33strats-ch28-give-enemy-rope

GIVE YOUR RIVALS ENOUGH ROPE TO HANG THEMSELVES THE ONE-UPMANSHIP STRATEGY Life’s greatest dangers often come not from external enemies but from our supposed colleagues and friends, who pretend to work for the common cause while scheming to sabotage us and steal our ideas for their gain. Although, in the court in which you serve, you must maintain the appearance of consideration and civility, you also must learn to defeat these people. Work to instill doubts and insecurities in such rivals, getting them to think too much and act defensively. Bait them with subtle challenges that get under their skin, triggering an overreaction, an embarrassing mistake. The victory you are after is to isolate them. Make them hang themselves through their own self-destructive tendencies, leaving you blameless and clean. THE ART OF ONE-UPMANSHIP Throughout your life you will find yourself fighting on two fronts. First is the external front, your inevitable enemies–but second and less obvious is the internal front, your colleagues and fellow courtiers, many of whom will scheme against you, advancing their own agendas at your expense. The worst of it is that you will often have to fight on both fronts at once, facing your external enemies while also working to secure your internal position, an exhausting and debilitating struggle. Life is war against the malice of men. BALTASAR GRACIAN, 1601-58 The solution is not to ignore the internal problem (you will have a short life if you do so) or to deal with it in a direct and conventional manner, by complaining, acting aggressively, or forming defensive alliances. Understand: internal warfare is by nature unconventional. Since people theoretically on the same side usually do their best to maintain the appearance of being team players working for the greater good, complaining about them or attacking them will only make you look bad and isolate you. Yet at the same time, you can expect these ambitious types to operate underhandedly and indirectly. Outwardly charming and cooperative, behind the scenes they are manipulative and slippery. You need to adopt a form of warfare suited to these nebulous yet dangerous battles, which go on every day. And the unconventional strategy that works best in this arena is the art of one-upmanship. Developed by history’s savviest courtiers, it is based on two simple premises: first, your rivals harbor the seeds of their own self-destruction, and second, a rival who is made to feel defensive and inferior, however subtly, will tend to act defensive and inferior, to his or her detriment. People’s personalities often form around weaknesses, character flaws, uncontrollable emotions. People who feel needy, or who have a superiority complex, or are afraid of chaos, or desperately want order, will develop a personality–a social mask–to cover up their flaws and make it possible for them to present a confident, pleasant, responsible exterior to the world. But the mask is like the scar tissue covering a wound: touch it the wrong way and it hurts. Your victims’ responses start to go out of control: they complain, act defensive and paranoid, or show the arrogance they try so hard to conceal. For a moment the mask falls. When you sense you have colleagues who may prove dangerous–or are actually already plotting something–you must try first to gather intelligence on them. Look at their everyday behavior, their past actions, their mistakes, for signs of their flaws. With this knowledge in hand, you are ready for the game of one-upmanship. Begin by doing something to prick the underlying wound, creating doubt, insecurity, and anxiety. It might be an offhand comment or something that your victims sense as a challenge to their position within the court. Your goal is not to challenge them blatantly, though, but to get under their skin: they feel attacked but are not sure why or how. The result is a vague, troubling sensation. A feeling of inferiority creeps in. You then follow up with secondary actions that feed their doubts. Here it is often best to work covertly, getting other people, the media, or simple rumor to do the job for you. The endgame is deceptively simple: having piled up enough self-doubt to trigger a reaction, you stand back and let the target self-destruct. You must avoid the temptation to gloat or get in a last blow; at this point, in fact, it is best to act friendly, even offering dubious assistance and advice. Your targets’ reaction will be an overreaction. Either they will lash out, make an embarrassing mistake, or reveal themselves too much, or they will get overly defensive and try too hard to please others, working all too obviously to secure their position and validate their self-esteem. Defensive people unconsciously push people away. At this point your opening action, especially if it is only subtly aggressive, will be forgotten. What will stand out will be your rivals’ overreaction and humiliation. Your hands are clean, your reputation