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