Ethics note: these are amoral techniques below, and will likely deeply offend those who believe ends don't justify means or in concepts like "respect."

They can be applied towards/against either your idea of the larger interests of the company or for your own benefit. How you choose to use them is your problem. I'd like you to see these pointers (pun intended) for what they are, a repertoire of useful and fun tactics that are fun to learn and improve, and a separate subject from goals.

So you have an incompetent boss?

Congratulations.

This is a fantastic position to be in if you know how to work it. Competent but unenlightened people can be dreadful to work for, because they can micromanage, second-guess and generally try to do your job for you without realizing it, and be right more often than you.

If you want to do things differently because you have other sneaky ideas about what you'd like the company to do/where you would like your work to go, they can also get in the way.

A competent boss is a nightmare that can only be escaped via finagling a remote-working arrangement, putting yourself on the road a lot, or in ambiguous authority multi-line reporting positions. This approach is explained very well in Stanley Bing's book, Executricks.

Now on to incompetent bosses.

True incompetents don't do things competent bosses do, because they don't like being proven wrong and subconsciously avoid activities that are amenable to proof tests.
This natural predisposition towards useless activities and unfalsifiable beliefs is good for you.


The first thing to realize is that such a person is only nominally your boss. Actually s/he is a child and you are the parent. So you should do things an effective parent would do (though not necessarily a parent with their child's best interests at heart).

1. Boost their self-esteem and confidence, especially in low-skill domains which can be packaged up as high-skill ones (like running useless procedural meetings by the book). Encourage 'em to do more of those things. Even if you have to pay the tax of some participation. These days, with a laptop and a command over formulaic meetingese, ("that's an excellent point, but can you elaborate on the first part?") anyone can pretend to be fully engaged in a pointless meeting while doing something else.
2. Bolster their delusions about their own competence where it does not interfere with your actual competence (if you can make 'em feel competent in areas where that would interfere with people/projects that you need to cause trouble for, due to your own strategic interests, that's a bonus. Incompetent bosses make effective weapons when aimed and launched at the unprepared).
3. Exhibit such extreme (but narrow) confidence in your own domain, and make your specialized skills illegible to them, so that they see it as a boundary they cannot cross. Like children, they will actually be grateful to you for setting firm boundaries. Like children, they may moan about it or make jokes about it, or act resentful about it, but they won't seriously attempt to challenge the boundaries. When they throw tantrums, be gentle but firm.
4. Hire babysitters. In the workplace they are called "meetings run by others." Try and make sure your manager is going to as many such meetings as possible. If he doesn't already do so, suggest that he run monthly communication meetings to update everyone on stuff they learned in other meetings in galaxies far, far away. This activity of turning 99% useless inputs into 99% useless outputs will make them feel productive. Praise their big-picture vision and role as cross-disciplinary linchpin. In the 1% of the cases where they bring in something useful, praise them effusively. Give 'em some treats (leading a vote of thanks or a round of applause for instance, or letting 'em overhear a fake watercooler conversation where you praise them, "we really need more people like Joe around here, who can cross organizational boundaries").
5. Just as you send kids on field trips or to summer camp to create room for your own life, it is a fantastic idea to gently encourage your incompetent boss to go on trips or advanced leadership courses. Just don't send them anywhere where they can do any real damage. If you are smart enough to realize that your company has no intention of entering the Japanese market, send them to study that, for instance. A week-long trip can be milked for nearly 4-5. One week of prep, 1 week of absence and 2 weeks of catching up. Beyond that, you can always explain away your actions for months into the future with, "oh, that came up when you were away in Japan, and we committed to this path." It is even better if they come back all fired-up about some new flavor of the month crap. You can use that to suggest creation of a well-designed non project that will keep them happy for years. This idea, by the way, is something I learned from the British TV show, Yes, Prime Minister.
6. Reframe decisions out of their imagined zone of competence, and kick them upstairs to vacuous strategic oversight. If they imagine they are a marketing genius for instance, and you are an engineer, you could say something like, for instance, "I think we could run some analytics and get you some information that really lets you make the decision at a strategic level. I can run those for you next week, just as soon as we upgrade to the new blah-blah reporting module after the database migration." When you actually present the results, you can pull an easy conjuring trick to make 'em pick the option you want. Framing is everything.
7. An incompetent boss, usefully managed, is a very valuable asset that you probably don't want to give away if you've got 'em where you want 'em, but if they take too much work to manage, you can amplify some of the above tactics to the point where they become ammunition in getting them promoted out of your way. Try and get a lazier incompetent as a replacement.

These methods work fairly easily out of the box for the good-natured, friendly, bumbling incompetent. They still work, but require tweaks and modifications, for the evil-jerk/cruel/sadistic incompetent (hint: pretend to be that way yourself, and adopt tough-guy rhetoric and position yourself as consiglieri/bouncer and get the same leverage above; easier to say than do).

These are just a few beginner tricks of the trade. There is a lot more. Watching shows like Yes, Minister or The Office will help a lot if you want to gain advanced skills.

Both competent and incompetent bosses are easier to work than enlightened ones. There alignment is your only hope. If they are headed in roughly the same direction you think the work of the group should go, modulo some personal priorities (which they will accept), life will be bliss. If they are headed in directions you disagree with, life will be hell and you should get out. None of these tricks will work on an enlightened boss (competent or not with respect to actual job functions in play, enlightenment is a different vector than competence).