This is very different from the offerings of the management gurus. 

Internal / office politics can be revealed and taught
Most senior managers say you cannot teach business politics.  The near total silence about this every day reality in hundreds of Management publications is close to scandalous.  The silence of personnel professionals on this subject is also hard to understand.  It's easy to say politics have no place in business if you are at the top, but things are very different for those in the middle.  Statements suggesting well intentioned people should be ignorant of office politics will be strongly approved of by those who abuse them. 

Office Politics are not a games
When you lose a 'game' you are not forced into a life of stress, insecurity and upset or even into losing your job.  Those who are successful or who have never really experienced it call it a 'game'.  They fail to face up to reality, leaving tens of thousands of well intentioned people prey to bullies, and corrupt / incompetent managers.  Shareholders, employees, and in the case of public organizations, taxpayers, all lose out alike.

Office Politics can be very positive
Office Politics can be a nasty affair, but it is necessary to understand how they are used to deal with them.  'Politics' is a neutral word... it is only those who abuse them, that make all politics appear repulsive and to have no place in business.  However, there are times when a diplomacy or a tactful move, which are political acts, can have hugely positive effects.  Once competent in office politics, well intentioned people can deal with those who abuse politics causing misery and low productivity. 

A new way of seeing things
Chapter 7 contains a simple device which will enable you to reassess what you know about relationships and then to reveal patterns and the positioning of manipulators, 'till now, beyond the imagination of the well intentioned.  It's far harder to stab someone in the back when they can see you coming.  You will find no trace of management-hand-book-jargon or American academic ideology in this brutally practical, down-to-earth publication.

What do I get out of this?
The benefit is two fold.  First, understanding how they work will serve for personal protection and advancement.  Secondly, for those already victim, an understanding of what really happened can draw the sting of a very unpleasant experience.  This publication reveals the fundamentals to stop unkind and selfish operators in their tracks, and to help make organizations run better and happier.  It is a handbook for the positive use of business politics. 

Please note: The book specialises only on business politics; it does not intend to, or deal with, politics with a capital 'P'

The only way to stop negative office politics is to be better at it than the others.  Those who abuse politics in organizations will loathe this book  

It is easy to accept what passes for established business practices without looking through them to discover whether they are based on firm and realistic principles.  This book examines a major blind spot in business which has been growing for over 100 years and has caused substantial damage to the UK economy.

There appears to be no clear cut method of judging organisations and their efficiency as the difference between a good and a bad one is judged from many different viewpoints: no universal method has yet been devised as a guide to good organisation.  The debate on how to judge the efficiency of the National Health Service is one example of this confusion.  The criterion of profit alone is insufficient, though it is obvious that business without profit cannot survive.

This book sets out to provide that guide and on the way reveals a huge amount about the taboo subject of internal politics.

The main theme is the equation that information plus authority permits power.  It is clear an impotent organisation cannot truly perform and is therefore fatally flawed, so the nature of information and how to control it, is considered at length.  While the nature of authority is quite straightforward, the use of information control is highly sophisticated.

The origins of modern business structures are considered, followed by radical alternatives which recognise the pressures and conditions which have moulded what we are saddled with today.

It starts with examples of current management incompetence and waste and these examples will illustrate the main theme.

Although corruption is widely thought as a source of under performance, the primary cause is inadequate control and use of information: this provides a cloak for fraud, incompetence and injustice.

In many cases the information is already owned within the organisation, but even so companies often appear unable or unwilling to access their own expertise.

Sample 2 (from Chapter 6-  Symptoms of Corporate Decay)

4. Communication Compression 

The last of the four covers the capacity to communicate at speed, the most significant feature of which is compression.  A well versed exponent of the art can speak volumes in a few words and when working with others so gifted, proceed at great speed.  Blather is the opposite.  Control is much stronger when dealing with someone who can digest information quickly and can return it in kind.

This reassuring vitality of purpose ensures swift response and multiplies the use of existing abilities, talents, skills and knowledge. On the grounds of utility, it can be used as a reason to pay some managers more than others, because the company gets much more bang for the buck.

If the interviewee passes all these tests with flying colours, the question of expertise comes into play.  The delicate point rests with political skills, so interviewer requirements will often be circumscribed by the health of the organisation for which they are recruiting.  The less healthy it is, the more emphasis is put on control and thus the less is put on expertise.  The first hurdle gets higher and higher.  Some interviewers appear to want it both ways and, rather like the search for the Holy Grail, want to find the ideal manager.

These beasts are not only politically competent and highly experienced, but will not and cannot use political skill to protect themselves from the incompetence of managers to whom they report. They will fit into the unhealthy control obsessed company and will still be able to turn in a top class performance.  They are as about as probable as an accountant successfully working an air traffic control desk or a coal-miner becoming a PA.  (This book is, oddly enough, is written by a one time lorry driver; there are always exceptions).

