MOVING UP: Proven Strategies for Career Success

by Edward F. Jr. Mrkvicka ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 20, 1985

How to succeed in business without really toadying. The author of How to Battle Your Bank--and Win (1984) here essays a tricks-of-the-trade manual that's longer on careerist strategems than substantive counsel. Constantly citing as an object lesson his own quick--and, he claims, carefully planned--trip to the top (CEO of a start-up bank in a Chicago suburb at age 31), Mrkvicka offers mainly familiar and frequently offensive prescriptions for getting ahead. At the outset, he urges telling prospective employers ""what they want to hear."" Once on the job, would-be comers should establish challenging personal goals. As means to these ends, he advises such shopworn ploys as arriving for work before one's superiors and completing assignments well ahead of deadlines. In Mrkvicka's book, the upwardly mobile do not settle in; they stay alert for new opportunities that come to light courtesy of the industry contacts whose favor has been assiduously curried. Likewise, since fast trackers are intent on climbing the corporate (as opposed to company) ladder, they periodically place blind situation-wanted ads in trade journals to test the market for their services. According to the author, astute operators change organizations at least once every three years. Nor does Mrkvicka shy from genuinely sleazy tactics, e.g., keeping written files on colleagues' shortcomings (absenteeism, adultery, alcoholism, et al.), which can be produced if need be to advance one's interests or short-circuit those of a rival. When the calculated risks pay off in a remunerative executive position, the author's wunderkind undergoes an unlikely metamorphosis that turns him (or her) into a leader. In brief, Mrkvicka contends (yet again on the basis of his own experience) that having manipulated and beaten the system in ways that would make Sammy Glick blush, arrivistes somehow become apostles of equity, fully capable of leading by example. On the ample anecdotal evidence included, the author was a big frog in small ponds, suggesting that his recommendations might prove occupationally hazardous in larger settings. At best, an ego-tripping inventory of self-serving techniques that have all been covered to better effect and with greater integrity elsewhere.

Pub Date: June 20, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories: NONFICTION