Leave your email address and on 12 January 2027 I will send you the ARIA worksheet — twenty minutes to map how you actually operate under pressure, and what it is costing you — along with one note to say the book is out. That is the whole list.
You’re on the list.
Two emails on 12 January — the ARIA worksheet, and a note that the book is out.
Why I wrote a book about office politics
Most fall into one of two camps. The first is brutally honest about how power actually works, and assumes you are prepared to do whatever it takes — you finish knowing more about influence and feeling faintly worse about yourself. The second is ethical and encouraging but stops short of real tools: manage your stakeholders, communicate clearly, build relationships. All of it correct. None of it quite enough.
I wanted one honest enough to name how organizations actually work, and principled enough to help you navigate them without becoming someone you wouldn’t respect. I couldn’t find it, so I tried to build it.
Three things you will not find in most books in this space
- A way of reading yourself as clearly as you read others. The archetypes are a self-diagnostic before they are anything else.
- An ethical anchor built into the strategy rather than bolted on at the end. Durable influence and decent behavior are not opposites; they are mutually reinforcing.
- Tools for the situations the literature skips — influencing without formal authority, navigating politics when you are rarely in the room, and how to hold power in a way that lasts.
The METHODOLOGY
Political IQ is the ability to read how influence actually moves inside an organization, and to act on it deliberately. It sits alongside emotional intelligence rather than replacing it. EQ tells you what someone is feeling; Political IQ tells you how the room works, and how to get ahead in it. It breaks that down into where power really sits, who sits around it, the ways people influence, and the alliances they build. Sadly, nothing is won on merit alone.
To understand your role, and to make a plan that supports your career goals, I have used five archetypes. They have played out on stage, on screen and in storytelling for thousands of years, all over the world. Understand their strengths and avoid their weaknesses, and use both to work out your own plan. If you have watched a Marvel film, Game of Thrones or The Traitors, or sat through Shakespeare, you already know them: the Sovereign, the Strategist, the Operator, the Confidant and the Mythmaker. They are not personality types — we all know their stories. My strategy is to use the one you are naturally under pressure, and to reach two or three others through gained experience. The rest is why you need to build your team around you, if you want to be the Sovereign.
Now meld the archetypes with a framework I call ARIA: Alliance Architecture, Reputation Management, Intelligence and Information, and Adaptive Timing. It helps you use your archetypes’ powers to realize your plan, with goals and objectives you can execute on in today’s world. Those four are what decide who gets the budget, the mandate and the promotion.
Andrew Manby spent thirty years running product organizations at IBM, Informix, Ascential, HCLSoftware and others, where the politics were as complicated as the technology. He was part of a team whose business IBM acquired in 2005 for $1.1 billion. This is what he kept noticing.