It is important to isolate and identify control factors when interviewing and make the compromise between expertise and control. This will not only ensure that the compromise does not swing too far in favour of control and start an avalanche of corporate collapse, but it will also bring the problems of the organisation into sharp focus.

As the first hurdle of control gets higher, so the second has to be lowered, because fewer and fewer competent people are left to choose from. Recruitment difficulties often tell more about the organisation than about the availability of appropriate candidates.

The first big question has remained secret for too long.  The priorities of control must not be permitted to swamp the need for expertise; if this is happening it must be asked why the needs of organisation are coming before the essential need for know-how.  When this happens the flaw lies with the organisation and its methods and not what customers rightly expect.

A spiral leading to corporate collapse can be initiated by such emphasis.  As individuals are set the test of the first control hurdle, fewer with expertise are left to pick from to attempt to clear the second hurdle of competence.  Consequently, over many appointments the overall level of expertise reduces.  With lower expertise, so the new managers will require more leading. Being less competent, they will be more prone to the offence of hiding incompetence. The crawler will become essential and thus the first hurdle will become more difficult to clear as the demands of control grow and grow.

The organisation gradually replaces competence with those who are highly skilled politically but tend to be incompetent.  This is a classic pattern of corporate decay.  It is almost always carefully hidden and cannot be described as a symptom, but could be better considered as a toxin.  This causes rot in organisations which appear to have forgotten the need for competence to be able to compete, or to have any reason for existence.

Sources of incompetence include the ignorance of owners.  Shareholders appear to be both unable to ask the right questions and willing to accept they have no right to delve into complexities of the companies they collectively own.  Directors do their best to keep the shareholders quiescent and ignorant.  They know what information can do and insist that they cannot perform with petty interference.

It is quite possible to know and yet not to interfere.  Knowing is very different from interfering with day to day activities of a company.  If you own a company, you have every right to know how it works down to the last penny spent in petty cash.  Look again at a story from Japan.

Some years ago in a Japanese car factory  in the US, the company President was visiting and walked around the factory floor. During that stroll he was asked by the R&D department if he felt, as they did, that it was better to arrange for the hatch to be fitted early on in production.  Their ideas were presented and he agreed.  Later it was observed that although the President had agreed to this idea, it had been decided to put the hatch on towards the end of the line.

There had been a heated discussion between the Quality Control and R&D.  Early fitting was useful and easier logistically, but the door was often damaged by the time it got to the end of the line, so on a QC basis this was a poor idea.  After the President left, the quality circle discussed the problem and convinced R&D the later fitting point was correct.  No one informed the President.  When he discovered he had been overruled, he was not in the least unhappy, as he had only expressed an opinion and who was he to presume to be wiser than those who were actually working the line?

The lie is in the wish to withhold information.  Directors are tacitly admitting that their position depends on restricting information and they appear also to be admitting that cover-ups are desired.  If their decisions are appropriate, why on earth should they be frightened if a shareholder walks across the factory floor?

By attempting to stop the flow of information in the name of management structure and organisation, senior managers can be left open to the charge of attempting to reduce the power of their superiors.  It appears that arguments constructed around principles associated with the Command structure, actually justify keeping superiors ignorant in certain circumstances.

The Command and Control structure is poorly named, as it often acts to make shareholders impotent through ignorance.  Failure to control information is a supremely incompetent management act.

Ignorance, injustice and the bad driving out the good

Ignorance alone is too obvious to discuss.  Injustice has other aspects beyond the obvious discussed above.  The tyranny of the reference still holds sway.  People will go through seven shades of hell to ensure they get a good one on leaving the company.  The old threat of an unjust  reference is often played on in a manner which can only be described as disgusting.

The way the bad drive out the good can be due to clique construction or to promotion based on the political skills of individual managers.  These people have literally empowered their superiors by forming strange vertical teams where they provide the information, and the superior, the authority: as a team, they produce power.

They therefore deserve rewards and have already displayed the capacity to handle an aspect of power through their crawling.  They often grass, branch, peach or sneak on their peer group and are not team players but rather self-centred and usually selfish.  The good find such actions distasteful and will only participate so when really pushed, so the bad tend to succeed over the good.  The more selfish and self-centred win over the team minded people.

Those people with families to support are quite capable of ruining a competent person's career to ensure they keep their job. There is simply too much to lose for a 50 year old man, with two children at boarding school, a comfortable villa and a non-working wife with her car.  The material and social disaster would be too much.  Far better to set up and butcher the career of any upstart competent who crosses your path.

Corporate deafness "Failure to listen"

Senior managers often refuse to answer telephones if they cannot identify who is calling them. Their secretaries stand as guardians to stop people from pestering their precious bosses.  It is strange that some senior managers appear quite willing and able to pick up the phone, whereas others will not or cannot.

In Irwin's case, the secretary had to be threatened before she would put my call through. Even when it appeared all too obvious that the company would have to act, the emphasis was on, "what is it to you?  What are you getting out of this?"  They even thought Irwin was employing me.  The idea that someone was attempting to correct a gross injustice because it was the right thing to do appeared beyond them.

