The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life - Hardcover

Murray, Charles

 
9780804141444: The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804141444 ISBN 13: 9780804141444
Verlag: Currency, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

For those starting out in their careers—and those who wish to advance more quickly—this is a delightfully fussy guide to the hidden rules of the road in the workplace and in life.
 
As bestselling author and social historian Charles Murray explains, at senior levels of an organization there are curmudgeons everywhere, judging your every move. Yet it is their good opinion you need to win if you hope to get ahead.
 
Among the curmudgeon’s day-to-day tips for the workplace:
 
• Excise the word “like” from your spoken English
• Don’t suck up
• Stop “reaching out” and “sharing”
• Rid yourself of piercings, tattoos, and weird hair colors
• Make strong language count
 
His larger career advice includes:
 
• What to do if you have a bad boss
• Coming to grips with the difference between being nice and being good
• How to write when you don’t know what to say
• Being judgmental (it’s good, and you don’t have a choice anyway)

And on the great topics of life, the curmudgeon urges us to leave home no matter what, get real jobs (not internships), put ourselves in scary situations, and watch Groundhog Day repeatedly (he’ll explain).
 
Witty, wise, and pulling no punches, The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead is an indispensable sourcebook for living an adult life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  He first came to national attention in 1984 with his book Losing Ground.  His subsequent books include In Pursuit, The Bell Curve (with Richard J. Herrnstein), What it Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, In Our Hands, Real Education, and the national bestseller Coming Apart.  He received a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.  He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

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ON THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN THE WORKPLACE

The first thing you need to understand is that most large organizations in the private sector are run by curmudgeons like me. That statement may not be true of organizations in the entertainment or information technology (IT) industries, which are often filled with senior executives who are either young themselves or trying to be. But it is true of most large for-profit businesses, nonprofits, foundations, law firms, and financial institutions. Academia goes both ways, with many professors who try to be best buddies with their students but a few who are world-class curmudgeons.

Technically, a curmudgeon is an ill-tempered old man. I use the term more broadly to describe highly successful people of both genders who are inwardly grumpy about many aspects of contemporary culture, make quick and pitiless judgments about your behavior in the workplace, and don’t hesitate to act on those judgments in deciding who gets promoted and who gets fired.

Be warned that curmudgeons usually don’t give off many clues that they’re doing these things. I’m an example. I don’t snap at subordinates. When someone approaches me, I like to think that I’m accessible and friendly. I try to express any criticisms cheerfully and tactfully. And yet behind my civilized public persona I am perpetually ticking off things in my head about the employees I encounter, both pluses and minuses, filing them away, and when the time comes for performance reviews, those judgments shape my responses.

Lots of the senior people in your workplace who can help or hinder your career are closeted curmudgeons like me, including executives in their forties who have every appearance of being open minded and cool. By their fifties, the probability that they are curmudgeons has risen precipitously. By their sixties, you can just about bank on it, no matter how benign their public presentation of self may be.

Curmudgeons of all ages and both genders remain closeted partly because they want to be polite, but also because they don’t want to sound like geezers, old and out of touch. Voicing curmudgeonly opinions would instantly label them as such. So they never admit that they judge you on the basis of their inner curmudgeon--but they do. If you want to get ahead, you should avoid doing things that will make them write you off.

These tips about how to behave in the workplace range from matters of style to the meat of your work. Some of them advise you to conform to your curmudgeons’ prejudices on matters that you may think should be no one’s business but your own. But let’s get one thing straight at the outset:

1. Don’t suck up.

Let’s assume that you’re going to work for a quality organization in the private sector. Within that organization, some of the people who run the place will be extremely good at what they do, some will be merely competent, and some will conform to the Peter Principle (“Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence”). It’s not a good idea to suck up to any of them.

By sucking up, I mean flattering supervisors, pretending to agree with their bad ideas, or otherwise unctuously trying to ingratiate yourself with them. Sucking up is usually thought to be a great way to get ahead, so this advice requires some explanation.

My career has brought me into contact with many highly successful people from the corporate, financial, publishing, journalistic, and scholarly worlds. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I have to go by my experience: Just about all of the highly successful people I’ve dealt with have been impressively skilled. I cannot think of any who got to their prominent positions by faking it. They have also almost always been self-confident, not in need of stroking, and good judges of people.

Caveat

I have had no experience with highly successful people in the entertainment industry or in government bureaucracies, where my advice may not apply. In politics, sucking up is part of the job description.

If the highly successful people in your organization are like that, trying to tell them they’re wonderful will be a disaster. They will recognize what you’re doing and disdain you for it. And it’s not going to work much better with other supervisors. You don’t want to suck up to the less competent or the incompetent, because (1) they probably are not in a position to help you much anyway, and (2) there’s too much danger that the people you really want to impress will observe your sycophancy and remember it.

The flip side is that highly successful people tend to value honesty and courage. I’m not recommending that you go out of your way to disagree with them or otherwise show your independence. It’s appropriate to be tactful if you’re a junior person working with a senior person, and you certainly don’t want to be abrasive. Just don’t trim your views if they go against the grain of the discussion. Express yourself forthrightly, and the odds are that you’ll get points for it.

If I’m wrong, and you find yourself in an organization where sucking up is in fact a good way to get ahead, look for a new job. It’s not a quality organization after all, no matter how glittering its public reputation may be. Life is too short to work there.

2. Don’t use first names with people considerably older than you until asked, and sometimes not even then.

I have in my library the three-volume collected correspondence, stretching over a half century, between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Their friendship was deep and intimate. And yet the last letter from Jefferson to Madison, written less than a month before Jefferson’s death, begins not with “Dear Jemmy” (Madison’s nickname), but with “Dear Sir.” It concludes “most affectionately yours, Th. Jefferson.” Not “Tom” or “Thomas,” but “Th. Jefferson.”

Ah, for the good old days.

The use of first names has undergone a cultural transformation in the last three or four decades, so that by now the use of honorifics and last names is nearly extinct. It’s not just the telemarketer on the other end of the phone who calls you by your first name. I have had parents introduce me to their six-year-old with the words “This is Charles,” requiring me to choke back an overwhelming urge to pat the little one on the head and say, “But you may call me Sir.”

I blame this misbegotten use of first names on the baby boomers. Frightened of being grown-ups since they were in college, they have shied from anything that reminds them they’re not kids anymore. But we’re not talking about your social interactions with random aging boomers. We’re talking about your professional interactions with highly successful older people whose good opinions you would like to acquire. By and large, highly successful people are quite aware that they are grown-ups. So cater to them: Call them by their last names until invited to do otherwise.

Often the invitation will be offered the first time you meet that highly successful person--“Call me Bill,” says Mr. Smith. But before you respond with “Sure, Bill,” consider what’s going on.

One possibility is that Bill is serious, in which case “Sure, Bill” does you no harm. But another possibility is that Bill is going through the motions because he doesn’t want to appear old and grumpy. In that case, suppose you thank him without using “Bill” and subsequently, unobtrusively, continue to refer to him as Mr. Smith. It’s a no-lose proposition. If Mr. Smith really likes being...

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Verlag
Currency
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804141444
ISBN 13 
9780804141444
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
144
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