Work and Success Nice Guys Finish Last - Essay Example

Work and Success – Nice Guys Finish Last The adage ‘Nice guys finish last’ is one that almost everyone has hears from one or another social acquaintance in their lives. There are many who live steadfastly by this saying and others who vehemently oppose it. However, when it comes to work and success, one can observe a number of situations where mommy’s advice to be ‘as nice to everyone as you would expect them to be to you’ comes a cropper. Anyone who has had even three months of experience in a corporate environment is sure to have come across at least one co worker whom they considered devious and unscrupulous.

There’s the boss who asks his junior to make the weekly report and takes credit for it when he mails it to the CEO, the co worker who feigns importance and a busy schedule to avoid pulling their own weight in a team and even the gossip happy tattletale who simply loves to breed an environment of paranoia between co-workers. Anyone who hasn’t encountered such people at their workplace is either blissfully oblivious or should never let go of their jobs. For the rest of the mortals, the only way to avoid being treated as a human doormat is to abandon the nice ways that earned them the ‘most polite student’ award in kindergarten and adapt to the new requirements of the corporate world.

Steve Jobs, one of the nice guys of the IT industry lost out to Bill Gates who patented the two button mouse that Jobs had developed. The result being that Jobs had to contend with the ire of his very frustrated customers who had to press the ‘command’ button for the simplest of functions with the mouse. According to a study Conducted by Christine M Riordan, mentioned on CNN Living (2010), of 1500 co workers studied, the nice ones weren’t the most likely to be boosted up the corporate ladder.

In fact, it revealed that the degree to which a person is good natured, cheerful, gentle and trusting of others could harm their prospects for promotion and salary increments. While everyone wants to be liked, a boss is one who makes the tough decisions for the benefit of the organization as a whole, irrespective of whom it ticks off. So if a person wants to make it big in the corporate line, they don’t have to be a jerk to coworkers, however, they do have to learn not to coddle them and to watch their backs at the same time.

As the age old saying goes, ‘the best defense is a good offense’. If one’s coworkers are too busy with their own problems, they have fewer to give you. Works Cited Christine, Riordan M. Nice Guys May Finish Last at Work. CNN Living. 03 March 2010. Web. 04 Mar 2011.