Three Bosses

Your boss is one of three people. So are you.

The Enforcer posts the number on the wall and lets it do the firing. The Idealist tells you the truth on a Tuesday and is still paying for it on Friday. The Operator knew a quarter ago and has already moved.

All three of them win. All three of them pay. Nobody tells you what each one costs.

THREE BOSSES is a book about workplace power that does something no management book does: it prices the advice. Twenty-one situations you will actually face - the inherited team, managing up, layoffs, the promotion duel, the reorganization, the whisper network, the coup, firing a friend - each played three times by the same three people, in a company assembled from the ones you have already worked in.

Then, at the end of every chapter, the bill. Reputation. Relationships. Results. Self. Four columns, the win and the cost side by side, in the same currency every time, so a decision in chapter three can be compared against one in chapter nineteen.

Five chapters are about losing power - the freeze, the reorganization that erases you, the coup, the public failure, the exit. Nobody writes those chapters. Everybody lives them.

WHAT YOU GET

1. A working method for reading any boss in three minutes - watch what they spend, not what they say.
2. Twenty-one worked situations with three answers each, and the price of all sixty-three.
3. A four-column ledger you can run on your own decisions, including the column nobody audits.
4. Five chapters on losing power, written the way it actually happens.
5. A closing principle from Machiavelli in every chapter, applied to a Tuesday morning rather than a principality.

For anyone who has a boss, is a boss, or is about to become one - first-time managers, senior operators, and anyone who has walked out of a meeting knowing they lost something and not knowing what.

You already speak one of these languages fluently. You have been paying for it for years without ever seeing the invoice.

Which one are you?