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By Geoffrey James
Sales Machine Blogger
Some of these books reveal the corporate underbelly or explain how to get ahead without your manager's blessing. Others encourage behaviors that, while fun and profitiable for you, are guaranteed to drive your manager batty.
Click on the "NEXT" button above, to browse our library of highly subversive business books.
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21 Dirty Tricks at Work is simply the best book ever written about office politics. Most books about office politics try to make all nice-nice. They explain that office politics are part of the game, and that if you approach politics with the right attitude, your ability to work with others will ensure that you succeed. That's good to know, except that it's a load of horse manure.
Rather than the HR-approved junk that you'll find elsewhere, this book actually describes, in detail, the kind of low-down nasty crap that the managers and co-workers can and will use to make sure that you get stuck with all the work and none of the credit. This is office politics in the real world, baby, and it's not pretty.
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book because it will make you immune when the boss wants to pull a dirty trick on you. More importantly, you'll know exactly how to use the same dirty tricks to get your way, regardless of what the boss really wants.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and you'll outmaneuver your boss every time.
Amazon: 21 Dirty Tricks at Work: How to Win at Office Politics
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If your boss recommends a business book, chances are it will be one that extols the virtues of a great manager or visionary, like Jack Welsh, Henry Ford or Attila the Hun. That's exactly how your boss wants you to think about him – a colossus bestride the business world, pointing the way to a brighter and more prosperous tomorrow.
The Peter Principle was based upon research into failures at nuclear power plants, where it was shown that "anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging applications until it fails." That's certainly the can in most companies, where the most "successful" denizens quickly find their level of incompetence.
It's absolutely true that members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. The last thing your boss wants is for you to notice he's been promoted to the point where he no longer knows WTF he's doing.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and you'll realize that your boss is clueless.
Amazon: The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
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This brief and easily-read book explains exactly how to use statistics to "prove" whatever you'd like to prove.
For example, How to Lie With Statistics explains how to use simple mathematical operations (like averages) to create nonsensical "facts" that can drive whatever agenda you'd like. Example: the average wealth of the citizens of a particular town is $100,000, therefore they don't need any government assistance. (The town consists of 1 stingy millionaire and 9 homeless people.)
Similarly, it shows how to build graphs that make a negligible difference seem like a big deal, like so:
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book because, if your boss DOESN'T know these tricks, you can use them to manipulate him to make decisions that are in your interests, but not necessarily hers. And if your boss DOES know these tricks, she's probably using them to convince you that you're overpaid and underworked.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and you'll gain more control over your boss's agenda.
Amazon: How to Lie With Statistics
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Crazy Bosses explains exactly how and why so many of today's CEOs are off their rockers. It describes, in excruciating detail, run-ins with kind of the narcissistic bastards who don't give a tinker's damn if they run the world economy into the dirt, so long as they get their executive butts kissed.
More importantly, for each category of nutcase, it provides a specific and useful action plan to harness the boss's craziness to your own ends. Since crazy bosses get ever more common as you climb higher up the food chain, this book is an indispensable tool for identifying and coping with them before they "cope" with you.
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book because either she's crazy or (if she's still on the way up) wants crazy or (at least) amongst the other crazies. She'd far prefer that you simply enable her craziness (i.e. cringe if she's a bully, nod if she's a narcissist, etc.) rather than use it as a stepping stone to a less-crazy workplace.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and your boss won't be able to push you around any more.
Amazon: Crazy Bosses: Fully Revised and Updated
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Wasting time at work is a time-honored tradition. But why do something unimaginative like play solitaire or surf for porn, when you can play an elaborate prank on your co-workers? What could be a better pick-me-up on a long Wednesday afternoon, for example, than hiding a cell phone in the ceiling of the conference room and then calling the number during a customer presentation?
Cubicle Warfare contains enough pranks to fill an entire lifetime of malingering and it gives precise, step-by-step instructions for executing even the most elaborate. More importantly, it promotes the idea that the real purpose of the workplace is to provide you with entertainment as well as a salary.
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book because, rightly or wrongly, he believes that office pranks are a drain on productivity. Especially if one of them involves, say, replacing the door to his office with finished drywall (my personal favorite). And taking a video of his reaction and posting it on YouTube:
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and you can finally get even.
Amazon: Cubicle Warfare: 101 Office Traps and Pranks
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This award winning book blasts the roof off the myth that outsourcing to China can be done without a reduction in product quality. It reveals industry secrets, such as the dangerous practice of quality fade, which is the deliberate and secret habit of Chinese manufacturers to widen profit margins through the reduction of quality.
