and I've spent 43 years

in higher education

and one of the things that's probably been the most frustrating to me has been dealing with

office politics

what I'd like to do is to invite you to come to our program on surviving

office politics

interestingly there was a study done years ago at M.I.T. and what they did was they took people who

had graduated from M.I.T., mostly in

engineering

and they brought them back every year for 15 years

to talk about what were the

things that they experienced

what they found was that their technical education was great

and all the technical problems were solved well, but all the problems that they had in terms of their career and becoming successful had to do with

the people side of the business, it had to do with what they called office politics

and then there's another study

published in the journal of accountancy that talked about all the different things that could potentially stress you on the job

things like at the top: travel or the amount of responsibility or how much work that you have to do

or how much too many meetings that you have to go to

what you see at the very bottom

the one thing that stressed people most at work

is office politics

and so in our seminar

we're gonna talk about what are the things that

make up office politics what are the things that you can do

to try to survive office politics and we're going to give you 10 different

influence tactics that you can how to influence other people to help

make you more successful when you try to

accomplish things at work and to

maneuver your way through the politics

and uh... then we're also going to talk about 20 different specific tips

in terms of surviving office politics

I can just give you a couple stories, one was Henry Kissinger

everybody knows very well was former Secretary of State also was a professor at Harvard

University, he said the reason that academic

politics are so vicious is

the stakes are so small and I think that

it's interesting compared to government or compared to

business things that we quibble over in academia are usually pretty

small potatoes

but they're still a big deal

when you go home at night and you're driving home and your mind is on your work or on your drive or on your home

laying around in bed tossing and turning because of the things that happened at work those are office

politics they may be small

in some way but they're still important to each of us

another example of positive politics I read a book recently called The Engine of Change

and uh... it was talking about during the time that the Mustang came out

in the 1960's

Lee Iacocca was the brains behind the Mustang

for Ford. General Motors wanted to come out with a car that was competitive

so there was a guy some of you may have heard of

John DeLorean

and he was at Pontiac and they had a car called the Pontiac Tempest

and that car

had a small engine in it so it really wasn't competitive to the Mustang, but there was a

corporate rule that said you could only have a 10 to one ratio of

cubic inches of the engine

to the weight of the car, so

3,500 pound car no more than

350 cubic inches well they had

a 389 cubic inch V8

developed and it was really just gangbusters

so he found a kind of a bending of the rules that said you can't bring in a new

car

that breaks that 10 to one ratio

but you can bring in a different

model of an existing car so he had the

Pontiac Tempest and he then

created the Pontiac Tempest

with the GTO package

well they originally thought they would sell 500 uh 5,000 I'm sorry

they originally thought they'd sell 5,000, they sold

35,000 the first year

65,000 the second-year over 100,000 the third-year and ultimately

Pontiac became the third best-selling nameplate

in the whole industry after Chevrolet and Ford

so there is an example of where they used politics in a positive way and

the organization benefitted

so that's the kind of politics that I'm going to talk about

how can you do things,

influence others in an ethical way

that are overall good for the organization

as opposed to Machiavellian politics which is where you work toward advancing

your own agenda

which may or may not appear to be in the best interest of the organization

so come and join us and we're going to ask you to bring a challenge that you are facing

and bring it to the session and we'll

show you these different 10 influence tactics and 20 different office politics

tips and put the

30 of those together and then try to apply them to the challenge that you are facing

so that this can be a

very hands-on practical session

that you can take back home, and hopefully have it work for you