Page 120 - Executive Warfare

EXECUTIVE W ARF ARE

on a new house: Everything comes in 30 percent over budget and takes
twice as long as promised, and the kitchen is still not finished, yet the guy
is completely evasive when confronted. Actually, it was like working with
a bad general contractor on about a hundred houses, with a hundred
unfinished kitchens, simultaneously.
And, of course, the world of IT is so esoteric that anytime anybody
complained, Tom would give some excuse that would have everybody
scratching their heads: “Our capacity is
only ten gazillion megabytes, and we
TO DEAL WITH A really need to be at twenty gazillion
STUBBORN megabytes.”
PROBLEM, The truth was, Tom wanted to rise.
SOMETIMES YOU And he’d decided to rise by holding his
HAVE TO GO THE rivals’ projects hostage. Corporate life.
CAVE NEXT DOOR Hollywood’s got nothing on it for
TO BORROW MEN, treachery.
WOMEN, AND For a long time, Tom won all the bat-
CLUBS. tles. To deal with a stubborn problem
like this, sometimes you have to go the
cave next door to borrow men, women,
and clubs. So I finally went to some of my other rivals and convinced them
that we needed to put our own differences aside in order to get rid of Tom.
As I said earlier, killing off somebody at this level is basically like chop-
ping down a redwood. You have to do it one stroke at a time. One person
had to go and complain about how slow and overpriced the IT work was,
then another person, and then another.
Finally, it got to a point where the ultimate boss couldn’t take the com-
plaints anymore. He woke up one morning and said,“You know, I’m going
to kill that IT guy.” And Tom was gone so fast! Cremated, no coffin.
Nearly as short-sighted as undermining the business in order to win a
promotion is goosing the business artificially for a short-term effect. I have
seen more executives take out this petard and blow themselves up with it

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