What’s up, y’all. I have been having an email exchange with my Stanford GSB alumni mentor over the past couple of days and he recently sent me some advice that I wanted to share. I was matched up with my mentor during my first year and, as after a long career as a consultant and finance guy, he had a lot to offer. I think the official mentoring relationship was supposed to end after first year, but he and I got along well and he’s been looking out for me ever since. This most recent advice was about how to handle corporate politics and I found it especially relevant as I restart my career after two years off for business school. It makes for a short entry, but some of you might find it to be a good one.

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My alumni mentor wrote:

“Marquis,

On corporate politics, I have finally mastered it at this point in my career. There are those who relish it at a young age, and CEO’s tend to be well represented in that group. I tended to avoid such things and just worked hard and diligently. I now wish I had tried harder to master the art at a younger age. It can actually bring a lot of personal satisfaction to convert a disaster into a road to major personal advancement and to come up with a fixit. Coming up with fixit’s will be duck soup for you after McK. The trick is to get credit for it and to deflect blame without laying it on anyone else.

A few things I now know that I didn’t know at all in my forties:

When asked to do something that isn’t going to work, smile while giving warning of the things that will surely go wrong and how they might be sidesteped (in the positive context of what the boss’s actual objectives are). Later, allude (very obliquely) to them in an e-mail. When asked to do anything, smile and come up with some interesting tactical alternatives and recommendations as to how to do them. When things actually do break down, smile

and come up with the fixit plan and comment how the truly guilty were just victims of circumstance and their own overzealousness. Always be the most cheerful and courteous one in the room. The Enron guys may have been the smartest guys in the room, but look where they are, now. Above all, make your boss look like a hero. And smile. It can actually be fun. Don’t sell [corporate politics] too short.

[Consulting] engagements are often the objects of corporate politics as everyone tries to use both the consultants and their recommendations to their own advantage (by agreeing with the recommendations if the boss does or trying to look good by embarrassing the consultants to save their own necks).”