Well, apologies in general for the length of time things have been taking to get content out the door. Truthfully I'm drowning to close a massive deal and the longer it takes, the more complex it has been getting. I'm in the eye of the storm right now with just a few hours of breathing space as everything is in everyone else's court but my own - meaning I'm waiting for documents to come back to me. So I wanted to bang this out pronto.

Climbing the Corporate ladder

Now lets say, you've joined a company or any organization and it is a company where you'd like to be at and for most people it the decision to put down roots is based on: (a) you like the job and the company, (b) there is room for promotion and you're happy with the compensation & (c) you fit in well with the company culture.

That being said, what you want and what you know now can change drastically for the better or worse when it comes to climbing the corporate ladder, e.g. getting promoted, getting more security, not getting fired, getting your maximum bonus, having more responsibility and getting pay raises and such. But at the heart of it is really getting promotions as they lead to the rest of the good things.

What this series is about is not my own speculation of how to get to the top, I'm not some senior in college who has hear this or that in how to get to the top, I've been to the top and I've done the following below. It isn't easy, it isn't pretty and it gets to be down right brutal, but if you've decided to compete with the lions and buy into the entire climb the corporate ladder and be the CEO one day, this is my straight up thoughts and views on it. But when you play this game, you play to not just win, but to destroy and salt the earth after each victory cause the stakes are real and your foes will do the same or worse than you. Cause everyday your are in a high powered corporate structure, you are competing and you will need to sacrifice your time with your family, you health and test you mental strength.

Of course every freaking fortune 500 CEO will say at a graduation commencement speech that if they could do it again, they would have more balance, but that is all bullshit, cause if they did have more of a balanced approached, they wouldn't be the CEO giving you a bullshit speech and accepting another honorary degree as well. Even if you've decided not to engage in going hardcore up the corporate ladder, at least if you read this, you can defend against some asshole hack trying to use you as a stepping stone.

The Foundation: 3 Years

Let's assume that you're in a big company, say with at least 20-50M in annual revenue with at least 500 employees. Ok, so when you start, you aren't going to be engaged in much corporate ladder crap, rather, it is about doing and learning your job. Most of the crap you will encounter are petty middle managers or interpersonal crap between colleagues like every over organization in the world. So stop your whining, the situation is nothing special so just concentrate on learning your job and begin great at it and putting yourself in a position to learn more. Cause right now, you're in entry level ville and your stupid retarded middle manager will be there 10 years later when you're VP anyway, so let it go and just do your job with all the interpersonal crap that comes with it. Cause if you can't even handle that, you're screwed anyway and will never be management.

Management is when you have targets to hit, sales or productivity or whatever. It's when you have to do reporting to someone above you that takes into consideration a part of the company you handle. And its when promotions really take on a great deal more responsibility. For major corporations, this generally starts after your MBA (masters in business admin) or some Masters grad school degree.

But to rewind for a second, and I've written about this before. You hear a lot of about having the need for 3 years of experience when you're an entry level person. And a lot of people don't understand why it is 3 years; the reason is:
1st year you actually learn the job; and it does take a year to learn it if it is part of a major corporation. Why? Because different times in the year have different priorities and your job will change as the sale or fiscal season changes. Until you've worked an entire year, you wouldn't have been exposed to everything your job entails.

And it goes without saying that if in 2 weeks you know everything about your job, well it ain't much of job cause then that means that any other peon/probe/drone/scv could do your job, so stop thinking stupid shit and get with context here. We're talking about the corporate management level here.

So you finish one year and you think, 'hell that is enough, I'm ready for the big times'. And you're not. Cause by the 2nd year, what you should acquire is the ability to actually improve on your job role, to see what can be done better, faster and more efficiently; to gain that mastery over your role and set a strong foundation for moving forward.

But then by the start of the 3rd year, why are you still there? Cause by the 3rd year, you should be able to train someone to fully take over your job and feed them whatever insight and understanding you've gained and also by doing so you also are able to articulate what you've learned. In the 3rd year you've acquired a level of professionalism in knowing what your managers really expect and if need be, set up a division for them for your job role.

Now by this time, you're the ideal worker drone; you know your job, nothing will faze you and you can even train other worker drones. So now it's time to go: executive skip middle management.

What is an Executive?

