Nader loves argument and pulls no punches

By Selwyn Parker

Jonar Nader is the cat among the management pigeons. Australia's scourge of accepted management wisdom, he certainly wouldn't agree with Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It was Carnegie who wrote: "The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it." That's not Nader. He loves arguments. He almost sets out to disagree on the assumption that unpopularity is often the lot of those who have the temerity to say things aren't what they should be.

"It is culturally accepted to follow the path of least resistance," he observes after 15 years of studying life in the corridors of commercial power across the Tasman.

"It is a tendency among colleagues and opponents to thwart anything that threatens the comfort of the status quo."

"It's a fact that social and cultural forces that accommodate mediocrity bond together to obstruct, frustrate, and dismantle any opponent through conflict or combat," argues Nader, who works for IBM in between multiple other activities, has established a leadership foundation, and is a popular speaker despite his outspoken views.

He has assembled these trenchant observations on Australian commercial life in his latest book: How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People. It is 357 pages of cold water. The writer is obviously fed up with the difference between what's said and what's actually done.

Sample excerpt: "I blow the whistle on the corporate and political games. I discredit the rules that have done nothing more than nourish the lethargic, imprison new talent, and suppress freedom. I expose protocol as a brick wall that protects the insecure and keeps at bay the bold.

"I call on those who are in a position of power to lift their game. I plead for action from those who have new ideas."

For good measure, Nader castigates Australian corporate life for its sycophancy, confusion, evasiveness, lack of courage, politicking and general mediocrity.

Nader certainly can't be accused of lacking new ideas, most of them heretical. For example, on the fraught issue of productivity:

"Employees are having to work intolerable hours amid job insecurity and unfulfilling environments," he argues. Far more effective than urging staff to work harder and smarter, he says, is to attack headquarters-driven red tape and strategies that block productivity.

On confused notions of leadership: "There are those who know they are leaders and go in search of new ideas so that they can fulfil their dreams; those who think they are leaders and go in search of buzz words so they can fool some of the people some of the time; those who would like to be leaders so they study as much as they can to enter the ranks in due course."

According to Nader, true leadership is a moral issue bound up with integrity and honourableness. Real leaders take people down new paths.

On empowerment: "If you wish your staff to be empowered, you need not be concerned with what they do but with what you do... Often the announcement of mass empowerment comes as a desperate measure by managers who are crying for help." Nader's basic argument is that employees arrive for work fully empowered and that managers can only take it away.

How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People is full of against-the-grain advice like that. To be fair to Nader, he doesn't set out to skewer corporate life in an attention-grabbing way but, rather, offers solutions based on eight years of "very deliberate analysis," and on numerous and often unhappy experience.

Lebanese-born, Nader's sideways views stem from the fact that he was an outsider in Australia, a "wog" (as he says) who was subjected to considerable discrimination. "I always came up against brick walls," he recalls. Inevitably, he learned to take a sceptics' view of everything, and this book is the result.

Nader is not the brash Aussie his strong views might suggest.

Rather, he is quietly spoken, amusing, impressively knowledgeable, full of conviction - and a one-man work ethic. Nader has written a definitive encyclopaedia of computing, is IBM Australia's manager of e-business software, an occasional university lecturer, regular contributor to newspapers, and sought-after speaker at $A7500 an hour.

He's single, and only 34 ... "but sometimes I almost feel I'm 68".

* How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People is published by Plutonium.