You say “being nice doesn’t pay” and that that it’s time to “embrace the hate.” How can a worker pull that off without getting fired?

You don’t really want to show your hate. To embrace it is just to actuate it and do something about it instead of having it eat away at you. And it’s not about hating people — it’s about minimizing contact with people who get in your way so you can truly focus.

You say teamwork can be overrated. How so?

A lot of the teams in business today are corporate-dictated — like, let’s take a lot of people and throw them at this problem and that should solve everything. Of course, teams need to meet to discuss these projects, and what happens is we glut the productivity pipeline with meetings about meetings and a lot of unnecessary interactions.

You write that a worker must be a Soloist, willing to set his own course.

The Soloist primarily needs to figure out how to get some time free from all of the meetings and interruptions. If you can carve out 20 or even 10 minutes to do some really focused work, it’s amazing how much distance you can get.

You break down the 10 Least Wanted types of associates, from the overaggressive Bulldozer to the anal-retentive Spreadsheet. What percentage of workers fall into one of these categories?

Probably around 100 percent. We have people who are very definitive, such as the Stop Sign, who’s the classic naysayer, the person who tells you something can’t get done. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the majority of the corporate workforce, which tends to be the Sheeple. They’re the great unwashed who are just there to do their job and go home.

By the way, the Soloist also tends to have some of these least-wanted tendencies. None of us are totally free from it. It’s the ones that overdo it that tend to get in the way of you getting your work done.