My management philosophy was the complete opposite of Big Bill's, and he felt compelled to take me under his wing and teach me how to treat employees. They were never loyal, according to him. They were efficient because the punishment for inefficiency was severe, as in the tissue incident. They worked hard because you paid them to work hard. Bill was convinced that, despite their paychecks, people only worked hard when he was looking in their direction. I couldn't convince him otherwise. When I pointed out that our present staff was half the size of the staff I took charge of initially, and they were producing four times the revenues, he attributed the increased productivity to his surprise visits and autocratic management style. Our staff was generating revenues of close to $250,000 per person. To me, their superior performance was in spite of his influence, not because of it. I spent time after each flight of the seagull encouraging various team members and refocusing their efforts. We had a molecular organizational design and every work pod orbited around the management core. Each person was a leader in his or her own area. Granted, we were a small company, but the principles of autonomy worked well and our people responded and performed just the way organization behavioral specialists predict people with a sense of ownership and autonomy will perform. I managed up the food chain and down the food chain, doing my best to keep Bill happy and to keep our team members happy and productive. That meant dropping whatever I was doing when he showed up. After he made his rounds greeting and insulting our team members, he signaled to me it was time to have coffee at Coco's down the street. We could have sat, talked, and drank coffee in my office or his office, but that was against his rules. Bill believed in leaving the premises to discuss company business. According to his philosophy, employees will eavesdrop and become privy to information they have no business knowing (99 percent of which nobody cared to know anyway) if you stay in the office. Thinking back, the stuff we talked about off-site was mostly information emanating from our team members anyway. Bill was into psychological warfare. Another reason he left the office to have coffee was to create the illusion we were discussing our team members beyond their earshot. This was supposed to make them fear for their jobs and therefore work more diligently. Big Bill was The Man and I reconciled myself to being a good soldier and charging up the hill when he said charge. In the publishing industry, he didn't even know which way to point the canons. We succeeded in spite of him.

When I say succeeded, we grew fast and developed a tremendous reputation in our field. When we sold the company 40 months after the day Bill and I bought it, his piece of the pie was more than five times his total investment—net. Charging up the hill at his command usually involved doing anything with little or no impact on our organizational objectives. Thank goodness he didn't like to bother with strategic planning. I would have been up to my tailpipe in mid-range plans. I felt all along he should have been more appreciative of my efforts on our collective behalf. And I whined to friends, family, and anyone who would listen. Many people can identify with the tremendous resentment I harbored for Bill. My role in my own misery I had the mother of all epiphanies thanks to the unrelated efforts of Bill and a friend in the mental health field. I was getting my first master's degree, the one in Marriage and Family Therapy, and one of my supervisors grew weary of hearing me complain about my business partner. One day, as I was launching into the vicissitudes of working with him for the 100th time, my friend said, "When are you going to stop worrying about him and start dealing with your role in this relational friction?" "My role?" "He knows you resent him and that makes him uncomfortable around you." "Okay," I said. "I'll admit that I resent the hell out of him. He doesn't appreciate a damn thing I do even though I'm doing everything I possibly can for the business. I'm making him a lot of money." "He's still uncomfortable." "Let him be uncomfortable," I shot back. She didn't have to say anything. She just patiently waited for me to stew in my own stupidity for a few moments. "All right," I mumbled. "And your point is...?" "You can't hide resentment. No matter how hard you try, it seeps into everything you say and do." "He comments about my sarcasm all the time," I confessed. "Are you sarcastic?" "All the time." She hit me in my wheelhouse. I couldn't deny that I had enormous resentment toward Big Bill, just like I had for my Machiavellian Boss at Disneyland. No wonder neither one of these guys was comfortable around me. No wonder they took everything I did as an assault and my every comment as a veiled insult. Whether they acted fairly or unfairly, competently or incompetently, appropriately or inappropriately, I was just as much to blame for the tension as they were. Whenever I was around them, it didn't matter what words came out of my mouth. I was always in an adversarial posture.

