Here are some basic guidelines for "managing your manager", which may be another way of saying how to behave like a total suck-up while deluding yourself that you are the one in control. Still though, such skills are necessary despite their vague repugnance. Follow these basic rules and you shall rise, my child.

1) Resign yourself to the fact that you can't escape office politics no matter how much you might want to, and just dive in and get wet. Become a floater among the sewage.

2) Psych your boss out. Get under your boss's skin like some telekinetic cootie and figure what makes that strange little critter in the corner office tick.

3) Step outside yourself, just as you might rise out of your body after death to hover about your HMO-cheated carcass lying there on the operating table, and view both yourself and the context of your corporation from a "higher" perspective. This is called getting the Big Picture. Remember, It - meaning the company - is not about You.

4) Stay positive, friendly, unfailingly unctuous - but shrewdly so. Meticulously "plan" your interactions like commando raids of good cheer. Transform yourself into the offspring of a Smiley Face button and Nicolo Machiavelli.

5) Ask questions to clarify your boss's desires. The boss might sit there in the shadows like Boo Radley, near catatonic in his self-importance, possibly neither articulate enough nor forthcoming enough to get his point across. It is your mission, should you choose to accept it, to discover what he really wants you to do.

6) If your boss abuses you, "sleep on it". Let it roll off your back. Regenerate your mutilated self-respect as a lizard would its tail. And always, always, make your boss look good, no matter how bad a boss he or she truly is.

For ever more such illuminating nuggets of admonitory banality, consult the link below.

"How To Manage The Manager" from the Kansas City Star