in the mainstream schools of thought;

• strategies and tactics to crush your opponents at work;

• many study cases based on real-life experiences;

• and much more.

You may ask yourself, What makes this book special compared to other unconventional management books on the market?

The answer is very simple: I am neither a consultant nor a university professor or a retired employee. I am not the kind of author writing either theoretical concepts or faraway experiences based on memories. I am an active, high-ranking professional who has worked for many organizations (large and small) and has been posted in many countries across the globe.

I am actually working for a very large organization. My advices are therefore based on real, practical, and actual experiences.

My methods have allowed me to:

1. very quickly climb the hierarchical ladders in several organizations with all the odds against me with regards to where I have started from,

2. achieve my personal life goals in addition to my professional ones, and

3. find the right life-work balance in order to succeed in both of them.

Before I go any further, I would like to mention a few practical points about this book:

• Whenever I mention organization, I mean any kind of entity that employs people, such as companies (publicly traded or privately held), governmental institutions, universities, schools, hospitals, etc.

• I have tried as much as possible to write sentences that are neutral with regards to the use of masculine or feminine tense. But you may encounter some sentences where I have used the masculine tense in order to make the sentence clearer. I do apologize for my readers about this; I did not intend to be biased.

I wish you a very fruitful reading and hope that Read It Secretly will help you achieve your goals because I have included my best and sincerest recommendations in here, tried and proven.

To Whistle-Blow or Not to Whistle-Blow?

¹

Unless you are the next Edward Snowden² or Chelsea Manning³, don’t even consider whistle-blowing on your employer. The reason is very simple: a whistle-blowing action usually means the beginning of the end of your employment with this employer and with any other one for the rest of your career. It is basically signing the death sentence on your employment.

Nobody wants to hire a whistle-blower for whatever position, whatever salary, or whatever reason. Unless you immigrate to the Amazon area (or a similar location), you will nearly never be able to hide your past as a whistle-blower. All whistle-blowers have their five minutes of glory, and the Internet does not facilitate the deletion of their past. Whistle-blowers become public figures and are kind of blacklisted in the minds of recruiters.

Most of us have already witnessed, in our employment experience, a bad behavior that we think we can blow the whistle on (or could have blown). But the large majority of these stories are usually not worth a whistle-blow. It is true that some stories are more serious than others, but at the end of the day, the ultimate test in order to know if yours is really worth it or not is to ask yourself these questions:

• Will my story be in the international media for at least the next ten years?

• Will my story lead to the resignation or jailing of the head of the employing organization?

• Is my story serious enough to bring down the company share price from its actual price down to a few pennies in case it is listed on the stock market?

If you cannot answer yes to one of the questions above, then your story is most probably not worth destroying your life for. Nevertheless, if your case is very serious, then of course seek legal advice. But in general, try to avoid going public. If you are witnessing something that is not against the law but that you still feel uncomfortable with, then consider engineering your transfer to another section of your employing organization or finding a position with another employer. If you must inform the authorities, check whether you can do it anonymously, but again consult legal advice. The point that I am trying to make is that there is no need to destroy your life because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Think about it for a second, do you know what happens to whistle-blowers after they go public?

I had the chance to know a person (let’s call him Mark) before and after he became a whistle-blower. Mark’s story is typical to what happens to whistle-blowers. Mark was a highly ranked employee who was in charge of compliance for a large multinational. He was very well paid and was working at their global headquarters. He was around fifty years old, and thanks to his accumulated salaries, he had already bought a beautiful house and saved a lot of money for his children’s university tuition fees, for his comfortable retirement with his spouse, and for anything else they wanted.

One day, Mark had a new boss at work who did not care about compliance. Mark’s reports on noncompliances were totally ignored, even the most critical ones. Mark wrote many internal memorandums and alerted the board about these noncompliances. No action was taken to correct the situation, and instead, Mark’s name was removed from the official organigram. He was harassed and later offered another position that did not deal with noncompliances. He was offered an administrative job in an affiliate with no power but with the same high salary. He was offered what we can call a golden cage.

What did Mark do?

He refused the position and blew the whistle publicly. He was harassed even more for another couple of weeks and then fired. Mark sued his employer (for harassment and abusive contract termination), and the latter politely returned back the favor and sued him for confidentiality breaches. It has been nearly a decade now that the court cases are still pending. Mark and his employer regularly meet at the court of justice for their many ongoing cases. On one side, Mark and his uniquely affordable lawyer against the opposing side, an army of expensive lawyers and their experts and witnesses, defending the powerful employer and attacking Mark mercilessly. The employer dragged the court proceedings for years, with his lawyers taking advantage of every opportunity in the legal procedures to postpone and delay.

Mark was never able to find employment after that; nothing, not even an underpaid job. Nobody wanted to hire him anymore; he had scared any potential employer. During ten years, Mark spent his entire savings in order to cope with the cost of life and with the huge legal fees. Today, Mark is the shadow of himself. He looks much older, and he is financially broke and depressed. He sometimes lectures, always with a sad face, as a key speaker in conferences on whistle-blowing where he is applauded as a hero by the participants while he is gently weeping.

The reaction of employers when faced with a whistle-blowing case that explodes in their face is of course to defend themselves, but they also want to make sure that they will not face other whistle-blowing cases in the future. That is why they make sure that the whistle-blower is methodically crushed down. They want to terrorize all their employees by showing them what happens to whistle-blowers. Indeed, when the story goes public, the other employees are usually highly interested in following how the story develops.

Please do not misunderstand me. I have nothing against whistle-blowers. In fact, I admire them. They are true modern heroes, but whistle-blowing was never included in my personal objectives. And the same goes for you. If your personal goals do not include becoming a public symbol for human rights or a keynote speaker at whistle-blowing conferences, then whenever you have the occasion to blow the whistle, remind yourself of your life objectives and focus on them.

Mark’s story is typical, but you can decide for yourself by researching other stories on the Internet. Wikipedia has