“Sun Tzu Was a Sissy”
Sun Tzu Was a Sissy
Conquer Your Enemies, Promote Your Friends, and Wage the Real Art of War
Stanley Bing
ISBN 13: 978-0-06-073478-7
ISBN 10: 0-06073478-7
Bing writes for a real laugh at office politics. He uses classic business ‘art’ to describe things such as “some of the various weapons at your disposal in the average corporate situation, and their respective utilities in warlike corporate situations in which you may routinely find yourself†The image he uses to compare these “weapons†is a fairly bland looking bar graph. The graph is the kind that, if you’re in business, I’m sure you’ve seen many times before. That’s what makes the whole thing funny. It’s a kind of sick satire on the savage nature of business and politics.
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He’s talking about deciet, sabotage, and systematic aggression as if he was talking about the fine points of a merger or acquisition. It’s quietly hilarious. He discusses the methods for undermining a coworker and graphs the effectiveness over time. It’s hilarious to imagine a meeting between professionals in which they discuss how to effectively attack other businesses, or divisions within their own business, and use charts to explain their opinions of the best method.
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The sad part of this satire is that Bing’s probably right. There is a lot of infighting, betrayal, sabotaging that happens between people of the same company. Luckily I haven’t come up against this in my career yet. I do feel that If i do I will now be better prepared to handle the situation having read Bing’s book.