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One of my dopier career moves was showing up the marketing director at a former employer. I thought I was demonstrating how useful I could be in her organization. She saw me as a potential rival. Blam! I got backstabbed up the yin yang, and if you’ve ever had your yin yang backstabbed you know it hurts like the Dickens.

If only I’d had a copy of Wess Roberts’ new book It Takes More Than a Carrot and a Stick I’d have known better. Right there on page 88, talking about Colleague Slayers it says, “They normally attack only those colleagues who have offended them or present a competitive threat to them in the battle for power and prestige that occurs in virtually all workplaces.”

Carrot and Stick isn’t just about how to handle backstabbers. It’s a veritable field guide to annoying co-workers, only more useful.

The average field guide helps you identify critters, but doesn’t generally give you advice about what to do once you’ve found them. Look up seagulls in your average bird book, for example, and it won’t tell you to move immediately if you find yourself directly below a hovering flock.

Carrot and Stick, on the other hand, tells you exactly how to handle each of the 15 major types of office irritant. Whether your problem is an Imperious Jerk, Empty Suit, Android or Perpetual Victim, Roberts helps you cope. He gives you specific advice tailored to your work relationship, so you know what to do whether you report to the Slougher (yet another species) he reports to you, or you’re peers.

This book isn’t for everyone. I know a guy, for example, who makes his living managing his own investments. He’s actually good enough to earn a satisfactory income this way. He operates out of his home, trades on-line, and has no boss, no co-workers, no staff … not even suppliers in any meaningful sense. He wouldn’t get much benefit out of this book. Neither would your average hermit, I suppose.

If you, like my investor friend, work alone in splendid isolation, don’t bother with It Takes More Than a Carrot and a Stick. Instead, buy Bob Lewis’s IS Survival Guide (hey, I need the royalties just as much as Wess does, and book-plugging does begin at home!).

But if you work in an office and have several nominees for the cubicle farthest from you, Carrot and Stick is just the ticket.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Argument by assertion seems to be on the increase.

Following my recent series on outsourcing, which argued against the popular non-core-competency theory (exercise core competencies in-house and outsource everything else), I received quite a few letters presenting the counterargument that you should outsource non-core competencies. Why? Because they aren’t your core competencies, that’s why!

It’s hard to come to grips with logic like that, let alone argue against it. But I’ll give it one more try. The more I try to figure out what “core competency” means, the more murky the whole thing becomes. I’m left with four outsourcing drivers – two positive, two negative:

  • Outsource when the outsourcer can provide the equivalent function for lower cost (or just fire the manager who can’t deliver the function without margins at the same price an outsourcer can deliver it with margins).
  • Outsource when the function being outsourced requires scarce high-value talent (for example, ad agencies).
  • Avoid outsourcing when the cost of changing your mind, also known as the switching cost, is high, as it is with IT.
  • Don’t outsource if your real goal is solving a personnel problem. If you’ve accumulated an inventory of unproductive employees over the years and are really outsourcing the unpleasant task of terminating them, there are far less drastic ways of handling this chore than outsourcing the function.

Nothing is quite this simple, of course, but I can at least understand these four decision factors. Why you’d want to increase the cost or risk of a function because it isn’t a “core competency” — a term whose definition is murky at best — continues to baffle me.

Not only that, but outsourcing doesn’t always solve the problem. Curt Sahakian of the Corporate Partnering Institute (www.corporate-partnering.com), which helps companies create partnership and outsourcing agreements, says many outsourcing deals are structured so badly it’s like drinking seawater when you’re adrift at sea. It isn’t a sustainable solution, and you end up thirstier than when you started.

Sahakian also offers this advice: Since your employers are going to buy their saltwater from someone, why not you? If outsourcing is inevitable, take charge of the situation and suggest a restructuring that turns your existing IT organization into an outsourcing provider, either as an independent or as a joint venture with one of the major outsourcing vendors.

When your choice is whether to be dinner or chef, chef is probably better.

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