Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (2012) is the direct practical companion to gervais-principle-series, translating the organizational analysis of that series into applied advice for navigating office politics. Published through ribbonfarm following the success of the Gervais Principle posts, it represents Rao's experiment with the short-form, practical-register book as a format — an application of his emerging understanding of how to package ideas for direct sale to an existing audience.
The Book's Argument
The title's provocation — "playbook for sociopaths" — signals the book's deliberate stance. Where the gervais-principle-series described the organizational world analytically, Be Slightly Evil addresses readers who have accepted that description and want practical guidance for operating within it. The "Sociopath" label here uses Rao's specific definition from the Gervais Principle: actors who operate with clear-eyed self-interest and long time horizons, rather than the clinical or ethical connotations the term carries in everyday usage.
"Slightly evil" rather than fully evil is key to the book's argument. Rao is not advocating unethical behavior but arguing that effective organizational navigation requires accepting that organizations are political rather than meritocratic, and acting accordingly. The "slightly" signals that the goal is not exploitation but self-preservation and advancement in environments that reward strategic thinking.
The practical content covers: how to read organizational power structures, how to manage upward effectively, how to build genuine alliances versus performative ones, how to navigate the Clueless middle-manager layer that the Gervais Principle describes, and how to maintain clarity about one's own interests in environments that reward confusion of personal and organizational interests.
Publication and Audience
The book was self-published through ribbonfarm in 2012, during the peak-ribbonfarm era, following the pattern established by tempo-book (2011). Both represent Rao's early experiments with self-publishing to a captive audience — selling books directly to readers who already trusted his work through the blog.
The audience for Be Slightly Evil overlapped significantly with the Gervais Principle series readership: people in organizations who recognized the framework and wanted to know what to do with it. The provocative framing attracted readers who might have been less interested in a more conventionally titled office-politics book.
Relationship to Other Work
Be Slightly Evil sits at the practical end of a spectrum that includes the theoretical gervais-principle-series at one end and the-art-of-gig at the other. Where Gervais Principle describes organizational dynamics analytically and The Art of Gig describes life outside organizations, Be Slightly Evil addresses how to navigate within organizations using the Gervais Principle framework. The three together constitute Rao's most sustained body of work on professional life and organizational dynamics.