Workplace Warrior: Insights and Advice for Winning on the Corporate Battlefield [Hardcover]

Kay Hammer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2000

Wars don't always take place on battlefields or in jungles. The hardest-won fights are often waged within a company, a family, an individual soul. In Workplace Warrior, Kay Hammer reveals the gripping story of the professional and personal skirmishes that led her to found Evolutionary Technologies International -- a company that Inc. magazine twice rated one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S.

It all started when Hammer found herself suddenly a single mom with two young girls to raise on an assistant professor's salary. After much inner struggle, Hammer did what more and more of us are apt to do in today's volatile marketplace: She decided to reinvent herself professionally.

Workplace Warrior tells the intriguing tale of how this determined woman retooled her skills, advanced quickly in the software business, fought countless rounds to get new ideas accepted, failed famously ... and finally won. Along the way, Hammer learned some lessons about herself and about how to survive the corporate minefield. She organizes her insights into what she calls the three stages of professional growth -- The Apprentice, The Warrior, The Adventurer -- and she challenges readers to examine their own progress.

Combining raw personal honesty with meticulous analysis of the "way things work" in corporate America, Workplace Warrior is that rare book that's both personally compelling and professionally enlightening.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A linguistics professor turned cofounder, president and CEO of the successful software company Evolutionary Technologies, Hammer believes the lessons she has learned in business can help others succeed. As a single mother of two young children in 1979, she realized that her chances of achieving financial security in the academic world were slim, so she returned to school and honed her computer skills. By 1991, she was experienced enough from her management positions in software development to spin off her own firm with a partner whose strengths complemented her own, despite several brushes with failure and battle scars from her abrasive and opinionated style. While she sprinkles the book with personal anecdotes, a more detailed biography would have added credibility to her insights, which are closely tied to her experiences. Much of the book explores the three stages that, according to Hammer, executives progress through--apprentice, warrior and adventurer--with an emphasis on the ongoing need to assess the corporate terrain in private and public companies from an economic standpoint. Strongest when it focuses on specific situations (such as how to respond to sabotaging colleagues), her slightly rambling guidance on effective communication in the workplace, strategies for dealing with conflict and ways to attract support will be of most use to readers seeking a model for calculated risk taking and canny politicking as they strive to take control of their careers. Agent, Karl Weber. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hammer, an academic turned corporate leader (Evolutionary Technologies International), uses battlefield concepts as the backdrop to her autobiography. She allows the reader some insight into her life, her personality, and the difficulties she had in adjusting to the complexities of corporate reality in the fast-paced world of computers, first as an employee and then as an executive. Of particular note is the section regarding common personality types (cynic, complainer, worrier, firebrand, victim, networker, armchair quarterback, smooth operator, confessor, hearer, and silent). As a text, the book is uneven: the personal success story is outstanding, the business primer is decent, the warfare metaphors are weak. The most poignant lesson in the book revolves around personal change: "In short, if done correctly, the decision to pack your tent can be one of the most invigorating decisions you can make in your professional life." While this book provides a number of insights, not the least of which is that one can identify personal weaknesses and change them, it covers little new ground. Not a necessary purchase.DSteven Silkunas, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 239 pages
• Publisher: AMACOM; 1st edition (May 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814404944
• ISBN-13: 978-0814404942
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,260,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! Powerful., September 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Workplace Warrior: Insights and Advice for Winning on the Corporate Battlefield (Hardcover)

Kay Hammer is one smart cookie who didn't crumble. This is a brutally honest story filled with savvy advice and thought provoking wisdom useful to anyone who works. Anywhere. The principles revealed by Hammer are potentially life-changing for anyone who truly gives them more than a passing thought. I can think of dozens of people to whom I would tacitly recommend this book. It should also be required reading for every corporate HR department.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensible, at times moving, January 4, 2001

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Workplace Warrior: Insights and Advice for Winning on the Corporate Battlefield (Hardcover)

Frankly, I like the book's content almost as much as I dislike its title and subtitle. Please, no more forced comparisons and contrasts between the battlefield and the workplace. Enough! With regard to the excellent text, as Hammer explains in the Introduction, one of her basic concepts is that there are "three stages of personal and professional growth." All three "can be characterized by their attitudes toward risk and the need for approval. These three stages are those of the apprentice, the warrior, and the adventurer." She has much of value to say about each, especially in terms of how each differs from the other two. Her larger objectives are, in my opinion, (a) to help her reader to decide which "battles" to fight as well as which to ignore, and, (b) to help her reader "win" more often on the "corporate battlefield."

According to Hammer, the defining characteristic of the apprentice is the need for external approval. The primary difference between the apprentice and the warrior is that the warrior's goals sufficiently compel her to risk disapproval and engage in conflict, while the apprentice is not yet either dissatisfied or secure enough to assume such risk." While apprentices focus on approval and warriors on vindication, adventurers focus on challenge and discovery. "They value respect, friendship, and recognition, but they do not need these things."

In Section I ("Rules of Engagement"), Hammer examines specific issues when running a private company and then other issues when planning an exit strategy. Then in Section II ("Basic Training"), she discusses effective communication in the workplace, strategies for dealing with conflict, and acquiring allies. Having thus prepared her reader for "combat", Hammer concludes with Section III ("The Battle and Beyond") in which she explains how to maximize chances for victory, why we tend to love and fear authority, and what can be learned from loss as a precursor to success. In the Epilogue, Hammer suggests that "Our real challenge is to conquer our shadow enemies -- those that mask our fear and pain -- so that regardless of our success in the battles we wage in the workplace, we move forward with greater serenity and satisfaction." If your own workplace often seems to be a battlefield and you feel ill-equipped to engage in combat, Hammer's insights and advice will be invaluable to you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars surviving the workplace wars, January 3, 2001

By 

Jeffrey L. Seglin "Seglin" (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Workplace Warrior: Insights and Advice for Winning on the Corporate Battlefield (Hardcover)

Hammer's take is that you should recognize the potential battles that lie in the wake of working your way up in business and starting a compare. If you do this, she maintains, you stand a better chance of success. While some of the stories Hammer tells of her treatment among the executive ranks are pretty horrendous, they come off as a forthright take on what it's like in the trenches. In fact such details add to the overall value of the book. We read of the boss who humiliated her in front of her colleagues by forming a shadow committee to duplicate her efforts behind her back and then announcing the adoption of that committee's suggestions at a department-wide meeting. She tells of an employee she was mentoring who eventually tried to take over her job. Understanding the enemy, Hammer says, is the way to win in the workplace wars.

Unlike other CEO books that make the journey seem all too pat, Hammer does a good job of painting a more complete picture, warts and all. The end result is a useful book for anyone working at a company or trying to make it with his or her own company.