Harold's cellophane existence intrigued me because I spent my life trying to be as visible as possible, which explains much of the trouble I've experienced. Had I attempted to preserve my anonymity, especially at strategic career junctures, I would have taken less incoming fire. If keeping a low profile is the longevity tactic you choose, the following cloaking techniques can help you survive in hostile environments:

■ Be aware you can generate conversation, even when you're not present. If you do good things, people will talk about you. If you do bad things, people will talk about you more. If you become a pawn in a social chess match, you will be talked about. If you are king or queen in a social chess match, you will be talked about much more. If you align yourself with the blue office faction, your fellow faction members will be aware of your presence or absence. If you align with the green office faction, the blue faction members will still monitor your comings and goings in order to calculate a firing solution. • Don't align yourself with any faction if you want to remain invisible. If you don't align with a faction, yet remain visible, you will be everyone's active target. Never give anyone incentive to give you a second thought in your presence, much less your absence. Don't become vital to anyone. Don't become a liability to anyone, except perhaps stockholders' equity.

■ Generating paperwork will get you noticed. Never generating paperwork is a way to fly below the office radar. In the cyber age, the same thing applies to e-mail. If you never send e-mail, you'll never place a demand on anyone to respond. If you never reply to the e-mail you receive, you'll eventually be forgotten. To remain invisible, get your name deleted from as many lists as possible. It goes without saying that the less your name appears anywhere, the lower your visibility.

■ If you must attend meetings, don't speak. Don't even ask anyone to pass the donuts. If you are asked to say something, never offer a new idea or challenge anyone else's ideas. Boss-generated ideas are particularly sacred. Even a pinprick at the sanctity of their incoherent reasoning can threaten job security.

■ If people poke their heads into your office or cubicle and ask what you're doing, say you're generating reports. No one wants to read reports, so they'll leave you alone and never follow up. No one wants to help write reports either, so they'll avoid you like the plague. Those who think these are not serious suggestions or accurate observations have never worked in a large bureaucracy in the public or private sector. How many times have you been frustrated by someone behind an airline ticket counter, a customer service desk, at the IRS, at your credit card, local telephone, or cable TV company who refuses to act boldly and decisively to resolve your problem? How grateful are you on that rare occasion when a service representative does? It's not that timid plodders are necessarily uncaring, bad people. They are simply keeping their heads down. Remember when president Ronald Regan was shot? As they wheeled him into the operating room, he looked up at Nancy and said, "Honey, I forgot to duck." Timid, pension-bound professionals are in a constant state of "duck," even when no one is shooting at them. There are countless people literally putting in time until they can retire with their maximum pension, go get a real job, and buy timeshare in Bend, Oregon. Many of these water-treaders don't mind keeping busy with company business as long as they aren't asked to break a sweat. To career bureaucrats, asking for work is asking for trouble. In a bureaucratic environment, if word gets out that you are the least bit aggressive at taking on and finishing tasks, you'll return from a bio-break one day to find everyone's work on your desk. I'm not here to criticize these folks. If becoming a non-entity and preserving your anonymity is how you choose to survive in the workplace, now you know how. Consider your options Be realistic when considering what you want to accomplish in your workdays. Most people reading this article are doers by nature and have found themselves frustrated by bosses who impede progress and accomplishment. Before you crawl under your desk and withdraw from the rat race, answer some basic questions:

■ Do you want to be active or idle?

■ If you want to be active, do you want to just keep busy or do something meaningful?

■ Does meaningful mean advancing your career and earning potential, or cataloguing rare fungi?

■ If you want to earn more and be more involved, are you willing to become a smart blip on the corporate radar screen? Unprepared blips are continuously frustrated and disappointed because blips on the organizational radar screen usually become targets. You might simply be a target for those who want to shirk their responsibilities and dump them onto the first person who will accept them. Becoming a target can also mean serving as a scapegoat for someone else's lack of performance. If you intentionally want to become a more active and visible player at work, be aware of and prepared for the potential downside of visibility. Many people are highly skilled at internal and external planning for their organizations, yet rarely apply those same planning skills to their own careers and working conditions. Surviving Idiot Bosses can be enhanced by planning your way into more rewarding activities. It's not hard to stay ahead of Idiot Bosses, so if you're not trying to hide in the janitorial closet until retirement, put your planning skills to work for yourself.

■ Consider what you want to become involved in. Look ahead and listen to the company propaganda for activities and initiatives that the department is likely to be gearing up for in the near future. Identify those things you want to be involved in and offer to do preliminary research and legwork.

■ Consider who is likely to be involved with the new initiatives and decide if these are the people with whom you want to share a foxhole. Look at who will likely be the team leader and consider how shiny this person's star is within the organization. Someone you personally enjoy a great deal might not be very popular up the food chain, in which case you could have a decision to make—having comfort now or keeping future options open.

■ Consider the importance of the new activities and initiatives in the context of long-range organizational objectives. It might be fun to resod the corporate softball field, but will redesigning work processes put you in a more lucrative limelight?

■ Consider what you are best suited for. Don't try to take charge of an aerospace engineering project if your background is in advertising or public relations. It's always in your best interest to align your professional responsibilities that resonate with your natural strengths and competencies.