unsullied. Their loss of position is your gain; you are one up and they are one down. If you had attacked them directly, your advantage would be temporary or nonexistent; in fact, your political position would be precarious: your pathetic, suffering rivals would win sympathy as your victims, and attention would focus on you as responsible for their undoing. Instead they must fall on their swords. You may have given them a little help, but to whatever extent possible in their own eyes, and certainly in everyone else’s, they must have only themselves to blame. That will make their defeat doubly galling and doubly effective. To win without your victim’s knowing how it happened or just what you have done is the height of unconventional warfare. Master the art and not only will you find it easier to fight on two fronts at the same time, but your path to the highest ranks will be that much smoother. Never interfere with an enemy that is in the process of committing suicide. –Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

1. John A. McClernand (1812-1900) watched with envy as his friend and fellow lawyer Abraham Lincoln rose to the U.S. presidency. McClernand, a lawyer and congressman from Springfield, Illinois, had had this ambition himself. Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1861, he resigned his congressional seat to accept a commission as a brigadier general in the Union army. He had no military experience, but the Union needed leadership of any kind it could get, and if he proved himself in battle, he could rise fast. He saw this army position as his path to the presidency. First of all, a complete definition of the technical term “one-upmanship” would fill, and in fact has filled, a rather large encyclopedia. It can be defined briefly here as the art of placing a person “one-down.” The term “one-down” is technically defined as that psychological state which exists in an individual who is not “one-up” on another person…. To phrase these terms in popular language, at the risk of losing scientific rigor, it can be said that in any human relationship (and indeed among other mammals) one person is constantly maneuvering to imply that he is in a “superior position” to the other person in the relationship. This “superior position” does not necessarily mean superior in social status or economic position; many servants are masters at putting their employers one-down. Nor does it imply intellectual superiority as any intellectual knows who has been put “one-down” by a muscular garbage collector in a bout of Indian wrestling. “Superior position” is a relative term which is continually being defined and redefined by the ongoing relationship. Maneuvers to achieve superior position may be crude or they may be infinitely subtle. For example, one is not usually in a superior position if he must ask another person for something. Yet he can ask for it in such a way that he is implying, “This is, of course, what I deserve.” THE STRATEGIES OF PSYCHOTHERAPY, JAY HALEY, 1963 McClernand’s first post was at the head of a brigade in Missouri under the overall command of General Ulysses S. Grant. Within a year he was promoted to major general, still under Grant. But this was not good enough for McClernand, who needed a stage for his talents, a campaign to run and get credit for. Grant had talked to him of his plans for capturing the Confederate fort at Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River. The fall of Vicksburg, according to Grant, could be the turning point in the war. McClernand decided to sell a march on Vicksburg as his own idea and use it as a springboard for his career. In September 1862, on leave in Washington, D.C., McClernand paid a visit to President Lincoln. He was “tired of furnishing brains” for Grant’s army, he said; he had proved himself on the battlefield and was a better strategist than Grant, who was a little too fond of his whiskey. McClernand proposed to go back to Illinois, where he was well known and could recruit a large army. Then he would follow the Mississippi River south to Vicksburg and capture the fort. Vicksburg was technically in Grant’s department, but Lincoln was not sure the general could lead the audacious attack necessary. He took McClernand to see Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, another former lawyer, who commiserated with his two visitors on the difficulties of dealing with military brass. Stanton listened to and liked McClernand’s plan. That October the onetime congressman left Washington with confidential orders, giving him approval for his march on Vicksburg. The orders were a little vague, and Grant was not informed of them, but McClernand would make the best of them. McClernand quickly recruited more soldiers than he had promised Lincoln he would. He sent his recruits to Memphis, Tennessee, where he would soon join them to march on Vicksburg. But when he arrived in Memphis, in late December 1862, the thousands of men he had recruited were