The Book
MERIT
An Executive's Complete Guide
to the Corner Office
Perception · Positioning · Promotion
A satirical business book written in the form of a serious, academic airport management guide. It instructs readers in psychological manipulation, fear tactics, and workplace toxicity — delivered with complete sincerity, in the cheerful instructional voice of a legitimate leadership text, supported throughout by real peer-reviewed academic research.
The closest comparison: Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. The book never winks. It never acknowledges it is satire. The reader does that work themselves.
The Premise
Two Audiences. One Mirror.
The Bad Leader
Who may recognize themselves and, ideally, reconsider. The book gives them enough plausible deniability — “it's just satire” — to keep reading until the mirror becomes unavoidable.
The Suffering Employee
Who needs catharsis. Someone finally naming what has been done to them, dressed in the language of the people who did it.
Written by a PhD who reached executive management and found himself surrounded by leaders who had used psychological manipulation and fear tactics to advance — making him a foreign entity in that environment. The book argues there are two paths to leadership. One is hard, ethical, and slower. The other is the subject of this book.
The Arc
Eight Chapters. One Career of Destruction.
The arc traces the career of a genuinely terrible executive — from first promotion to untouchable exit. Each chapter teaches a distinct skill set. No overlap. No mercy.
What Nobody in HR Is Allowed to Tell You
The setup. Two paths to leadership — one ethical and slow, one manipulative and effective. A diagnostic quiz helps you discover which path you are already on.
You Are Just Lucky: How to Ensure No One Else Knows That
Luck, privilege, and the meritocracy myth — reframed as instruction. How to make fortune look like foresight.
How to Weaponize Fear and Make People Think You're Tough
Managing down through fear. Impossible standards, data-driven terror, and manufactured job insecurity.
How to Create Insecurity and Learn to View People as a Threat
Surveillance, tribal belonging as control, and succession theater. Making compliance self-sustaining.
Wear Out Your Knee Pads
Managing up. Strategic sycophancy, patron selection, and becoming so embedded in a powerful person's self-narrative that your advancement feels to them like self-love.
The Nuanced Art of Stabbing from Behind
Managing laterally. Eliminating rivals through restructuring, narrative control, and alliance exploitation.
The Art of Never Being Wrong
Blame architecture, credit migration, and narrative control. Building organizational memory in your favor before anything goes wrong.
How to Fail Upward
The endgame. Golden parachutes, legacy construction, and ensuring the organization absorbs the damage while you absorb the severance.
The Fine Print
What This Book Is Not
It is not:
It is:
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