■ Consider how others see you. Although your unique strengths and competencies might be right for a project or corporate initiative, do others recognize you as a leader? You could maneuver your Idiot Boss into assigning you a project, which technically legitimizes your power. But if your peers don't perceive you as a competent leader, they will sabotage and subvert your efforts, leaving you wishing you had stayed under your desk.

■ Consider how much time and effort you're willing to exert to overcome obstacles in your path, what amount of abuse you're willing to absorb from detractors, and whether the potential rewards are equal to the sacrifice. I slightly misstated the point earlier when I said I would have taken less incoming fire by keeping a lower profile throughout my career. The problem isn't coming under fire. The problem is not being properly trained for combat operations.

Surviving Your Performance Review

Invisibility has its rewards. Transparency in the workplace can lead to job security, as it did for cellophane Harold, or even promotion. Most people nonetheless prefer a stimulating challenge and the opportunity to excel. I believe professional people have a natural inclination to perform well. Why, then, is the performance review such a dreaded experience? Theoretically, management should be eager to regularly examine the organizational population and review their performance in terms of who is contributing. Yet, you would be amazed at how vigorously some managers avoid reviews. Good bosses are eager to give performance reviews to praise performance and encourage growth. Sadists enjoy giving performance reviews for the opposite reasons and thereby render them useless for their intended purpose. Ostensively, the performance review is to determine promotion and raise eligibility. In reality, most organizations go through the performance review process at least once a year after much pushing, prodding, and threatened litigation from the Human Resource Department, which is only trying to cover the company's derriere in the event of a grievance or wrongful termination suit. As a general rule, giving performance reviews is a n0 win situation. In the competent leadership vacuum common to most organizations, I would prefer serving as a human shield before I would recommend issuing performance reviews. To give you a raise, most boss types must deny money to someone else. The company will claim in court that a highly effective and completely objective system is used to determine who receives and does not receive pay increases. Truthfully, the raises are doled out to the boss's favorite people. It's difficult to prove, although people sometimes win handsome settlements. If you want to get your hands on the money sooner and save legal fees, become one of the boss's favorite people by preemptively using the techniques listed under the various boss types. By design, performance reviews require a manager to sit on the throne of judgment. I didn't apply for Solomon's job and don't want it. If a manager gives an honest appraisal, the team member might feel slighted or even attacked. If the manager inflates a review to protect the team member's fragile ego, the boss might feel guilty for subverting the system, rendering it meaningless.

With the possible exception of the masochist, all of us like to think we're more valuable than we really are. (I have yet to work for a company that can't survive my departure.) When bosses go through the performance review motions, what constitutes a good employee to them and what constitutes a good employee in the real world are often two different things. If top executives are genuinely concerned with organizational productivity and performance, they should have team members do performance reviews on their bosses. To organizations already doing so, I extend a heartfelt "attaperson." To the others I say: Wake up, morons. Bad bosses have 1,000 times more destructive potential than ineffective team members. If you can't find the courage to have team members review their bosses, at least use 360-degree feedback for performance reviews. It's more valid, reliable, and objective than the manager-generated performance review. Performance review horror Performance is reviewed every day in organizations where open communication is encouraged and information flows freely among all team members. My worst performance review came from a particularly mean-spirited manager whom I will always believe had it in for me for graduating from college and using words in excess of two syllables. I remember thinking to myself as my manager yakked in the background: Are we talking about the same person here? All this time I thought I was doing a good job. Does he think I work long hours because I have nothing better to do? If I'm this bad why did he wait so long to tell me? He wrote that I needed improvement in quantity of work, quality of work, work habits, and especially communication—then he demanded that I sign it. Based on that performance review, I'm surprised security didn't escort me from the building in handcuffs.

Don't allow poor performance reviews to wound your ego. They are a more reliable indicator of the boss's mood and ability to deal with people issues than they are accurate reflections of performance. If your boss discusses goals, objectives, habits, and behaviors on performance-review day, and no other day, the performance review process lacks any kind of credibility as far as I'm concerned. For those who still suffer under the oppressive yoke of their boss's performance reviews, the least I can do is offer some pointers. Performance reviews mean different things to different boss types. Depending on your boss's type, you can slide through unharmed or emerge from your performance review bloodied and bruised. Regardless of the challenge awaiting you, it's best to go in with your eyes open. According to recent data from the career development office at The College of St. Catherine, professionals over the age of 35 change jobs on average every three years and workers under the age of 35 can expect to change jobs every 18 months. Yikes. That's a lot of Idiot Bosses to deal with. Changing jobs anywhere near that frequently means you're likely to get your share of other boss types, too. You need to be prepared for them all. Reflect on what I've already told you about the various boss types, their likes and dislikes, and their underpinning career paradigms. You must present yourself in the best possible light to your boss 12 months a year, not just 30 days before performance reviews. Violate the particular protocol of divergent boss personalities at your own peril. A bad performance review will shatter your serenity. Even if you manage to preserve a semblance of happiness and contentment in the workplace following a poor performance review, your long-term job satisfaction will be shaken.