not there. A telegram from Grant–dated ten days earlier and waiting for him in Memphis–informed him that the general was planning to attack Vicksburg. If McClernand arrived in time, he would lead the attack; if not, his men would be led by General William Tecumseh Sherman. McClernand was livid. The situation had clearly been orchestrated to make it impossible for him to arrive in time to lead his own recruits; Grant must have figured out his plan. The general’s polite telegram covering his bases made the whole affair doubly infuriating. Well, McClernand would show him: he would hurry downriver, catch up with Sherman, take over the campaign, and humiliate Grant by winning the credit and honor for capturing Vicksburg. McClernand did catch up with Sherman, on January 2, 1863, and immediately assumed command of the army. He made an effort to be charming to Sherman, who, he learned, had been planning to raid Confederate outposts around Vicksburg to soften up the approach to the fort. The idea was heaven-sent for McClernand: he would take over these raids, win battles without Grant’s name over his, earn himself some publicity, and make his command of the Vicksburg campaign a fait accompli. He followed Sherman’s plan to the letter, and the campaign was a success. At this triumphant point, out of the blue, McClernand received a telegram from Grant: he was to halt operations and wait for a meeting with the general. It was time for McClernand to play his trump card, the president; he wrote Lincoln requesting more explicit orders, and specifically an independent command, but he got no reply. And now vague doubts began to trouble McClernand’s peace of mind. Sherman and other officers seemed cool; somehow he had rubbed them the wrong way. Perhaps they were conspiring with Grant to get rid of him. Grant soon appeared on the scene with detailed plans for a campaign against Vicksburg under his own direction. McClernand would lead a corps, which, however, was stationed at the faraway outpost of Helena, Arkansas. Grant made a point of treating him politely, but everything together added up to a humiliating setback. How to be one up–how to make the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly. The Lifeman is never caddish himself, but how simply and certainly, often, he can make the other man feel a cad, and over prolonged periods. THE COMPLETE UPMANSHIP, STEPHEN POTTER, 1950 Now McClernand exploded, writing letter after letter to Lincoln and Stanton to remind them of their earlier rapport and of the support they had once given him, and complaining bitterly about Grant. After days of fuming and writing, McClernand finally received a response from Lincoln–and, to his shock and dismay, the president had somehow turned against him. There had been too many family quarrels among his generals, wrote Lincoln; for the sake of the Union cause, McClernand should subordinate himself to Grant. McClernand was crushed. He could not figure out what he had done or how it had all gone wrong. Bitter and frustrated, he continued to serve under Grant but questioned his boss’s abilities to anyone who would listen, including journalists. In June 1863, after enough negative articles had been printed, Grant finally fired him. McClernand’s military career was over, and with it his dreams of personal glory. Interpretation From the moment he met John McClernand, General Grant knew he had a troublemaker on his hands. McClernand was the type of man who thought only of his own career–who would steal other people’s ideas and plot behind their backs for the sake of personal glory. But Grant would have to be careful: McClernand was popular with the public, a charmer. So when Grant figured out on his own that McClernand was trying to beat him to Vicksburg, he did not confront him or complain. Instead he took action. Knowing that McClernand had an oversensitive ego, Grant recognized that it would be relatively easy to push the man’s buttons. By taking over his subordinate’s recruits (technically in his department anyway) while apparently covering his bases in the telegram, he forced McClernand into a rash response that seemed like insubordination to other military men and made it clear how far he was using the war for personal purposes. Once McClernand had rushed to take his troops back from Sherman, Grant stood aside. He knew that a man like this–vain and obnoxious–would irritate the hell out of his brother officers; they would inevitably complain about him to Grant, who, as a responsible officer, would have to pass the complaints upward, apparently without personal feelings in play. Treating McClernand politely while indirectly checkmating him, Grant finally got him to overreact in the worst possible way, with his letters to Lincoln and Stanton. Grant knew that Lincoln was tired of squabbling within the Union high command. While Grant could be seen working quietly to perfect his plans for taking Vicksburg, McClernand was acting petty and throwing tantrums. The