Page 113 - Executive Warfare

Peers

division head. Things that were supposed to be confidential regularly were
not, and I wound up looking arrogant and offending people I didn’t par-
ticularly want to offend.
Rumors would also surface about my temper, coloring in this portrait
of arrogance. For example, I’d come into work and be amazed to learn
that I’d dressed down a security guard in public the day before. It’s very
hard to defend yourself against stuff like this. It’s like having to answer the
question,“Have you stopped beating your wife?”No matter what you say,
the doubt lingers.
It took me years to figure out the source of this treachery, and I could
hardly believe it when I finally did: a peer who had outwardly been par-
ticularly supportive and kind. We’ll call him Marty. But the truth was,
Marty had been at the company long before I’d arrived, and he’d largely
worked for old men who mistook him for a rising star, just because of his
energy. I belonged to a different generation and thought he was a lot of
bluster and relatively little substance.
Naively, I thought that all I had to do to get Marty to stop this stuff was
show him I was on his side. Help him
get bigger jobs, support his projects, let
him take credit for more than was really THE BEST WAY TO
warranted. DEAL WITH A
Nothing worked. Fear is a very pow- REALLY
erful motivator, and he was simply TREACHEROUS
afraid of what I would do to him if I PEER IS TO
were his boss. DISCREDIT HER SO
Finally, I realized that the only course THAT THE NEXT
of action open to me was to make the TIME SHE SAYS
rumors themselves suspect. SOMETHING UGLY
I’d recently been the advertising ABOUT YOU, IT
director for Michael Dukakis’ 1988 SIMPLY SPLASHES
presidential campaign. If the Bush vic- BACK.
tory had taught me anything, it was that

93