The Little Book of Bad Business Advice by Steve Altes Published by St. Martin's Press, 1997   You've tried all the traditional approaches in the business world, read countless self-help books guaranteeing career success, and where has it gotten you?  It's time for new tactics.   My Little Book of Bad Business Advice is more productivity-sapping than Minesweeper and ten-thousand times cheaper than a Harvard MBA. It's a classic in the field of office heinousness. Buy one for yourself and one for your lame-brain boss! Besides, a portion of the profits go to charity. The rest I will squander in a series of foolish get-rich-quick schemes, as usual. Damn!

 

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This is the part where I get filthy rich! Come on people, throw your money away!

 

 

 

Excerpt

• Show up at your company's Toastmasters meeting with a loaf of bread and a stick of butter and act really confused.

• Breeze past top executives' secretaries by always insisting your calls are "personal, confidential, and extremely urgent."

• Follow your brother-in-law's hot stock tip.

• In job interviews, speak ill of your former bosses.

• Tell coworkers, "That's not how we did it at my old company," at least once a day.

• End every business meeting with the admonition, "Remember, we never had this discussion."

• Tell your staff not to think of you as a boss, but as a fellow colleague--a colleague who just happens to be right all the time.

• Give your next budget presentation using a sock-puppet. Introduce it as "Baxter P. McGruff, the bean-counting billy-goat."

• Only use the bathroom in that obscure part of the building and be real secretive about it.

• Strong-arm people into giving to the United Way, participating in the company blood drive, and buying candy bars for your kid's soccer team.

• Post Dilbert cartoons on your office door and write on them: "So true!  That's how stupid my idiot boss it!"

• Always have a back-up plan. For example, if your project fails, your back-up plan can be: "I'll be fired, lose my home and my family, live in a refrigerator box under the bridge, and curse the day I was born."

• Park in the visitor's lot.

• Judge people at work not by their accomplishments, but by their knowledge of sports.

What People Aren't Saying About It

"Possibly the best book of bad business advice published this month."
       - Nora Rawlinson, editor, Publisher's Weekly

"Steve Altes's writing reminds me of Shakespeare, in the sense that both Altes and the bard arranged letters to form words and thus create sentences."
       - Kenneth Branagh, actor

"Buying this book is guaranteed to make you more attractive to the opposite sex and make you live longer. In addition, the pages of this book, when burned, provide a clean, inexhaustible source of energy."
       - Phineas Taylor Barnum, showman