To be a successful manager you have to communicate tactically. Always try to impress and ingratiate yourself with superiors. Communicate very cautiously and tactically with those at the same rank as you, since they are your competitors. Try not to communicate with underdogs at all.

Communicating with superiors
Modern management requires playing many roles and engaging in multi-tasking. Do not expect to do well if you are merely good at your job. Employ the usual social skills here, including the use of humour (laughing at the boss's jokes), and doing support (wise nodding at meetings will help you develop this). Try to develop a particular awareness of how to play different roles -- quietly efficient subordinate, ambitious and knowledgeable specialist, good friend, mate with betting tips, sports fan, procurer, and so on.

It is important not to confine yourself to any one of these but to be a  'good all-rounder', a good colleague but also 'a good chap'. Females may wish to practise the latter in particular, or to develop a particularly gendered version of this role -- be a very good listener, a flirt, a little girl, a mother, someone who is turned on by power and finds older men utterly sexy and fascinating. There may be a female variant of what is known as the Australian ploy -- if you have a good idea, make sure you float it in the presence of a powerful man, then walk well away and leave it alone for a couple of weeks, until he discovers it and decides to conquer it as terra nullis .

Communicating with competitors
Practise the difficult technique of modestly praising yourself and surreptitiously gossiping about others. Don't forget to develop suitable body language -- a knowing smile, a raised eyebrow, feigned surprise when you hear someone else being praised. Never divulge any information or ideas to others, unless you're going to receive back something of even greater value. Try the Australian ploy (see above), but this time as Captain Cook. Be guided by the principle that you should never give a sucker an even break, and freely ask people for their ideas and then pretend they are yours. A good way to do this is to develop a non-directive style in meetings: start by asking how you can help, and what people think. Reply only with little nods and grunts. Wait out silences because anyone with any energy or interest will gladly help you out and fill them.

Develop the managerial principle of asymmetry. Be helpful and courteous to those above you, contemptuous and manipulative toward those below, and obstructive toward competing peers. You can usually find reasons for not co-operating on projects that they have, because they will not have consulted you properly, or other relevant authorities; they have not properly costed the proposals, or done sufficient market research; they have never understood your particular area of expertise and thus can be condemned as meddling amateurs.

Communicating with underlings
It is best to put into place as quickly as possible a number of structural barriers between yourself and underdogs in order to avoid any unpleasant personal communication. The goal is to render your level of management as a complete  'black hole' - those few communications that do enter your orbit will be dragged in, comprehensively ignored, and lost in organizational night and fog. Communications should be reduced to an absolute minimum anyway, and there are a number of ways to ensure this:

• Insist that all communications must follow procedures. Try not to specify what these procedures actually are, or if you are forced to do so, write and publish them as obscurely as possible. Deliberately poor and therefore ambiguous punctuation can help. Thus any particularly annoying or damaging communication can be refused on the simple grounds that the communicator has not followed procedures, which is quite likely if you make those procedures complex and opaque enough. Denunciations of the procedures, or persistent attempts to overcome them in order to get to you can be described as  'unwelcome', or even as 'harassment', and the persistent communicator can be disciplined.

• Try to place as many levels of management as possible between you and those likely to complain in particular in order to forestall any unwanted communication. Insist that your role is simply to receive communications from others, ideally with a recommendation for action attached. You do not have to go to the bother of actually deciding anything, and you can easily avoid responsibility.

• If persistent communications still manage to get to you, pass them right on down the chain again. You have a email system in your organisation, so use it. If underlings pass them back, try a few parallel moves, to other departments. If the worst comes to the worst, simply ignore any inconvenient communications. You're far too busy to deal with them right now, and, by the time you can get round to them, any likely response will be out of date, and so you can ask for a fresh version of the annoying communication all over again.

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