John Hoover - How to Work for an Idiot, Revised and Expanded with More Idiots, More Insanity, and More Incompetency: Survive and Thrive Without Killing Your Boss

Praise for How to Work for an Idiot

If you have the unhappy experience of working for someone you think is a real jerk, Dr. John Hoover says there is hope.

Bloomberg Television

How to Work for an Idiot is so cleverly disguised, you might think youre reading Norman Vincent Peale.

Bloomberg Radio

an irreverent and realistic look at what people must deal with every day at work.

CNNfn

REVISED & EXPANDED WITH MORE IDIOTS, MORE INSANITY, AND MORE INCOMPETENCY

SURVIVE & THRIVE WITHOUT KILLING YOUR BOSS

By John Hoover, PhD
With illustrations by Steve Lait

Copyright 2011 by John Hoover

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

HOW TO WORK FOR AN IDIOT, REVISED & EXPANDED
EDITED BY KIRSTEN DALLEY
TYPESET BY NICOLE DEFELICE
Cover design by Howard Grossman/12E Design
Printed in the U.S.A.

Cartoons used with permission of Steve Lait.

To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.

The Career Press, Inc.
220 West Parkway, Unit 12
Pompton Plains, NJ 07444
www.careerpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hoover, John, 1952
How to work for an idiot : revised and expanded with more idiots, more insanity,
and more incompetency : survive and
thrive without killing your boss / by John Hoover. -- Rev. and expanded.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: How to work for an idiot : survive & thrive -- without killing your boss. c2004.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60163-191-6 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-635-5 (ebook) 1. Managing your
boss. 2. Executives--Psychology. 3. Office
politics. 4. Interpersonal relations. 5. Psychology, Industrial. I. Title.

HF5548.83.H66 2012
650.13--dc23

2011026934

At this stage of my life Im grateful that my boss is not an idiot. In fact, Amy Friedman, CEO and founder of Partners in Human Resources International, where I direct the executive coaching practice, is a most caring and compassionate business leader, well known for her endearing and enduring relationship skills. My other two bosses at Partners International from 2006 through today, Paul Gorrell and Trish Kyle, are talented, resourceful, and engaged corporate learning professionals, as well. I therefore send half of this dedication to all of the Good Bosses out there, like Amy, Trish, and Paul, who are cutting edge enough to understand that a key ingredient to success is the ability to make the first laugh of the day at ones own expense. The other half of the dedication I send to those who suffer under the yoke of working for one of the other boss types. Keep the faith.

This second edition would not be going to print if not for the confidence and leadership demonstrated by my publisher, Ron Fry, who had the prescience to back this title with public relations and creative marketing. Laurie Kelly-Pye and Michael Pye of Career Press have also been at the vanguard of this books success since its original release in 2003. Kirsten Dalley edited this second edition brilliantly, giving my mother, Ruth Schultz Hoover, the gifted writer and ber-editor of the first edition, a chance to simply wave appreciatively as this edition went to press.

Many thanks to my legal eagles, Mark Merriman and Andy Tavel, at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC in New York.

Other acknowledgments could be legion if space allowed. For example, I send heartfelt thanks to my dearest friend, Paula Hammond, who is always eager to give helpful advice to this recovering idiot. My sister, Ann Bourke, is an ally in my mission to rescue people from their inner idiots, beginning with my own. I am also grateful for the experience of working with talented colleagues throughout the executive coaching industry, at Fielding Graduate University, at City University of New York, and at the American Management Association. Most of all, I thank a loving God who has forgotten as far as the east is from the west what a nincompoop I have been at times in my personal and professional affairs. I am blessed.

This book contains the debris they scraped off the walls after my head exploded. For years I wrote books on leadership, creativity, and organizational performance, traveling far and wide while extolling the virtues of innovation, flattened organizations, collaborative leadership, and shared responsibility in the workplace. My clients welcomed me and nodded approvingly as I taught the principles of teamwork and open communication. They even waited politely until I had finished and left the building before ignoring my advice.

How to Work for an Idiot is my revenge.

Regardless of what youre thinking, the Idiot I am most worried about is not the one in the corner or penthouse officeits the one in the mirror. Accepting my personal powerlessness over stupidity and how my life had become unmanageable, I joined a recovery program for clueless creatures and found idiot-free serenity. Not a world without Idiots, but a peaceful perspective from which they could no longer perturb me.

By studying the evolutionary hiccup that resulted in Idiot Bosses (I-Bosses), I discovered why the females of some species eat their young rather than allowing them to grow into bosses who impose their ignorance on others with less institutional authority. Many direct reports from my early days as a boss might have wished my mother had had a healthier postpartum appetite.

Publishing a book such as this is not without consequences. Im an executive coach, I supervise an executive coaching practice at Partners International in New York City, and I even helped launch a coaching certificate program at City University of New York, where I teach Coaching in the Context of the Organization. Certain people are shocked to hear the word idiot in my lexicon. It is not generally considered a term of endearment in polite company. Some people, especially those in human resources departments who might otherwise hire me to coach and consult, find it pejorative, even offensive. As a recovering Idiot Boss, I find that using language that aptly describes my history is a terrific reminder to me as well as a bridge to others who use such languagein their heads or aloudwhen they describe their employers to friends, colleagues, family members, and coaches.

Where such language exists, there is work to be done. Many people out there are angry and self-destructive and blame it on their bosses. They need help from someone who will press pause on the Polite Machine, roll up his sleeves, engage with them, laugh with them, and cry with them on the journey to becoming a changed person who is truly appreciative of others and dedicated to the success of the organization that employs them.

If you dont believe there is an underlying current of anger and resentment running beneath the surface of all the contemporary boss humorfrom Scott Adamss eternally popular