You do all the work, while your do-nothing coworker slacks off and gets ahead. While it’s easy to let your lazy coworker drive you mad, and be bitter about being overlooked OR you can steal Slacker Chad’s tactics so you get the promotion at work that you deserve, big pay increases, and the praise you deserve.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Don’t hate the player… learn from him
0:32 Stop being invisible
2:57 Chad pays attention to this (while you ignore it)
5:18 He’s in favor with the right people
Kill Your Wi-Fi Dead Zones! The Best Mesh Systems for Your Home
Cisco’s Feud With Former Star Executive Turns Personal—and Costly
Arista Networks’s CEO Jayshree Ullal, who was once close to John Chambers, is grabbing Cisco’s networking business and winning over customers
Mr. Chambers, 67, now Cisco’s executive chairman, is credited with the company’s extraordinary growth phase in the 1990s, largely by buying smaller companies, including Crescendo Communications where Ms. Ullal worked.
Ms. Ullal, who rose to become one of Cisco’s most valuable executives over her 15 years at the company, ran the switching division, which allows companies to shuttle data at high speeds. By the time she left, switching was Cisco’s biggest business, with more than $10 billion in annual revenue, a big reason why Cisco recovered from the dot-com bust.
.. Ms. Ullal, raised in India, was an outspoken engineering and marketing whiz who disliked rigid rules.
Ms. Ullal grew frustrated as Cisco began moving beyond its core switching and routing business into areas such as high-end videoconferencing and consumer electronics, former executives who worked with her said. About a year before she left, Mr. Chambers had created dozens of internal councils and boards, which was at odds with her command-and-control approach.
.. Ms. Ullal urged her employees to avoid attracting Cisco’s attention at first, said a person familiar with her thinking. As the giant in the field, Cisco could have “destroyed us with a stray thought,” this person said.
.. Arista’s technology was faster, more flexible and less expensive than Cisco’s
.. Facebook engineers described Cisco as “behind the curve and on target to become irrelevant” in the data center
.. Other customers started complaining. An email from a customer support engineer in August 2013 to dozens of senior managers, including Mr. Robbins, the future CEO, said Morgan Stanley had lost confidence in one of the switching products “after more than 12 months of ongoing software defects, instability and a lack of needed features.” The bank halted plans to use 400 Cisco switches and said it might turn to Arista.
.. Cisco interviewed dozens of executives to understand the problem. The brutal conclusion in a September 2013 report: Cisco had good ideas and talented employees but a risk-averse culture, indecisive leaders and too big a focus on incremental products.
.. Inside Cisco, a “Beat Arista” document in January 2014 warned that the impending IPO would provide the upstart the cash to strike Cisco’s most profitable product lines. “Time is now to target their top 100 accounts—slow momentum, impact revenue & market share and help drive an unsatisfactory IPO,” one slide said.
.. Arista prevailed over Cisco in a trial late last year over copyright claims and one patent claim in one of the lawsuits.
.. Arista’s share of the overall data-center switching market has grown from nothing in 2010 to over 9% in 2016, while Cisco’s share has fallen from about 80% to about 58%, according to research firm International Data Corp.
Getting Radical About Inequality
I’m not in the habit of recommending left-wing French intellectuals, but I’m beginning to think that Pierre Bourdieu is helpful reading in the age of Trump. He was born in 1930, the son of a small-town postal worker. By the time he died in 2002, he had become perhaps the world’s most influential sociologist within the academy, and largely unknown outside of it.
His great subject was the struggle for power in society, especially cultural and social power.
.. A habitus is an intuitive feel for the social game. It’s the sort of thing you get inculcated with unconsciously, by growing up in a certain sort of family or by sharing a sensibility with a certain group of friends.
.. Every minute or hour, in ways we’re not even conscious of, we as individuals and members of our class are competing for dominance and respect. We seek to topple those who have higher standing than we have and we seek to wall off those who are down below. Or, we seek to take one form of capital, say linguistic ability, and convert it into another kind of capital, a good job.
.. Most groups conceal their naked power grabs under a veil of intellectual or aesthetic purity. Bourdieu used the phrase “symbolic violence” to suggest how vicious this competition can get, and he didn’t even live long enough to get a load of Twitter and other social media.
.. Different groups and individuals use different social strategies, depending on their position in the field.
People at the top, he observed, tend to adopt a reserved and understated personal style that shows they are far above the “assertive, attention-seeking strategies which expose the pretensions of the young pretenders.” People at the bottom of any field, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of accomplishment to wave about, but they can use snark and sarcasm to demonstrate the superior sensibilities.
.. Sometimes, the loser wins: If you’re setting up a fancy clothing or food shop you go down and adopt organic and peasant styles in order to establish the superior moral prestige that you can then use to make gobs of money.
.. Bourdieu helps you understand what Donald Trump is all about. Trump is not much of a policy maven, but he’s a genius at the symbolic warfare Bourdieu described. He’s a genius at upending the social rules and hierarchies that the establishment classes (of both right and left) have used to maintain dominance.
Bourdieu didn’t argue that cultural inequality creates economic inequality, but that it widens and it legitimizes it.
.. as the information economy has become more enveloping, cultural capital and economic capital have become ever more intertwined. Individuals and classes that are good at winning the cultural competitions Bourdieu described tend to dominate the places where economic opportunity is richest
.. Bourdieu reminds us that the drive to create inequality is an endemic social sin. Every hour most of us, unconsciously or not, try to win subtle status points, earn cultural affirmation, develop our tastes, promote our lifestyles and advance our class.
.. His work suggests that the responses to it are going to have to be more profound, both on a personal level — resisting the competitive, ego-driven aspects of social networking and display