There ain't nothing like being an executive of a major corporation with your expense account, business class flights, own secretaries and people kissing ass to you to try to get your business. It's a sweet gig, but of course that is just the superficial view of it, but if that is what you're after, you're never gonna get it. Why? Cause if you really want to get that, you need to be hunger, ambitious and go full on competitive; cause that is what you are up against. You ain't up against some Quakers who are doing business, you're up against kids who have gone to the best schools that they could get into, worked just as hard as you and want that corner office and company Lexus as well.

So the most straight forward way, after you're entry level mastery is to get an MBA; working your way up via middle management is possible, but it is highly unlikely you'll break into executive management because of the reasons in the last paragraph. There is this massive divide from middle management to executive management and it is the MBA or an equivalent masters degree that bridges that gap (but in business you need to have that entry level mastery first or else you're just an impotent business brainiac who will suck at business- business is all based on experience first, theory second).

The Tour of Duty: Sergeant vs Lieutenant

Again an analogy I've used before in my blogs. The difference between exec and non-exec comes down to the divide between planning and operating. While they are both one and the same in terms that all business involves both, the degree in which you are more planning and operational vary a lot. And they are totally different skill sets. For instance: you can be a great sniper, the best, but you can be a shitty general.

It's like every Vietnam American war movie, the Sergeant who has been on 3 tours of duties knows everything while his preppy dick head college educated lieutenant knows dick all and without the Sergeant, would have been killed 3 times already. But still the Sergeant needs to listen to the lieutenant, why? Cause the lieutenant knows what the overall plan for war is, the strategy, he gets it. The lieutenant says,' we have to capture that hill now' and the 'Sergeant says, ' that is crazy sir, we'll loose half our platoon, for no good reason, if we wait 3 days, we can take it without the causalities.'

But the lieutenant says, 'no we need to take it now' and the Sergeant says, 'fuck my life sir but ok,' But the strategic importance may be lost on the Sergeant, even if his assessment is 100% correct, but by getting that hill or putting pressure it, it may cause the Viet Cong to take pressure off a key supply route that is critical to another front which is on the verge of completely getting fucked even more. Is the Sergeant or the lieutenant wrong? No they aren't and the more communication between them will give the Sergeant more motivation to do his job and more efficiency for the lieutenant to do give feed back for the planning, but the skill sets are completely different.

As an executive, I don't call the advertising company to actually buy advertisements, someone else does that, but I do make the decision on how much we will spend, budget, as well as what types of media we want to focus on. Now if my media buyers are great then they will maximize my media spend (like for $10k, they get me 5 months in a major magazine's inside back cover, rather than just 3 months), then, its great as it helps to get the result, but I'm not going to spend an hour to do that myself, rather I'm going to be mainly making a lot of decisions on a lot of areas and for those people go off and actually execute it properly.

So we've defined the basics here, the foundation- and sorry kids, getting an MBA is one of those check marks that you need to fulfill to get into the executive box, even guys who have worked their way up from middle management eventually take time off to get some type of 'executive MBA', like a certificate from a school, like Harvard summer school, so they can at least have something to hang up on the wall- but lets now get into the nitty gritty of it all. The fight.

The Fight

The fight is composed of 3 areas: results, work ethic, and reporting. And victory comes when you fight with sincerity and decisiveness.

Sounds freaking simple, and perhaps stupid, but this is as good as it is going to get and if your dad's have trouble at work getting promoted you can show'em this post as well, cause it ain't common knowledge.

Results

Hey goes without saying right? There comes a point where your line managers actually aren't retards, actually do see through petty political maneuvering and bullshit that your colleagues actually got away with when you were entry level or middle management level, but at the executive level, they can see who is capable or not (most of the time). When it comes to the executive level, you do live and die by your results and those who don't get results quarter after quarter, will get fired no matter how much they are able to bullshit.

But that being said, there are executives how do slip through the cracks and if you do get one of these motherfuckers who are simply using you to hold on to their position for a bit longer, life can be hell cause you really are getting exploited. But if you are patient and do the next two steps properly, you can give your line manager the big fuck off send off in about 12 months.

But regardless, you need to own the result and the result needs to be tied to growing business or acquiring new business or increasing profitability. A lot of times you'd think the guy who saves a project from the shitter or is the main go-to-guy to fix problems that no one else can fix i.e. the fixer, and has the confidence of the CEO is the one to get promoted, but he/she isn't. Cause no one celebrates saving something that someone fucked up, they all just sigh in relief, but when you get new clients, grow into new markets, and make the company more profitable, -when you show da money- that is when every breaks out the bubbly, and that is what results are all about. Let someone else be the shit shoveler of other peoples fuck ups, you just concentrate on bringing the money and fixing your own fuck ups.

