Book Review: Supervisors Survival Kit, 11th ed.

So I'm reading this book for one of my librarian classes and I have to say that translating it into English from Jargon (it was written in Jargon), makes it very cynical. Its an updated version of The Prince. I can't say I'm disappointed because it is everything I have both feared and personally witnessed to be true about modern managers, which is that they are generally horrible and a fantastic argument for both Unions and returning certain medieval organizations back to life. I won't say which ones, but they sometimes had Guilds and tended to wear black.

Never let your employees feel safe and they won't ask for a raise. 

This book is depressingly accurate. It gives all sorts of bad but functional advice which is certain to drive any supervisor nuts and turn them evil if they weren't already. There's no warnings about the dangers of ambition, or how to shield employees who get the work done from bosses who have no clue how that happens while you're dealing with their egos and abuse. Not nice. I want to say that this book is realistic, but I already compared it to Machiavelli.

I am writing up the cliff's notes version of the translation and using the filter of real world experience to correct the Positivity!! that real humans find so insulting. See the smile? That's what you see on Middle Managers told to do the impossible and expecting to lose their best employees by giving the order.

Consider Azula, from the same series. She's a raging psychopath, who only cares about getting what she wants, nothing else. Her ambition and madness define her, and while she can motivate her friends as allies she eventually drives them off, and fails when alone. This is the truth of management. If you go into management with ambition, you are screwed, and will destroy yourself and everybody around you. This is why new "experienced" managers coming into your workplace from somewhere else should be FEARED, because they just ran from the mess they made somewhere else, and haven't learned from their mistakes. They're going to make the same ones again somewhere new.

Good managers need to avoid ambition, and defend at all cost their productive employees, and go home at night despite complaints and threats from your own boss about how you should get things done or they'll get even. They won't. It is too much work. Sometimes the best manager is a slacker.