In his book, Going to WARk, Stelexos-X defines what WARk is and why understanding and managing it is of such significant importance for all executives willing to put the effort to achieve growth and ascend to the top places of the business hierarchy.

So, we dive into the definitions of new and exciting concepts like WARk. 

WARk = WAR @ Work

WARk = Work in WAR

WARk is the “place” you go each day for work. It is the place where you fight most of the conflicts of the major part of your adult life. WARk is also a place where even severe conflict is not deadly. You know with very high levels of certainty that if not for a heart attack, a stroke or extreme stress, death will only find you long after you have left that place for good.

WARk is the place where the author of Going to WARk has spent almost ALL his adult professional life. 

Let’s be even more specific. How did WARk come to exist? We need to break the answer in parts.

PART1: First of all, WAR exists because we are born with it, it is in our blood. This is straightforward. Conquest and dominance are written in our DNA sequence and war is their direct descendant. Even if one is not among the cast of warriors and conquerors born for war, even if one confronts their enemies only to lose or even flee before conflict, even for them WAR is instantly identifiable as it is in their DNA also. They lose or flee only because they handle WAR poorly, they do not know how to fight and how to win.

PART2: Secondly, Work is necessary for us. Our system of collaborative labour leading to the creation of value and relevant remunerations is inherent to the modern world. We need it to create growth. It creates growth in a twofold manner. First, numbers of people grow and second, the income of these people also grows. The total growth is the arithmetic product of the previous:

So the system is based on keeping the people alive and at work, competing with each other for more value, thus in the process creating even more value and competing even more for it. Fierce competition creates WAR@Work which equals WARk. WARk is war at work without a death toll.

That is how WARk has come to existence!

Stelexos-X says that 

“…WARk can be worse than war. War @ Work is a form of Total Warfare as it is not restricted to military targets and results in massive civilian and other non-combatant suffering and casualties. The workplace is a battlefield that has been occupied with total warfare for as long as man has laboured. Basically, it could be that WARk is the first type of war ever manifested”.

There is a paradox in WARk. We now understand that since the beginning, we have been living in a professional environment that is defined by conflict. WARk has always been a part of work environments but it has always been difficult to spot it and comprehend it. And that is the paradox of WARk; it is evident and invisible at the same time. 

Within this paradox, someone can find one of the basic answers, one of the harsh truths leading to a successful professional positioning for an individual. This truth is invisibility.