New Book Delivers a Strategic Operating System for Professionals Navigating Leadership That Doesn't Work

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Most career advice assumes competent leadership exists somewhere in the chain of command. Author Chris Greer's debut book, Career Strategy Under Broken Leadership: The Professional Operating System, does not.

Published by Chris Greer Press and now available in trade paperback, the book provides a strategic framework for mid-career professionals — operations managers, project leads, senior individual contributors, technical specialists — who have realized that the person above them cannot do the job, and the organization either cannot or will not correct it.

"Promotion systems reward visibility, tenure, and political positioning as often as they reward capability," Greer writes. "Every professional will spend a significant portion of their career reporting to someone who cannot do what the role demands. This is structural, not aberrational."

Rather than offering coping mechanisms or anti-management rhetoric, the book delivers a five-phase operating system — Diagnose, Stabilize, Influence, Position, Evolve — built on diagnostic frameworks, decision tools, and influence strategies designed for professionals operating under constraint.

The book introduces several original frameworks, including:

• The Translation Layer — a protocol for communicating with leaders whose capacity to receive information is compromised
• The SHIELD Documentation Protocol — a systematic approach to professional documentation as operational infrastructure
• The Escalation Calculus — a five-dimensional risk framework for determining when formal escalation advances your interests and when it destroys them
• The Counter-Curriculum — a method for converting observed leadership dysfunction into leadership capability
• The Credibility Compound — building reputation as distributed infrastructure that does not depend on a single manager's advocacy

The book fills a gap in the business literature between leadership books — which address the people in charge — and "bad boss" books, which offer emotional validation. Career Strategy Under Broken Leadership does neither. It treats the reader as a strategic actor capable of engineering their own trajectory, regardless of who occupies the office above them.

"This is not self-help," Greer states. "No affirmations. No mindset hacks. No promises that talent is automatically rewarded. This is strategy."

Book Details

• Title: Career Strategy Under Broken Leadership: The Professional Operating System
• Author: Chris Greer
• Publisher: Chris Greer Press
• Publication Date: February 26, 2026
• Formats: PDF & EPUB (145 pages), Trade Paperback (164 pages)
• ISBN: 978-1-972194-00-3 (PDF) · 978-1-972194-01-0 (EPUB) · 978-1-972194-04-1 (Paperback)
• Price: $19.99 (paperback)
• Available at: Amazon (paperback) | chrisgreer.com (PDF & EPUB)

About the Author

Chris Greer is the author of Career Strategy Under Broken Leadership and Who's Running This Place? He writes about organizational dynamics, leadership structures, and the strategic decisions professionals face when the systems around them don't work as advertised. He lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

For more information, visit chrisgreer.com.

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