Have everybody leave the room, then collect a group of total strangers, from right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person and stare at him until he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him, in a very somber voice, “Bob, your plan is very, very risky, but you’ve given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what the hell you’re getting yourself into.” Then they should file quietly from the room.

Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an important person such as your boss starts talking. When he does, look at him with a look of enraptured interest, as though he is revealing the secrets of life itself. Then write interlocking rectangles. Also, if you’re sitting next to somebody you can trust, you can use your notepad to discuss various other people at the meeting.

Boy, are YOU ever in for a surprise. I mean, here you have been staying home, day after day, cooking meals and doing the laundry and praising the primitive refrigerator art your children produce and scrubbing away at the advanced fungal growths around the base of the toilet, during which time your husband has been GONE. And when he gets home, all he has the energy to do is just COLLAPSE on the Barca-Lounger and talk about what a DIFFICULT DAY he has had because the ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE (whatever that is) won’t “BALANCE” (whatever that means). So you have naturally come to believe that whatever goes on in the business world must be just DEATHLY difficult and complex, to cause a grown man such ANGUISH.

Well, just you wait until, following the program outlined in this book, you get your first actual job in business. You are going to think you died and went straight to heaven. For one thing, everybody there is a GROWNUP. They allow NO CHILDREN in business. You never have to take ANYBODY, for any reason, to the potty. Speaking of which, if a business toilet gets dirty, you just CALL MAINTENANCE ON THE PHONE, and THEY COME AND CLEAN IT! And if they don’t, YOU CAN WRITE A SNOTTY MEMORANDUM ABOUT IT!

And the best part of it is—as you will see, once we get into how businesses work—YOU NEED NO SPECIAL SKILLS OR QUALIFICATIONS TO BE PART OF A BUSINESS. All you have to do is figure out what simple concept the other people are really talking about when they use their complex business terms. For example, when your husband says the “Accounts Receivable” won’t “balance,” what he means is, he has these two NUMBERS that are supposed to be the SAME, but instead they’re DIFFERENT. Is that pathetic, or what? I mean, really, would you call that a PROBLEM? Especially if you compare it with, say, a situation where you’re at the shopping mall Burger King and you have finally managed to get your food and your children and your packages to a table, and just as you start to bite into your Whopper junior, your two-year-old knocks his chocolate milk onto a priest, your six-year-old commences projectile vomiting and your four-year-old wanders off, enraptured, in the company of a toothless man with needle marks and Nazi tattoos. Now THIS is what I would call a PROBLEM, and you have to deal with it ALL BY YOURSELF.

Meanwhile, back at “work,” your husband is drinking nice hot coffee in a nice clean vomit-free office, fretting about his two little NUMBERS with the aid of a COMPUTER and probably three or four CO-WORKERS, all of whom will eventually go have a nice quiet lunch featuring MARGARITAS and NO CHILDREN.

So trust me, housewives. You’ll do FINE in the business world. Your husband does, right? How hard can it be?

Okay. Now you can take phone messages. You can go to meetings. In short, you can do everything that can be reasonably expected of an employee. If you want, you can spend the rest of your professional life very comfortably doing these things. Ultimately, you can look forward to getting a couple of small promotions, followed by retirement, followed by death, followed by having your body eaten by insects and bacteria and then excreted in the form of basic chemicals that will serve as fertilizer for unattractive plants with names like “duckweed.” Is that what you want?

I didn’t think so. Because you’re the kind of person who wants to be Number One. Not in the sense of being bacterial excrement, but in the sense of having POWER. We’re talking about CLOUT. We’re talking about having a staff so large that when you have a dental appointment, you send an aide to get his teeth drilled. We’re talking about CLAWING YOUR WAY TO THE TOP.

You can’t expect to get a promotion right away, of course. You should wait two, maybe even three days before you start pushing for it. This will give you time to look around to see who your serious competitors are, to size them up, to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and to crush them under the freight elevator.

As the famous baseball codger Leo Durocher was fond of saying before he died: “Nice guys finish last.” There is some truth in this. Take the example of Attila the Hun, who was an unpleasant person but an extremely successful Hun, one of the top Huns in the business. His lesser-known brother, Bob the Hun, was a nice guy, but a failure. Bob would show up with this horde outside a medieval village and say, “Listen, would you folks mind if we raped the women and stole everything and killed everybody? You would? Oh my gosh! Sorry!” And off he’d slink, very embarrassed. His was by far the lowest-ranked horde in the league.

But that is just one isolated incident. There are plenty of examples of nice people who DID get to the top. Just look around! There’s, ummmm, there’s ... ah, hmmmmm. Ha ha! I’m sure there are lots of examples, and for some reason I can’t think of a single ... wait! I’ve got one! Mother Theresa! That’s it! Here’s a very nice person who nevertheless rose to the top of her profession. So the moral is: even in this dog-cat-dog, highly competitive world, you can be a decent human being and still attain a career position where you kneel in the Third-World dirt trying to help the wretched and diseased. But if you want to succeed in a large modern corporation, scum is definitely the way to go.

Okay, let’s talk nuts and bolts. In most corporations and organizations, a person gets promoted via a five-step procedure:

1. He works diligently and competently at his job for several years.

2. His superiors gradually start to notice him.

3. Somebody above him in the organization dies, retires, leaves, or is promoted, thus creating an opening.

4. His superiors, after carefully considering all the qualified candidates, promote him.

5. An announcement of the promotion is put up on bulletin boards throughout the building, and his co-workers gather around and pound him on the back

(many of them aim for his kidneys).

This procedure is all well and good for most people, but you are not “most people.” You are a highly motivated individual who wants to be on the fast track, and you cannot afford to fritter away valuable time working diligently and competently at your job. So your best bet is to skip over steps 1 through 4 and go directly to the only really essential step: the bulletin board announcement. Type it on a quality typewriter, using the format shown here.