Most employees walk around every day with a ready supply of hand grenades.  Some are thrown at coworkers during times of duress.  Others get rolled into the boss’ office when credit is taken for something you worked weekends to complete.  But the most explosive, destructive and damaging we save for ourselves.  This is the overarching point of Gen Xer Jason Seiden’s sarcastic book, “How to Self-Destruct: Making the Least of What’s Left of Your Career“.

How to Self-Destruct provides a useful thought-exercise when considering the frustrations of your own career trajectory.  So many of us are concerned about what we should be doing to succeed in the workplace.  Seiden takes the opposite approach – what should you do if you were trying to ruin your career?   Shockingly, the behaviors that could ruin your career are identical to the “play it safe” strategy most of us use to advance and protect our careers – being defensive, not taking risks and making sure that blame falls on someone else.  

Recognizing behaviors to avoid can be equally, if not more, useful to career advancement than focusing on behaviors to adopt.  It will take several pages to get used to the reverse language in the book.  And sadly, I’m convinced there are some readers who won’t get the point and may actually employ Seiden’s advice literally.  Flame on brother, flame on….

If you want an entertaining snapshot, take a look at Seiden’s “explosive trailer” below.  Let’s keep those grenades at the ready and the conversation going.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Human Capital/Human Resources, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.