Most advice about asking at work is about money. This is about everything else: the extra week, the second person on the project, the tool that would save six hours a week, the meeting you should be in, the work you need to hand back.

You usually know what you need. The problem is that it comes out as a complaint in a one-to-one, or a long message ending in "let me know your thoughts", and nothing changes.

This book gives you a repeatable method. Find the need under the symptom. Identify the person who can actually approve it, which is often not your manager. Price the ask in the currency the approver pays in: budget, headcount, political capital, precedent. Shrink it to the smallest version that solves the problem. Put it on one page, in the week of the year when it can be said yes to. Then handle what comes back — yes, no, not now, or silence.

There is wording for the asks that are hardest to phrase: refusing extra scope, returning work, asking across teams where you have no authority, and asking for something personal. Where an answer depends on local law or your employer's own policy, the book says so and points you to the right adviser.

This book was created with generative AI. The text was generated by an AI system and reviewed and edited before publication.