How to Get Seriously Rich While Failing in Business (Souvernir Press, 2003)

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Extracts: Keenness and commitment: Be one of the first to arrive at work, one of the last to leave; make a point of working late at least two evenings a week, making sure you are seen by any senior managers whom happen to be around. If you slip out for a beer use the well-known technique of leaving a jacket on the back of your chair. Be bright eyed and bushy tailed at all times. Show a can-do attitude. Use phrases like 'no problem' or 'nothing is impossible' or 'the difficult can be done at once, the impossible may take a little longer. Quote from self-improvement books such as The Seven habits of Highly Effective People and leave copies of books like this lying around. Develop a bold, illegible, but instantly recognisable signature that conveys a sense of authority and inner strength.

Management speak

The twenty top terms

Activity based costing Balanced business scorecards

Benchmarking Competitive advantage

Core competencies Cost drivers

Downsizing EBITDA (Earnings before interest, tax,

depreciation and amortisation)

Emotional intelligence EVA (economic vale added)

Human capital Key success factors

Knowledge management MVA (market value added

Outsourcing Partnership sourcing

Portfolio analysis Strategic positioning

Synergy Value chain

Get some good prints for your office (by fashionable modern artists such as Basquiat, Hockney, Warhol or Tracy Emin).

Don't settle for a cheap modern car when for the same money you can get a classic Cadillac, Mercedes or Jaguar.

Finally, remember that there are three kinds of people in a company - those that make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who ask 'What happened/'. Make sure you are seen as one of the first kind.

The MBA

Ten years ago you could have got to the top without an MBA. Today it is more and more essential to have those magic three letters after your name. It is essential, however, that your MBA should come from one of the top accredited schools. The fees are very expensive so your best course of action is to try to get your company to sponsor you. If you have married the Chairman's daughter you stand a good chance of bringing this off but otherwise your best bet is to aim for a consultancy assignment to help pay the fees.

You may well learn a great deal from an MBA programme, but very little of it will help you achieve your aim of becoming seriously rich. Indeed, if you take some of the subjects too seriously - business ethics for example - it could be counter productive.

The psychometric profile

From time to time you will probably be required to complete some kind of psychometric questionnaire. These things are designed to measure your I Q and reveal your personality profile. In particular the tests will be designed to assess your strengths and weaknesses in terms of your potential as top management material. Psychometric questionnaires in the workplace, unlike those in magazines, are not an opportunity to find out more about yourself, least of all an opportunity to confess your inner doubts and fears. Using your intelligence you should be able to work out which boxes to tick in order to come up with the kind of profile that will impress the people in Human Resources. They will be looking for traits associated with leadership qualities: extraversion, dominance, self-belief, determination, ambition, flexibility, and creativity. They will pounce on any suggestion of introversion, rigidity of thinking or indecisiveness. It is a good idea to persuade a friendly psychologist to get you copies of the most frequently used tests so that you can practise picking the 'right' answers.

IQ tests can be trickier and it is more difficult to fudge the answers. Nevertheless, you can significantly increase your score by practising. There are plenty of books containing typical IQ test questions and doing these will enable you to become very familiar with the kinds of thought processes involved in answering them. The test tends to be of three kinds, testing verbal, numerical and spatial intelligence. Find out where you are strong and weak, but remember that to get on in business verbal ability is more important than the others.

A useful rule is to try to work quickly, answering as many questions as possible in the time available, since with forced choice questions there is always a chance of getting a correct answer by chance.

The Assessment Centre

You may be required to spend a day or two at an Assessment Centre. If so, as well as filling in lots of questionnaires and taking various pencil and paper tests you will be interviewed more than once and invited to take part in a number of group exercises.