Work Ethic

The managers that matter to you, need to see work harder, not longer, but harder. That doesn't mean sitting at the desk the longest or coming in earliest, but rather it means that if you're capable of pumping out good results then you just increase the output of it. It means when people look at you, they have a nick name for you, 'the beast, the killer, the closer'. It means that they know that when you get into a deal, you're gonna close it and get the best out of it, and that you're consistent and not only do you have the best results, you have most.

How do you do this? Well it comes to really knowing your job, then taking every opportunity you can that is in the scope of your job and focusing on every detail and exhausting every angle. In this way, Steve Jobs rules, you could said he was a bit nuts, but it wasn't just his single results that makes him a legend, just the ipod and itunes alone could do it, but fml, the iphone, the ipad - holy shit- it's all Steve Jobs, but compounded upon compounded results making him a huge cut above the rest.

In the same way, whatever you do great, you just keep at and keep pumping it out and yes it involves working 3 days straight, not seeing your family for a month and missing your workouts and drinking a few bottles of whiskey to close the deal. It requires you to sacrifice more than anyone should and go to the brink and sometimes fall off, but at the end of the day, if you don't, someone else will and if the cost is too much, then just step off the train, it's cool. But if you wanna be on the train, and go this way, then this is what you have to do. But at the start of this is: your results need to be great, better than your peers, the rising star, and then you need to outpace the rest.

Reporting

This is how the office politics are really played out with the big boys. In shitty companies where no one is really doing great work, where the company isn't market leader or the top of their industry, sure, it's all about interpersonal politics, but when it comes to companies with plus 1000 employees and are competing hardcore with other companies for just .5% more market share, it comes down to results, work ethic, and the glue that bring it all together- reporting.

What reporting means is basically preparing a documentation or presentation of your results to your line managers or higher ups. Thing is, if there isn't much gap between you and your line manager in terms of corporate position and your line manage is really a hack (just going through the motions), then what your line manager will do is simply 'out report' you and even report your own results and credit it to you, but put them in the context of their own results (they didn't get there cause they were that dumb). Thus taking the steam out of your results or making it appear that this wasn't something amazing, but rather part of their master plan, thus keeping your score at zero.

Now, for most guys, they think the first 2 points are enough, but it simply isn't enough. Your line managers are not mind readers and the hire up you go, the more scope you have to deal with. Your line manager may make you feel like a superstar, but you're just one 15 min meeting out of his entire day of talking with Tokyo, Paris and NY. But also, while you are busting your hump to get results, your competing line manger maybe isn't. That cocksucker is compiling everyone's results and spending 80% of his time working on some really awesome report that looks like some gloss stock analyst report, with all the bells and whistles, meanwhile you're just writing a 5 paragraph text email about your latest win, cause you got 3 other pending projects on the table. But to the eyes of the senior executives, they can't help but put you in the same context or place in which your own line manager has put you in- because they simply also don't have enough time to assume otherwise.

In time though- a hack line manager will always be called out cause a coup will eventually occur- but to save yourself 2 years of slavery, rather than just 1 (but you'll have to endure at least 1 anyway) you're going to have to have to go the final distance or all will be for naught- i.e. why kill and sacrifice yourself for some other cock sucker.

If this has been going on then: (i) don't just causally report and give hard figures to your line manager right away, if they are asking for it, then they are preparing their own report. Rather, just say you'll get it to them, then (ii) make your own report much better than you normally do. Even if you're on your last breath, don't skip any details, remember your training as an entry level analyst and make the document with all the bells and whistles, then (iii) forward you report to your line manager while cc'ing your higher ups, with a nice email text into, putting the report attached as your win. Thus, you've followed proper protocol, and you include, as per your 'line manager's' instructions' in the email, but the report is all done by you, and your line manager doesn't have time to take your results and put it into his own reporting and your results can stand as your own results.

BUT this is in the context that you and your line manager aren't that far apart in position, that your line manager has been screwing you and you do have access to be able to report directly to the main line manager. Eventually, your cocksucker line manager will realize that his time is up and either do more reporting as a desperate way to tip the scales again, but since he needs your results, you just do it the same way each time and even if they demand your results first, you don't need to- Why?