Poorly Made in China explains why Chinese suppliers feel they have little to lose by placing consumer safety at risk for the sake of greater profit, which is why the United States now suffers from poisoned toys, adulterated medicine, and so forth. It also explains why so many U.S. brands are going down the toilet due to sub-standard products whose only American component is the brand name.
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book because she and her superiors and peers were snookered by fast-talking Chinese executives, and built an entire manufacturing strategy on a flawed premise that they could get quality on the cheap.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and you'll realize that American management is incredibly naive.
Amazon: Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the China Production Game
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The Good Old Days draws upon prints and photographs from the Bettmann Archive to illustrate what life was really like in the United States from the 1870s to the 1910 or so, when laissez faire capitalism was the law of the land. This makes it the perfect book if you want to discover the utopia that is the natural result of a business environment without labor unions.
You'll learn how the lack of workplace safety resulted in the death of thousands of workers every year. You'll learn how railroad companies paid the families of workers who died on the job exactly one week's wage. You'll learn how children were forced to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, on machines that could remove a hand if any mistake was made.
The reason that your boss doesn't want you to read this book is that it reveals all too clearly why labor unions are pretty good idea, when you consider the alternative, which is sociopathic corporate behavior.Since your boss is probably pushing you to work 60 hour weeks with no overtime pay, this book might convince you that a labor union might not be all that bad an idea.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book, and you might want to join or form a labor union.
Amazon: The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible!
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Forget everything you know about job-hunting. All that stuff about sending out resumes, answering interview questions, and registering on job boards. All that stuff is completely nonsense. Almost nobody gets a job using those traditional methods, and nobody ever gets a GOOD job that way.
Ask the Headhunter provides the step by step methods that high powered executive headhunters use to develop opportunities for their job-hunting clients. Much of Nick's advice sees heretical at first, but once you actually understand how the business world really works, his methods have the undeniable ring of truth.
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book because, armed with its contents, there's absolutely no reason on God's green earth that you won't be able to go out, today, and find a better job than the one you've already got. It's that simple.
BTW, the author Nick Corcodilos also authored twp new e-book How Can I Change Careers? and How to Work with Headhunters.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book, and you'll be able to find your dream job... somewhere else.
Amazon: Ask the Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job
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If your boss sees a copy of the Bible on your desk, he's probably going to think that you're a model employee: docile, gullible, and thus unlikely to rock the corporate boat. But that's only because 2,000 years of revisionist history has watered down the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth so that they fit nicely into the corporate world.
It started with Saul of Tarsus (aka Saint Paul), who though he never met Jesus was convinced that he knew more about Jesus's teachings than everyone else, including Jesus' own family. With lines like "slaves, obey your earthly masters!", Saul started a centuries-long process of domestication. Through the years, what was originally a revolutionary philosophy has been transformed into the kind of pious subservience that lousy bosses love.
However, as numerous political scientists have noted, what Jesus actually taught in The Gospels bears far more resemblance to communism than to capitalism. Jesus was against lending money at interest and against the accumulation of wealth (the two primary foundations of economic activity) and promoted a communal lifestyle with common ownership of property.
So your boss would be crazy to want you to actually read The Gospels, since you might notice that today's "Greed is Good" corporate world is the complete antithesis of what Jesus actually preached.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book, and you might want to start your own revolution.
Amazon: The Gospels
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What can I say? The Dilbert Principle is simply the best (and the funniest) business book ever written. Scott Adams is like some kind of mythical superhero who can see into the very soul of the business world. He perfectly captures the absurdity of everything that takes place there, while puncturing every bloated corporate balloon that ever floated past a cubicle.
I don't want to spoil the book for you, so I'll quote instead from an interview that I conducted with Scott right after The Dilbert Principle was published. Here's what he had to say about economic forecasting:
"There are, in general, two ways to predict the future. For example, you can use horoscopes, tea leaves, tarot cards, crystal ball, and so forth. Collectively, these are known as the "nutty methods." Or you can put well-researched facts into sophisticated computer models, more commonly referred to as "a complete waste of time." While all these approaches have their advantages, I find it's a lot easier and economical to simply make stuff up."
Pure brilliance.
Your boss doesn't want you to read this book, because it punctures all the bloated myths of the corporate world and reveals it as a repository of absurdity, contradiction and human foolishness.
BOTTOM LINE: Read this book and you'll never take work seriously again.
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IMPORTANT: Enjoy this post? To see more, email me through my website: GeoffreyJames.com