One type of interview is aimed at putting you under stress. Typically you will be asked a hypothetical question such as ‘ You are in a shipwreck; you are a powerful swimmer and can save one person. Close by and in danger of drowning are (a) A world famous heart surgeon, (b) a two year old child and (c) your wife’s mother. Which would you save?’ It does not matter in the slightest which one you choose; the interviewer will attack you mercilessly both on grounds of moral degeneracy and lack of clear logical thought. All you have to do is to defend your choice calmly and quietly. The two ways to fail are to change your mind or to raise your voice. (Mind you, these are often the causes of failing in real life!)

Another type of interview is the psychiatric one. It will help to read a popular book about psychoanalysis before taking this interview. It will give you some idea of what questions will be asked and what hang-ups the interviewer will be looking for. You will be asked about your childhood. Was it happy? What were your relationships with your parents and siblings like? Were you happy at school?

The best way to cope is to give positive answers to each question. Yes, you had an idyllically happy childhood; your schooldays were wonderfully happy; you really got on well with your siblings and still do; no you are not afraid of the dark, spiders or snakes; you do not have nightmares, you sleep soundly; your sex life is great; yes, of course you have masturbated and, no, you don’t feel guilty about it.

When it comes to the group exercises, there are usually two kinds. In one type the leader is designated in advance. When it is your turn to act as group leader there are two things to remember. First, don’t try to take decisions by yourself. Always involve the group members. This not only demonstrates a politically correct leadership style it happens also to be the best way of solving whatever problem has been set. Secondly, go out of your way to be considerate to any member from an ethnic minority and any no-hoper and, if you are male, to make sure any females in the group feel fully involved.

The other type of exercise involves a leaderless group. The observers will be watching to see how many leadership initiatives each member takes and how many are accepted by the rest of the group. To succeed in this situation you will need to have already established yourself as someone with leadership potential by having created the right image during the preceding stages of the Assessment Centre.

The people who emerge as leaders in such situations are the ones who are seen by their fellow group members as caring, concerned to maintain harmony in the group, protective of the weaker members and who very rarely use the ‘I’ word.

How you behave when the group is relaxing and not being observed is as important as or even more important than your behaviour during the exercises

Above all, never ever be heard to say anything negative about any other group member.

The performance review

In order to stay on the fast track you will need to get an ‘excellent’ rating on each annual performance review. Your immediate superior will conduct the review, so the first rule is always to keep on very good terms with that person.

Lord Acton said that power corrupts; we all know too well that money also corrupts, but friendship can corrupt too and if your boss thinks of you as a friend it will be very hard for him or her to give you a bad report.

The second rule is to prepare well. List all your accomplishments over the past year in great detail, being careful to steer the narrow path between embellishment and downright exaggeration. To give the appearance of balance, mention a couple of instances where you failed to achieve an objective, but make sure these instances relate to relatively trivial matters.

Then comes the part where you list your view of your development needs. Go for safe things like improving your financial knowledge or IT skills. To ask for more training and development in areas like interpersonal skills or assertiveness can be interpreted as a damaging admission of weakness in these vital areas.

One more rule – thank your boss profusely when the interview is over and say how very helpful you have found his or her advice and how much you have benefited from the coaching and mentoring you have received over the preceding twelve months.

Meetings

Nowadays, managers spend much of their time in meetings. These give you a great opportunity to shine.

The golden rule is ‘Always wait to see which way the boss cat jumps before opening your mouth.’

Prepare well. Most people don't take the trouble to do more than glance through the relevant papers in advance of a meeting. Thorough preparation pays off. On key issues it is a good idea to prepare and circulate your own paper. This need not involve a lot of work. You can download a paper on almost any subject from the Internet – and the risk that anyone will rumble you is small.

If the meetings are scheduled for the early afternoon make sure you have a very light lunch, preferably a salad and above all no alcohol. You need to look and feel alert. Take notes, but don’t doodle.

Get to the meeting in good time and choose your place with care. Make sure that you will be able to catch the chairman’s eye easily and that your position is sufficiently central to enable you to address the other people at the meeting without getting ‘Wimbledon neck’ through having to keep looking in two different directions.