difference between the two men was all too clear. With this battle won, Grant repeated it, letting McClernand hang himself with his unwise complaints to the press. There are other ways to fray nerves. During the Gulf War, President Bush kept pronouncing the name of the Iraqi leader as “SAD-am,” which loosely means “shoeshine boy.” On Capitol Hill, the ritual mispronunciation of a member’s name is a time-tested way to rattle opponents or haze newcomers. Lyndon Johnson was a master of the practice. When Johnson was Senate majority leader, writes J. McIver Weatherford, he applied it with junior members who voted the wrong way: “While slapping the young chap on the back and telling him he understood, Johnson would break his name into shreds as a metaphorical statement of what would happen if the disloyalty persisted.” THE ART OF POLITICAL WARFARE, JOHN PITNEY, JR., 2000 You will often come across McClernands in your daily battles–people who are outwardly charming but treacherous behind the scenes. It does no good to confront them directly; they are proficient at the political game. But a subtle one- up campaign can work wonders. Your goal is to get these rivals to put their ambition and selfishness on display. The way to do this is to pique their latent but powerful insecurities– make them worry that people do not like them, that their position is unstable, that their path to the top is not clear. Perhaps, like Grant, you can take action that thwarts their plans in some way while hiding your own beneath a veneer of politeness. You are making them feel defensive and disrespected. All the dark, ugly emotions they strive so hard to hide will boil up to the surface; they will tend to lash out, overplaying their hand. Work to make them grow emotional and lose their habitual cool. The more they reveal of themselves, the more they will alienate other people, and isolation will be their doom.

2. The Academie Francaise, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, is a highly select body of France’s forty most learned scholars, whose task it is to oversee the purity of the French language. It was customary in the early years of the academy that when a seat became empty, potential members would petition to fill it, but on the occasion of a vacant seat in 1694, King Louis XIV decided to go against protocol and nominated the bishop of Noyon. Louis’s nomination certainly made sense. The bishop was a learned man, well respected, an excellent orator, and a fine writer. The bishop, however, had another quality as well: an incredible sense of self-importance. Louis was amused by this failing, but most in the court found it downright insufferable: the bishop had a way of making almost everyone feel inferior, in piety, erudition, family pedigree–whatever they had. Because of his rank, for instance, the bishop was accorded the rare privilege of being able to have his coach drive up to the front door of the royal residence, while most others had to get out and walk from the entrance doors of the driveway. One time the archbishop of Paris was walking along the driveway when the bishop of Noyon passed. From his carriage the bishop waved and signaled for the archbishop to approach him. The archbishop expected him to alight and accompany him to the palace on foot. Instead Noyon had the carriage slow down and continued his drive to the front door, leading the archbishop through the window by the arm, as if he were a dog on a leash, meanwhile chatting away superciliously. Then, once the bishop did get out of the carriage and the two men started up the grand staircase, Noyon dropped the archbishop as if he were nobody. Almost everyone in the court had a story like this one to tell, and they all nursed secret grudges against the bishop. With Louis’s approval, however, it was impossible to not vote Noyon into the academy. The king further insisted that his courtiers attend the inauguration of the bishop, since this was his first nominee to the illustrious institution. At the inauguration, customarily, the nominee would deliver a speech, which would be answered by the academy’s director–who at the time was a bold and witty man called the abbe de Caumartin. The abbe could not stand the bishop but particularly disliked his florid style of writing. De Caumartin conceived the idea of subtly mocking Noyon: he would compose his response in perfect imitation of the bishop, full of elaborate metaphors and gushing praise for the newest academician. To make sure he could not get into trouble for this, he would show his speech to the bishop beforehand. Noyon was delighted, read the text with great interest, and even went so far as to supplement it with more effusive words of praise and high-flying rhetoric. On the day of the inauguration, the hall of the academy was packed with the most eminent members of French society. (None dared incur the king’s displeasure by not attending.) The bishop appeared before them, monstrously pleased to command this prestigious audi