The fear seems to be that everyone has an axe to grind, and that, therefore, any information offered gratis must be tainted and should be held suspect and best not acted on. After all, the abuse of information is how so many senior managers got to their positions, so it could be quite reasonable for many to act consistently with the way they have always viewed information flow.  This is not to say that receiving information necessarily demands action.

Why is it that those who attempt to speak the truth for the good of their company can be sacked for their efforts?  Surely this is a clear example of structure coming before the interests of the business.  Indeed, an MD listening to workmen is thought to be poor form by intermediate tiers of management as if the MD no right to do so  Of course, a direct, vital and open line between conception and production produces a lean efficient harmonious machine, and shows up the obfuscating thickets of middle-or-muddle-management, who are too often a buffer zone between the head and limbs of a company.

Blackmail and intimidation

These ugly words could also involve other characteristics such as hypocrisy; at the root of all this is a lie.  Anyone who may not have the best interests of the business.  which gives them their living at heart will use that organisation as a vehicle for their own ends.  In other words they will pretend loyalty and act for personal gain.  When the two neatly coincide, all is well. When they do not, it is the company which pays as the ends of the individual are put first.

"Blackmail systems"

These can cover several areas: career prospects and promotion; dismissal for petty discipline; bonus leverage; references; physical threat: and personal information.

The action of these systems is simple.  They nearly always depend on poor information flow to cover their activities.  The plain use of the threat of unjust disciplinary action to ensure the silence of juniors is one method.  Another is the implicit threat to career advancement, should the truth become known.  Lower salaries or more unpleasant working conditions are another lever, as is intimidation which can even involve physical threat. Finally there is the situation where the history of an individual is stored up so that one member of management has the goods on another.

Some middle managers appear to have sunk into uncharted and repulsive depths. Good people can find it difficult to avoid this stench wafting their way and attaching itself to them.

In every case of blackmail the aim is to apply leverage through intimidation and implicit threat.

Properly, blackmail is an incorrect word where abuse of disciplinary authority is used to intimidate people into silence.  The blackmail aspect is really only used when managers are dead wood support, as described above.  In these cases however, the core of the act of silencing people rests with pure intimidation.

The ability to abuse information flow, being unsupervised, enables managers to use intimidation as well as blackmail, to silence juniors.  This in turn enables information theft..  With a strange symmetry the capacity to abuse disciplinary procedures to ensure the silence of those reporting caused the indiscipline of middle and senior management so common today.  The system of discipline used appears to be a source of indiscipline.

There are many good people who won't act in this way, but promotion tends to favour the selfish and these people are more likely to act for their own ends.  The ignorance of superiors caused by the Command and Control system indirectly causes the promotion of the selfish over the less selfish as it opens the need for the empowering vertical teams suited to the action of crawlers.  And so the system ties itself into more and more destructive knots.  This is an ugly and miserable subject.

Managers use many devices to solve the problem of controlling information flow and directors and owners develop techniques to get around the problem of indisciplined management.

Some large companies do their best to mirror the military systems with shared messing systems and emphasis on company loyalty. Even now a major multinational has a high profile office in London with at least three separate dining rooms.  Not long ago a famous brewer had no less than seven levels of dining room!  Often seen as a reactionary institution, the messing system can have a significant effect in the discipline of the management (officer) corps. Their confusion, not mine.

Other companies have set up whole departments of structured management which do very little. These exist rather like white roots in a potbound plant, they serve little purpose except as information systems, their official purpose contributing little or nothing to the organisation.

A retail company got around the problem by establishing a non-management committee; all the staff were entitled to send representatives and it only reported to the Chairman. There are myriad management attempts to solve information flow problems.

The growth of accountancy was spurred on by the common misconception is that figures cannot lie but people are quite able to lie about figures: they frequently do, producing mirages, rather than accurate images of reality.  Accountancy is utterly unable to deal with the problem of ideas and information flow and always needs time to reveal its offerings.  An organisation is travelling through changing time and space, and, like a train, boat or plane, needs a constant supply of information from outside.

Figures have to be processed at the end of a week, month, year or some other convenient period.  Accountancy carries the problem of retrospective analysis.  Trends have to be seen before action is taken.  This gives time for those who have manipulated the figures to draw down the veil of history and also gives time for damage to take place. A device with more immediate results is called for.

The flow of information is dammed, tainted, wasted, depriving large parts of companies of information which is critical to survival.  The current of information must run through a business to produce whatever is required by the market it serves.

The landscape metaphor can be extended to irrigation and this can be compared to control. So far, in the information landscape, we have gardeners, stone walls, dead wood, grasses, rotting trees, white roots, mirages, rivers, and dams. The picture is beginning to form.  It is not meant to be a picture of health.

Please note: The cartoons are from the book, but do not appear in the same relationship with the text.