How to Get Promoted
These are a set of games which in general I think can cause tremendous frustration in the people that &quot;don&#x27;t get it&quot; or aren&#x27;t naturally socially outgoing, good corporate citizens by nature. This is a similar bucket as Win Friends and Influence People adherents - it&#x27;s a methodology and an effective one, but there are parts to consider. You see this all the time in security. They&#x27;re right, but because it&#x27;s not packaged well, there are legions of bitter AF security engineers who don&#x27;t understand why their messages aren&#x27;t not getting through.<p>At a minimum, it&#x27;s really important that people know that things can work like this sometimes. If you don&#x27;t follow it and maintain your soul or whatever, at least you won&#x27;t be confused why Brian shot up the ladder so quickly. Promotions and success shouldn&#x27;t only go to the socially outgoing, which is why I don&#x27;t think Win Friends and Influence People is all that bad of a book. In a well functioning team, Brian and the talented Roberta can also climb. But if you&#x27;re really pissed about Brian, stuff like this is probably why he&#x27;s doing well. At least you know!<p>If Roberta needs to learn to schmooze a bit by reading a book, or learn how to navigate a crappy team and save a career to fight another day by doing an 18 month jump as this article states, I think that&#x27;s ok. We train our bodies and minds to try and even the odds in the job market and health context, so what&#x27;s wrong with training our personalities and corporate strategies a bit so the good can rise up too?<p>The only caveat with this genre of corporate how-to&#x27;ing is it only works if you never mention that&#x27;s what you&#x27;re doing. That&#x27;s sort of obvious, but it&#x27;s an interesting quirk because this is important stuff to pick up on for good, talented, non-A-Hole peopl  who do want to find a way to do good in existing corporate structure. But it&#x27;s naturally sort of a toxic underbelly of work culture, and many are opposed to learning it.