CHAPTER 12
Politics
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
—Ernest Benn
Every manager and team member is aware of the potential destructive capabilities of office politics, but few know how to manage it. For the sake of discussion, I will define politics in the office as “that energy spent pursuing a personal agenda that is incompatible with the macro-organization's stated technical agenda.”
By this definition, a junior team member befriending an executive is not political; but, if that friendship results in that team member's ideas getting furthered at the expense of superior concepts, it becomes political at that point. The reason an organization ...
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