Page 26 - Executive Warfare

Introduction

listening to the ones you don’t expect: the spouses of the people you work
with and the guy at the gym who notices your temper tantrums when you
lose a racquetball game.
So now, in addition to getting your job done and done well, you have
to develop some very adult skills.You have to manage an incredibly tricky
network of relationships, simultane-
ously, in private and in public, and in a
YOU NO LONGER way that announces your ability to lead.
HAVE JUST ONE The experiences that have brought you
BOSS TO PLEASE. to this point can in no way have pre-
YOU NOW HAVE A pared you for the subtle, tortuous, and
COMPLEX, HAZY sometimes crazy-making challenges
MATRIX OF you’ll now face.
HUNDREDS OF This I learned on my third day with
BOSSES. the title of vice president. I’d just come
to John Hancock as an outsider to run
the company’s communications. In John Hancock’s 122-year history, I was
the first vice president ever hired directly from outside the ranks.
It was a big step up for me, and the way I was treated was pretty heady
stuff. I was given a gorgeous big office on one of the top floors of the beau-
tiful building Henry Cobb of I.M. Pei & Partners had designed for the
company on Boston’s Copley Square. Soon, people were arriving with styl-
ish design plans and asking me questions like, “Do you prefer to furnish
with antiques or something more contemporary?”
What I’d been used to was this: When you took a new job, whatever fur-
niture was in the office when you got there was your furniture.And if there
were any delay in your moving into that office, most of the good stuff
would have been pilfered by the people in the neighboring offices.
Of course, I didn’t understand that just because I’d now have an office
fit for a prince, that didn’t mean that a few offices over, there weren’t half
a dozen other princes and princesses thinking very hard about how to
block me, use me, or kill me.

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