The Seven-Day Book Cover Challenge, Day Six: The Organization Guerilla: Playing the Game to Win

This one is going to have a few of you scratching your heads. It's a book I picked up off the 99-cent table at a bookstore, at the beginning of my career. It's easily worth 20 or 30 times what I paid for it.

This is a very cynical book, with practical advice that will save (and maybe even advance) your career, whether you work in a small business or a giant corporation. You may disagree with some of its principles, and you may go "well, duh" at some others, but after reading the book, you will see its truisms everywhere.

Here are three examples:

1. In business, as in politics, nobody ever gives you the real reason for their decisions/actions.

2. If you want to know who has the real power in an organization, watch where the money comes from, and where it goes -- in short, Power Follows Money.

3. I can't put this into a pithy sentence, but there's an entire chapter in the book about the politics behind distribution lists: who do you put in the From, To, Cc and Bcc fields of a memo or, in today's world, an email? There's a whole science behind it. Make sure you get it right.