When you look in the mirror before going to work, do you see a real jerk looking back at you? Maybe you don’t think so. But your colleagues might.

And if you’ve been climbing the corporate ladder, chances are you could be turning into a real “asshole,” says Ed Rychkun, author of How’s Your AQ Today? Corporations Stripped Naked (www.rrpbooks.com).

Rychkun knows a jerk when he sees one. For 30 years, he worked with companies in North America and abroad, along the way serving as a VP, CEO, founder, director and chairman.

Asked if he was ever an asshole, he answers: “Absolutely.”

Ed Rychkun

It’s not something the now semi-retired Rychkun is proud of; it’s just that he along with many others in organizations was infected with what he calls the “Asshole Quotient,” or AQ.

Published this year, part of Rychkun’s premise in his satirical account of corporate life is that many organizations feel it’s perfectly OK to treat staff like dirt. As a person moves up the ladder, he or she annoys more people and their AQ rises accordingly.

“They (executives) say it’s just business, nothing personal,” explains the resident of Langley, B.C.

However, it’s a reciprocal process and as negative feelings intensify between personalities, the end result is lowered productivity, Rychkun says.

Perhaps a simple way to measure if your organization is infected, he says, is to ask yourself if you’ve ever thought somebody in your office was an asshole.

He uses the noun because in his corporate life, the three most universal words that he heard were profit, productivity – and asshole.

“The word I chose wasn’t important,” he says. “It could have been jerk, or something else, but it was a thought, a feeling that was associated with the word, that tended to affect productivity.”

He calls his book a satirical attempt to bring some humour to the workplace – and a good dose of truth. Often crude and funny (I recognized a few old bosses, one a ham-fisted “dictator,” one a babbling “idiot”), Rychkun shows hundreds of tactics ladder- climbers use to advance themselves, to control and manipulate others.

“I found as I progressed up the ladder and became less and less in touch with the technology I’d learned previously, in other words following the Peter Principle, I had to use various tricks of the trade,” he says.

“We call them management techniques; things we do to keep people in their place.”

As an example, he presents what he calls a classic boardroom case:

Imagine you’ve just made a presentation, he says, and you’re in the hotseat. And the president (“being a complete asshole”) says: “I don’t believe what you are saying. Prove it.”

What do you do? One common survival tactic is to pass the buck, Rychkun says. “You look to your left and stare at someone, and you say: ‘Stan here is the expert in the area. Let’s hear what he has to say.’”

The moment you’ve passed the buck, you’ve destroyed a social link between you and Stan, Rychkun explains. You made each other’s AQ list.

Rychkun began making notes in 1986 on the tactics business people use. He says many ploys are so common, so ingrained, that they just seem to be a natural means of doing business.

He says he has yet to meet a company president who hasn’t belittled a subordinate by saying, “I don’t believe a word you are saying . . .”

He acknowledges that as business people climb the rungs, decisions become tougher, especially when times are difficult financially. Yet there are mean-spirited ways of dealing with people and softer, more humane measures.

But does the AQ virus infect all companies? Rychkun’s has seen some companies where individual departments flowed with energy. “There is exceptional teamwork, empathy and sympathy,” he says. “There is a lot of joint participation in helping each other . . . but no matter how good the department is, it can be infected because things change.

“People are drawn to power, to advance, to make more money and that’s when the virus creeps in . . . but it doesn’t have to be that way because there are examples of (organizations with) family-type feelings.”

In his book, Rychkun creates 100 characters in a mock organization who he says reveal the untaught secrets of those “successful” executives and managers.

It’s a look at a silly but true underbelly of a corporation, he says, and even provides readers with a mathematical formula to determine their own AQ.

Once part of that underbelly, Rychkun said he had to escape the culture. His sanctuary was writing books, and today he runs a mining company, consults for new enterprises and enjoys semi-retirement.

And he hopes his latest work will open some people’s eyes.

To do so, he says, they’ll have to look in the mirror – and see what kind of person stares back.

(Mike Dempster can be reached at miked@businessedge.ca.)