Books for managing your careerBy Amy Lindgren
November 9, 2010
"Games at Work" by Mauricio Goldstein and Philip Read (Jossey-Bass, 2009, $24.95).
What if your goal at work isn’t so much to advance as to survive? And what if the main obstacle is a system of office politics seemingly designed to drive you batty? Authors Goldstein and Read feel your pain, and they have some solutions.
But first they have some definitions to help you categorize the politics you’re experiencing. Gossip and blame are the low-hanging fruit in this process of naming -- we’ve all run into these particular motivation killers. But perhaps you haven’t been as aware of the demoralizing impact of bosses who underfund budgets or managers who suppress negative data to maintain an aura of positive energy.
Armed with this information, you are ready to apply the authors’ awareness-identification-mitigation (AIM) strategy to confront the games and rise above them. What about the idea of ignoring the games altogether? Only at your own peril; apparently standing on the football field with no pads and no plan provides very little protection from the folks who do know they’re playing in a game.
