Page 93 - Executive Warfare

Peers

to be “sensitized.” It’s the corporate equivalent of being sent to a Maoist
reeducation camp.
At the end of the first night, the instructors did this exercise that I had
never seen before, which is quite common now, where you pick a partner,
who blindfolds you, and then you
allow yourself to fall backward into your
partner’s arms. As I fell, one of the YOUR PEERS ARE
instructors was telling us,“It’s all about NOT ALL ALIKE.
building trust.... ” MOST OF THEM
When my head hit the floor, three WILL NOT TURN
things made me feel better. One, I heard OUT TO BE RIVALS
a lot of other heads hit the floor, too. AT ALL.
Two, we were on a plush carpet, so it
wasn’t too painful. And three, the guy
laughing behind me, the guy who’d let me fall—well, it was his turn to
wear the blindfold next. Oops!
So there we were, the best and the brightest, future leaders and exem-
plars, all behaving like the jealous teenagers in the Lindsay Lohan movie
Mean Girls.
I do not suggest that you treat your peers this way. It’s stupid for many
reasons,including the fact that your peers are not all alike.Most of them will
not turn out to be rivals at all. For every peer who is truly running against
you for the next job, there are probably five who are not even in the race.
They may be less ambitious than you, satisfied with where they are. Or
they may be in staff positions—in the general counsel’s office, in finance,
in public relations, in information technology, or in human resources.
These peers may rise to the top of their area of expertise, but they proba-
bly won’t wind up running the organization. As a general rule, if you are
not in a revenue- or profit-generating position, you don’t get the top spot.
Or they may simply have the wrong talents or the wrong temperament
for leadership. The real rivals among your peers will be room-changers.
Certain people, when they walk into a room, alter the atmosphere. Every-

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