Battler who kowtows to no one

Childhood in Lebanon turned Jonar Nader into the fighter he is. JULIE MIDDLETON reports.

Jonar Nader is, by his own admission, an extremist.

It's a loaded label in the current climate, especially if you have his Middle Eastern appearance, but he has a better claim to it than most.

Nader is a Sydney-based, 35-year-old rampant over-achiever and the author of the best-selling 1999 book How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People: Leadership in the Networked World.

Yes, that's the book that so enraged lawyers acting for Dale Carnegie and Associates when it was published last year.

Threats of legal action did not earn them friendship with Nader, nor was he overly influenced: he told them to "go jump".

The attitude tells you something about this consultant-turned-entrepreneur's approach to life and career advice.

Nader, who terms himself the world's only "post-tentative virtual surrealist", says his life and times have been irrevocably marked by a childhood spent among the horror of Lebanon's devastating 16-year civil war. He later emigrated to Australia with his parents and two sisters.

The extreme experience of being a puppy of war forced him to take a position, to hold provocative opinions, to be driven to success in everything he does, he says.

"Bomb after bomb after bomb - no protection, no food, no money," he recalls. "The September 11 attack, horrific though it is, takes place in Beirut and Belfast 24 hours a day."

But the lifelong legacy of war is survival skills - "and when you come out of a warlike situation, you have to take a position. I'm an extremist. Everything I do I have to do well.

"I take on battles and issues. And I take corporations on on behalf of consumers."

It's no surprise, then, to discover that How to is a prescriptive book, bullish in its just-do-it assertions.

Its confident ideas can be as contrary as the title, the author a digital-age philosopher of the Gen-X "think for yourself, and if you don't like it, change it" school.

We are imprisoned by our virtues, he says, by deference to bosses, parents, educational institutions. Dump the disease of unquestioning acquiescence.

"I urge my readers to say what needs to be said, to fight for what must be done, and to do what must be done, even if in the process one has to lose friends and infuriate people."

Clarification: "I do believe in order and authority and hierarchy, but I don't believe in idiots running riot and people doing stupid things that waste everybody's time."

Nader, who left school at 14 and "dabbled" with university, is a former IBM and Compaq sales and marketing boffin and the author of technical computing texts, including the well-known Prentice Hall Illustrated Dictionary of Computing.

But, he says, "the day I stopped lusting after my manager's job was the day I knew I was doomed in corporate life".

His How to has recently spawned a small hardback of extracts called Words of Wisdom. It's a collection of quotes - his and others' - collected during arguments and other times of stiff discussion, he says.

Two of his: "Some boardrooms are filled with the bland leading the bland," and one which would be the perfect closer to a row: "Your secret is safe with me, but my opinion of you isn't."

Nader's marketing is slick. His website is a lesson in the value of self-belief. Next on the agenda are three books he reckons he's well-qualified to do: how to lose and/or infuriate leaders, bosses - and lovers.

Links

Logictivity