Rat’s Skills: Making Friends and Betraying Them

How to get promoted? How to get a salary raise? How to stop writing code and start managing other losers who still write it? How to become a team leader, a boss, a Vice President, a CTO, and a CEO? Is it a matter of luck, or can some tactics help you get to the top of the career ladder? Let me share a few lessons I’ve learned. Le Professionnel (1981) by Georges Lautner Many books have been written about office power games, for example Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Power in Organizations (1981), Henry Mintzberg’s Power In and Around Organizations (1983), and Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporation (1977). They are good reads, but barely useful as practical guidelines. They treat career-successful people as humans. They are not, they are rats. Joep Schrijvers’s The Way of the Rat (2004), my favorite, uses exactly this metaphor. Being a rat means taking advantage of other people and enjoying it. This is what a rat does in nature: it doesn’t earn its food, it steals it. That’s why we…