The Story of the Big Cheese and the Hotshot
Winning Established Positions - The Art of War 3:2:5-17
This is a cautionary tale about trying to advance by winning existing positions from those that hold them. It follows the verse from The Art of War (see above) in its sequence of events. As children, we want what we can see. When children are very young and see another child with a toy they want, they simply grab it. Though we learn that we cannot grab things we see without paying a price, we never stop wanting what we see. This is the entire purpose of advertisements: to show us what others want us to want. So, it is natural that we develop our strategies from similar ideas.
What do we see when we a looking for our own success? We see the successes of others. These successes are not opportunities but established positions, those that have been discovered and proven rewarding. Seeing them and wanting them is misleading because it is a terrible strategy to try to grab the positions of others.
When we use a practical strategy for our personal success, what we want to look for are opportunities, but opportunities are hidden. We cannot see them with our eyes, but only with our imaginations. Our opportunities exist as an empty place, a need, an opening. It is not an established position but the uncertain potential of an area to which we can expand or move our existing position.
Big Cheese and the Hotshot
A Big Cheese who holds a very rewarding position in a successful hi-tech corporation. Who knows how she got it? Maybe she was just lucky or maybe she was a very hard worker when she was young. But, today, it is clear that she is just coasting. Those working for her are unhappy. Her responsibilities are poorly managed. Important decisions take a long time to be addressed. The rumor is that the bigger cheeses are unhappy with the Big Cheese.
Among her employees is the Hotshot. This Hotshot is creative, energetic, and she is frustrated that the Big Cheese doesn’t give her more responsibility and implement some of her ideas. Fellow employees tell her that she should go after the Big Cheese’s position. She sees the power, prestige, and other rewards the Big Cheese is getting and decides that the position is what she deserves and she is what the organization needs.
Hotshot’s Plot
This Hotshot is smart. She realizes that she must first learn more about the Big Cheese’s job and what doing it entails. She volunteers to help the Big Cheese in her spare time. Since the Big Cheese is lazy, she takes Hot Shot up on her offer. Hotshot learns where the Big Cheese s falling down, what should be done better, and who doesn’t like the Cheese. She helps the Cheese, but not so much that the Big Cheese’s performance is noticeably improved. She even finds ways to subtle undermine the Big Cheese that cannot be traced back to her. Hotshot even meets some of the bigger cheeses who decide about Big Cheese’s position. She never criticizes Big Cheese directly to them, but she drop hints and makes what she think are valuable suggestions,
Months pass, but Hotshot is disappointed that nothing she has tried has worked hurt Big Cheese in the slightest. The Big Cheese is as secure as ever and doing less work than ever before. The only change is that Hotshot’s fellow employees are more unhappy than ever. In that unhappiness, Hotshot sees an opportunity.
Hotshot works on getting to everyone who works for Big Cheese. She befriends them all. She looks for what she can do for them if she had the Big Cheese’s position. She is not surprised to learn that they all have things they want. She sees the good in their ideas, the justice in rewarding them better, and the need to make changes in policy. To each individually, she confesses that if she was in the Big Cheese’s position, she would certainly do what they wanted.
This takes more months, but, despite her best efforts, she cannot get any of her allies to act in any way that overtly suggests to anyone that Hotshot should move into the Big Cheese’s position. They don’t contact any of the bigger cheeses, not even anonymously. Despite their universal support of Hotshot, they still fear offending the Big Cheese. Their desire for more does not outweigh their fear of losing what they have. They fear change.
The Showdown
This finally angers Hotshot to the point that she doesn’t care about the the danger. She takes matters into her own hands. She gets an appointment with the Bigger Cheese to whom her Big Cheese reports. She write up a report that documents all the weaknesses of Big Cheese, based upon her months of working with her. She documents all the complaints of her fellow employees, their good ideas, the injustice of their compensation and so on. She documents all the improvements she and her fellow employees want to make. Hotshot concludes this report by documenting how much more money her department could make and save if she were in charge.
Bigger Cheese listens to Hotshot’s information and studies her report, but she sees it from a different angle. She refers it back to Big Cheese, who fires Hotshot and her closest allies for insubordination. Not only is Hotshot left without a job, but her closest friends resent her. She finds it impossible to secure another job as good as the one she had. She hears afterward that the corporation had a shortage of people in Big Cheese positions and only replaces them when they are promoted, hired away, or retire.
Final Thoughts
Trying to win existing positions is a disaster. Hotshot spent months ignoring real opportunities, the unfulfilled needs of her boss and her fellow employee because she targeted what she could see, an existing position. She needed to use her imagination and imagine a new position that would address those problems and reward the Big Cheese. She could then ask to be compensated for her new responsibilities. When Big Cheese was promoted, hired away, or retired, she would have been position to move into her position or, better yet, invent a new position helping all the other Big Cheeses. She had plenty of opportunities to advance much more quickly but she was blinded by what she saw.