PART

I

The People at the Top

Having worked as a psychologist, consultant, and college teacher, I had zero idea about management structure or strategy when I joined Hewlett-Packard in 1980. As you’ll see in Chapter 1, I found out the hard way that what you don’t know can hurt you. The lessons I learned over the years (mostly about what not to do) became rich background for this book. After reading Speaking Up^®: Surviving Executive Presentations, you won’t have to make the same mistakes I made.

In the famous military treatise, The Art of War, Sun Tzu advises, “Know your enemy and know yourself, and you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.”¹ In Chapter 2, you will meet your “enemy.” While life at the top levels of corporate America can be very competitive and feel like a battlefield sometimes, the executives sitting around that table are not your enemy. Thus, the war metaphor is limited. In fact they see you as a colleague. As Dan Warmenhoven reminded us, “We’re all on the same team. We’re all in the same company. We are all pursuing the same objectives.”

Of course, the more you know about your “colleagues” before walking into that room, the better. Chapter 2 takes you behind the glossy annual reports, to reveal what life is like for people at the C-level: their lack of job security, the competitive nature of their jobs, and the journeys they’ve taken to get where they are. Understanding all this, plus the skills you are going to learn in the rest of this book, will allow you to win your boardroom “battles.”