Under no circumstances ever be late for an important meeting. Rather than be late it is much better not to turn up at all, subsequently sending an apology and mentioning the dreadful accident you witnessed on the motorway that left you in a state of shock and caused your absence. (Whatever excuse you use, the outcome should be that people are very sympathetic towards you, that you are seen as the innocent victim of circumstances.)

When a meeting hots up and opinion becomes sharply divided on an important issue and angry exchanges start to take place, time is getting on and the chairman starts looking worried, it is time for you to intervene along the following lines:

‘Chairman, I have listened carefully to both sides of this discussion and I think I know why it is that we are finding it so very difficult to reach agreement on a course of action.’ (Here hold your audience by pausing for a moment or two until you have everyone’s full attention.) ‘Chairman, I think the reason we cannot agree is that we simply do not have enough information on which to base a sound decision. May I suggest, therefore, that we set up a small working party to investigate further and report back to the next meeting? ‘ You then add that you would be quite willing to serve on such a working group. Now everyone will be happy. You have got the chairman off the hook and the protagonists of the various points of view can leave the meeting able to fight another day.

Your own meetings

When you are chairing a meeting remember there is only one test of whether a meeting has been a good one or a waste of time. A good meeting is one where people walk away from it saying ‘That was a good meeting’. You can achieve this outcome if you remember that for most people the characteristics of a good meeting are:

· They have been given five minutes to air their particular hobbyhorse.

· The chairperson achieves consensus by the simple method of taking all the decisions.

· It lasts no more than an hour.

It is important to arrange for your secretary to interrupt if the meeting goes on longer and to say that there is an emergency that needs your urgent attention.

Presentations

Most young executives are terrified of having to make presentations, so this gives you a great opportunity to shine; get some coaching in presentation skills, become a whiz-kid with Power Point and lose no opportunity to show off your skill. Making first class presentations is one of the most highly prized skills in the world of business and will earn you countless brownie points.

Remember that slides containing lists of words are very boring. The whole point of a visual presentation is that there is something to look at – cartoons, graphs, photographs. Invest in your future. If it is a very important occasion pay a professional to prepare your presentation for you. Always use a laptop; under no circumstances ever make your presentation with a set of overhead foils. (On the other hand always have a set of overhead foils in reserve in case the technology fails.)

Finally, always remember to stop speaking before people stop listening

Choosing your friends.

Be friendly with your colleagues at work but save real friendship for others. In order to get on fast you will almost certainly need to trample on other people on the way and no one wants to do this to their real friends.

Associate with the 'in' crowd, the ones who are clearly favoured by top management. It is a good idea in the early years to pick out a fast rising star and cling to his tail. Steer clear of the ones who are going nowhere.

Social skills

Remember that in the business world, image and things like presence, self confidence and social skills are much more highly valued than qualifications. Here are some tips:

· Take up golf (but always know when to lose).

· Be attentive to the Chairman's wife at company functions

· Always notice his secretary's new dress or hairstyle.

(These last two are as important for women as for men).

· Never appear to be the worse for drink. (It is, however, excusable to appear to be the better for drink, i.e. in the sense of being more relaxed, wittier.)

· Never go to a Thai or Indian restaurant at lunchtime.

· Prepare a few witty after dinner speeches and practise them. There are plenty of books containing model speeches for all occasions.)

· Never tell sexist or racist jokes in public. Save them for your closest friends.

· Always be charming and friendly to people at all levels of the company – you may need their support later on. Remember that there are no short people, just ones who are vertically challenged. Be politically correct at all times.

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Some other things to remember

· The purpose of a memorandum is not to convey information but to protect the writer.

· If you don’t delegate you will have no one to blame when things go wrong.

· It is better to ask dumb questions than to make dumb mistakes.

· Don’t try to become irreplaceable. People who can’t be replaced seldom get recommended for promotion.

· Don’t watch porn on the office computer

If you follow all this advice carefully you will get your first chief executive job in your early thirties. However, don’t spoil things by trying to get this far too quickly.

Remember it is better that people ask why you are not chief executive than that they ask why you are.