Cause reporting is just communicating your results, your job is get results, you wont' get blamed cause you do your own reporting (which you should be doing), reporting really is just reporting; and if your line manger is exploiting the lines of communication, well at the executive level, fuck him. At the mid-manager level, they likely can get you fired but at the executive level, everyone's neck on the line and threats are usually empty if you're close in position. But you can't jump the gun on this, make sure that he really is a cocksucker, cause once you do this, no matter how innocently you pull this off, it will be war and you will need to fight on 2 fronts, reporting and results, but once they don't have access to your results, their reports will look like toilet paper and again, at the top companies, they will quickly realize what was going on.

As an aside, fighting on an interpersonal political level is for shitty companies, if your company sucks, and there are no results to speak of, it will degenerate into this. Best to just look for a better company who will appreciate a tiger like you and get the best recommendations you can. After all, why would you want to be an executive at the #5 player over that of being at the #1 company in your industry, even if it is at a lower position, you could end up going back to your old company as the CEO instead.

AND NEVER MAKE IT PERSONAL, the first person that does in a professional company looks like the loser, even if you are right, let that asshole shoot himself first, but defend yourself, but don't attack back on a personal level. The fact is, when you compete and people's jobs are on the line, things get messy, but if they are competing with you for a position, well who is to say they are more deserving- if you want life to fair and be nice, do something else, cause you won't find that here.

Victory

Ultimately, people need to know that you are sincere. You can be the best of the best, but if people don't respect you, then you simply are not a qualified leader. This isn't a one on one battle here, you're ultimately going head to head with other major companies in your industry and you need people to believe that you are the best person for the job. And with that comes the fact an executive's job is about making the tough decisions that no one can, or has a hard time making, and doing it within the appropriate amount of time.

This is not a fine line between being rash and decisive. When you're rash, its because you've never even bothered to think about the possible scenario and you just lash out and react. When you are decisive, you never react, you are prepared or have enough foundation to assess the situation with a cool head and make the best possible decision the shortest amount of time. And that amount of time could be 3 months of research, but it compared to others, they may need 5 months or never really make a clear response.

In the bigger corporations, you don't need to make any decisions. I'm totally being serious. You could, as an executive, do nothing for 3 months and still the company would be running- why? Because operations are still going on, the mail, the checks, the marketing, it's all still running- but when a new competitive force comes into play, those same operations become less effective or non-effective. It's like Facebook will still be huge on the PC platform- they could just bullshit about doing a mobile advert business model for the next 3 months and no one would know any different, the would still get to 1.1B members in 2 weeks from now; but in 3 months from now, their revenue would start to really slide and then in 2 year's from own, MightyAtom's model advert social media platform would start kicking their pretty ass (I wish haha- and no I'm not in that field), but my point is, for most executives at top corporations there is a point where you need to put your head on the chopping block and say, 'yes, this is the direction we should be going', and if you are as good as you say you are, then that, plus your sincerity and decisiveness, will get you to the top.

Now this ain't easy, and I've endured some hard things, but I've also done it in record time as well, and the hardcore Fortune 500 corporate life ain't for everyone. I would never survive in a public company environment cause I'm abusive, but both of the major companies that I worked in were both private (meaning not on the stock exchange).

Further Reading

In terms of books: Again, I'm only recommending books that for me were key to my own development as well as ones that I've found value in reading again and again:

I'd really suggest, 'Straight from the Gut' by Jack Welch; he was the CEO of GE and considered the best CEO of the last century lol.

Jack: Straight from the Gut


And in terms of being results driven, anything written by Jeffrey J. Fox, the man, really really knows what he is talking about and if anyone is about knowhow, it is this man.


Amazon: Rainmaker Jeffrey Fox

How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients


Amazon Fierce Competitor Jeffrey Fox

How to Be a Fierce Competitor: What Winning Companies and Great Managers Do in Tough Times


Again, you can grab these books from the library and read em through, but honestly, as a business guy, I've always seen these books as a personal investment, so if you can get a used copy cheap, purchase it, because you will be reading them more than once.

As always: apologies for any major grammatical errors as I've just tried to get this post out there. Feel free to post questions, I know I haven't been the most diligent in replying on the stop, but I will check in as much as I can. Cheers.

Brought to you by the TL Knowhow Team
Written by: MightyAtom