01
If you’re like me, then I know you’ll want to dive into the actions straight away. “Tell me what I can do to improve”, I can hear you shout, “after all that’s what you promised me on the back cover!”
Fair enough, but having a good understanding of yourself – what drives you, who you want to be and most importantly, what you want to achieve, is the fundamental basis of achieving moderate success. After all, if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, how do you know if you’ve achieved it?
The chapters in this section include:
What even is success?
Your 5 minute personality tests: Are you a Fiery Red ENTJ?
A Brief Interlude: It’s all your fault
Your personal brand: Are you IKEA or Apple?
No, you’re not the only one who can’t sleep at night
02
Now that you’ve found out a little bit about yourself, we can really get started on the activities. We’ll begin with the basics of doing well in any job – setting expectations, managing your time and effort, writing emails and presentations, and dealing with the ups and downs of working life.
The chapters in this section include:
Aiming high : ‘Ça, c'est du vrai insight’ at BCG Paris
Managing expectations: Your Easyjet flight is delayed
Keeping focus: The exam question
Managing Time: Trying to avoid 'al desko'
A Brief Interlude on being honest
Sending emails: Don’t be a Boov
Writing presentations: Avoiding ‘death by PowerPoint’…
Being proactive: “Einer geht sich immer noch aus”
Moving on from setbacks: The 5 stages of grief
Finding balance: The Stockdale paradox
03
Working with other people isn’t as easy as you might think. Surely, if your work is good and you’re nice enough, then others will just cooperate & be suitably dazzled by your brilliance? Unfortunately not, because, well, life is complicated. People are complicated. It’s not a straight line from input to output but a squiggly one defined by who people are, what they want, how they feel, and what they had for breakfast, among many other inputs.
Hopefully, as you enter the realm of psychology for beginners, you’ll get excited by the fascinating world of complexity out there and agree that figuring people out will make your job a lot more fun as well as successful.
The chapters in this section include:
Understanding people (1): What they do
Working with third parties
Understanding people (2): Who they are
Showing humility: Three men go camping
A Brief Interlude on swearing
Understanding people (3): Where they’re from
Managing your boss
Making people feel special: Free fries in Greece
Working with idiots
Active listening: An endangered skill worth honing
04
Here, we’ll focus on advanced skills, which you’re more likely to need in slightly more senior, mid-management roles – such as setting priorities and goals, making decisions, debating and negotiating.
The chapters in this section include:
Strategy is deciding what not to do
Setting goals: Aboard the riverboat Steam Queen
Solving problems: The hypothesis-based approach
Making decisions: You don’t always need to ‘sleep on it’
A Brief Interlude on humour
Negotiating well (1): Why cinemas only sell giant tubs of popcorn
Negotiating well (2): Getting my teenagers out of bed
Setting prices: Restaurant 97 in Surbiton
Managing people: Let it go, let it go!
Reinventing things: Never waste a good crisis
05
And so we come to the crux of this book. Ultimately, you won’t be moderately successful without a promotion or two along the way, either within your existing company or moving to a new one. These days, career paths have become pretty squiggly so it’s no longer necessary to follow a predetermined path, but to reach the goal you’ve set yourself at the beginning of this book, it’s likely that you’ll want to formally move up (or across) the ladder.
Doing well in your current role is of course a prerequisite for this – well most of the time anyway, sometimes you just get lucky – but it’s rarely sufficient. You also need to look out for opportunities and then grab them with both hands when they appear. That’s what this final section is about.
The chapters in this section include:
Defining your ‘value proposition’
Developing your career: Get a mentor, or two
Getting promoted (1): Know the process(es)
Getting promoted (2): Step up!
A Brief Interlude on luck
Fantastic jobs and where to find them
Working with headhunters: It’s not you, it’s them
A Brief Interlude on job titles
Impressing people at interviews: My top ten tips
Succeeding in a new role: How hard can it be?
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