Put the Boundary Where It Belongs

As true as it all was, I didn't want to hear it. I've learned in the years since that it is not what my consulting clients want to hear either. It's a difficult pill to swallow. What about your situation? Upon closer examination, are you being punished for your talent and competency or are you poisoning the atmosphere around you as I did? Most likely it's a combination of both and you only have control over your part in it. If others make you boil, your attitude might be helping increase the flame on their burner. I feel a little goody-goody, frou-frou asking the rhetorical question: Can't we all just get along? Yes we can, but not always on our own terms. Truly getting along with bosses and coworkers is rarely on our terms. Draw the line where you need to protect yourself and your best interests, but when the line is drawn to protect your ego and to prove you're right, it's time to redraw the line. We can all get along if we'll accept that life and work are never perfect and there are times and places to settle for less in the moment to gain more in the long term. There are also times not to compromise. Deciding which is which is up to you. How serene you can be despite your I-Boss is your call. How much you allow his inevitable stupidity to rob you of valuable time and energy is your decision. You might not be in control of what your I-Boss says or does, but you are in control of your attitude. Deciding to admit your role in the chaos and discomfort caused by your I-Boss is a start. When I realized and accepted that I contributed to Bill's bad attitude, the tension between us immediately eased off. When my attitude improved, so did his. You and I have tremendous power to alter the climate in which we work, regardless of our I-Boss's incompetence or his fear of our competence. We can and should do good work. We can and should take pride in what we do.

That causes us to focus on accomplishment rather than focusing on the burden someone else is placing on us. And we can present our good work to the I-Boss not as a threat, but as our contribution to the overall efforts of the team. If you want to live a happier, more fulfilling life, live by the words of Aunt Eller. You remember Aunt Eller, Miss Laurie's adult supervision in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Judd Fry, the ranch hand with designs on Miss Laurie and a vendetta against Curly, her betrothed, dampens the newly nuptualized couple's spirits by trying to burn them alive on their wedding day. In the film version, after a narrow escape, good old Aunt Eller comforted her niece by saying something like, "You must look at the good things in life and the bad things in life and say 'well, all right then' to both." I've never heard it said better. Look at the good things at work and the bad things at work and make peace with both. Like the Chinese proverb I mentioned earlier says, life will be what it is, whether you understand or not. That's why we recovering idiots pray for serenity to accept what we can't change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You have no control over your Idiot Boss. Your control is limited to how you think and what you say and do. The good news is the way you think and what you say and do can improve the way your I-Boss treats you. As you become less threatening to your I-Boss, his respect for your talent and competencies will increase. Who needs control when a little bit of influence can cause such a major improvement in how others look at you?

Success In Spite of Stupidity

Success and stupidity don't mix. Your boss's stupidity is only half your problem. Your own stupidity can easily complete the disaster. With the help of my Higher Power, I'm counting on my recovery process to give me a chance to rise above my own intellectual challenges. Although my Idiot Boss's mental shortcomings remain beyond my control, I can anticipate his thinking and behavior and proceed accordingly. Throughout my career, I have done things I shouldn't have done, not done things I should have done, said things I shouldn't have said, and not said things that could have made things better. If wishes were Winnebagos, the homeless would pay exorbitant insurance premiums. I must choose every day not to waste precious time and energy dwelling on mistakes I've made in the past, wishing I could go back and try again. That would be dumb. What's done is done. But to delete the past from my memory and make the same mistakes again would be dumber. The problems that once bothered me most, as an Idiot Boss or Idiot Employee, were of my own devising. All the while, the keys to my happiness and serenity were in my pocket. The keys to your happiness and serenity are in your pocket right now. I resisted as long as I did because I didn't want to give up my antiquated notions of how life should be. Not that my vision of how life should be was completely misguided. It was the belief I could somehow will it to perfection that wasted enormous amounts of time and energy.