Customer Reviews

Conduct Expected for the 21st Century: Rules for a Successful Career

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When I was a younger (20ish) person, I used to get in hot water with my bosses ALL the time. I had no clue as to what a huge PITA I was in the workplace. I picked up "Conduct Expected" in a bookstore during one of my darker weeks working with corporate (conformist) attorneys and could not put it down. Since lunch hour was about over, I had to buy it to take it with me.

That first book lays down ground rules that are definitely important for junior people just starting in the workplace. After being a working person for 20+ years, I know what rules to bend, but your average 24 year old does not. I'd give this to a recent college graduate, for example.

I recently picked up the most recent one and found that old Paul's gotten much darker and more cynical about the workplace. I love him madly for it. He compares corporate types to primates and compares the bum-kissing at the office with literal bum-kissing ("tuberosity maintenance") in primate troops. "Demented" is the word that came to mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this edition - relished it. After you read this book, rent "Office Space". It will cheer you up in Dark Times. Unlike "Dilbert", Lareau lays it out for you and gives you some commonsense rules to keep upper management happy and make your work life simpler and more productive.

The material presented in this work is concise and clearly directed. It is by far the most useful guide available to anyone navigating the modern work place.

This book will help people make sense out of their work environment, will improve their "boss-managership" skills, improve their co-worker relations, and enhance their career development.

Perhaps even more important is that by knowing and following the rules it will help reduce accidental exposure to career limiting mistakes.

The advice and guidance is provided through short sections that highlight organizational situations and relationships and then provides instructive commentary.

This edition is very similar to the first but has enough updating to make owning both worthwhile in my opinion. The previous edition had a set of check lists to help develop "rule following" behaviors in the work place. I enjoyed using the checklist to help identify and improve my organizational performance and miss not seeing some of them in the new edition.

I have recommended this to others who have in turn made recommendations to people who also have benefitted from the advice provided. Feedback has always been overwhelming positive.

The material presented in this work is concise and clearly directed. It is by far the most useful guide available to anyone navigating the modern work place.

This book will help people make sense out of their work environment, will improve their "boss-managership" skills, improve their co-worker relations, and enhance their career development.

Perhaps even more important is that by knowing and following the rules it will help reduce accidental exposure to career limiting mistakes.

The advice and guidance is provided through short sections that highlight organizational situations and relationships and then provides instructive commentary.

This edition is very similar to the first but has enough updating to make owning both worthwhile in my opinion. The previous edition had a set of check lists to help develop "rule following" behaviors in the work place. I enjoyed using the checklist to help identify and improve my organizational performance and miss not seeing some of them in the new edition.

I have recommended this to others who have in turn made recommendations to people who also have benefitted from the advice provided. Feedback has always been overwhelming positive.

This is a survival guide for the ruthless and uncaring world of business--and it works well for political, military, and academic careers as well. In "Conduct Expected for the 21st Century," William Lareau lays down 142 "hard facts and expected conducts" in 13 chapters. These are fleshed out with a few diagrams, several antecedents, and brief explanations. Designed with the business professional, this list of rules guides us in displaying the proper careerist mindset. Sometimes, "getting the job done" gets in the way of career progression! Lareau doesn't advocate immoral or illegal conduct; going to prison is a career killer! Appearances are everything!

Most of Lareau's hard facts and conduct expected are "common sense," and should have been taught in business school. A few rules are counter-intuitive, but still true: "humans are designed to survive in a world that no longer exists." "Justice and fairness do not exist." "Never forget that you are viewed as a necessary nuisance." It struck me as odd, but "get used to the fact that organizations abhor aggression" is just as true in a military career as in the business world--corporations claim to admire aggression, but aggressive individuals are a threat to the power structure.

Ever wonder why Congress is full of career politicians? Why American politics is so fouled up? Politics is a business, and "Conduct Expected" applies to the U.S. Congress just as it does to Starbucks or WalMart or ITT. Brown nosing is required for career survival--but brown nosing with style. Bribery used to be standard accepted business practice in the United States, and is still considered obligatory in most of the national governments recognized by the United Nations. "Humans do not like change and seek to maintain their views of the world." You aren't going to change the way others do business--all you can do is change the way YOU do business. "Conduct Expected" doesn't directly address finding yourself in a situation where you must break US law or your career ends, but the guidelines provided in job selection should prevent your getting into that situation--or if you find yourself in an environment where you soon will be a felon, you will have the tools to rapidly extricate yourself. Conducting damage control may brand you as a "whistle blower," which will make you unemployable. Going to prison is a career killer, too. Life ain't fair, so you have to take care of yourself. Lareau addresses establishing a support network on and off the job to enhance your career.

"Conduct Expected for the 21st Century" is my most important business guidebook. I more or less trashed my own military career because I lacked the careerist mind-set. It is arguable if I would have heeded Lareau's advice 30 years ago, but it would have been nice to have "Conduct Expected" when I began my military career!

Expected Conduct is essentially a list of 142 pretty good rules for conducting yourself to get ahead in your carreer. Unfortunately the author has also seized the opportunity to express his contempt for humanity. Your best bet is to read enough on each rule to understand its meaning and skip the presumptuous explanatory opinion. Dilbert is funny. This author is not.

Business Organizations have two goals: to perpetuate themselves, and to competently provide goods/services to their customers at a profit. Each of these goals require value systems. American society extols the values of those who are technically competent, who are visionary, who are flaw-finders, who are suspicious of authority, and who are iconoclastic. Although these values encourage, and make heroes of, innovators who create breakthrough goods & services, which is a good thing, extolling these values has a downside. These values can, and often do, make required interpersonal actions, that are necessary for effective functioning within an organization's structure, dangerously counter-intuitive.

Conduct Expected excels at describing what behaviors direct managers, lateral managers, senior managers, subordinates, and the "corporate collective entity" find threatening, and the book does a great job of setting out rules for avoiding these behaviors. However, the book falls short of explaining, from a management science perspective, why these behaviors should be avoided. Instead the book uses euphemisms for "butt kissing," describes primate behavior, and just says that you have to put up with it. The next revision of the book should include more nuanced explanations of the human dynamics within an organization. For example, the complaints that senior management, middle management, and workers have of each other, which each normally attributes to personality, are actually artifacts of their position in the management hierarchy.

I do recommend this book. As you read it, take in all of the rules and start to internalize them. But, as you read it, don't let the sarcasm get you down or cause you to become more jaded.