Clever as Serpents provides ethical insight into business life, the job market, and office politics, revealing that business culture, while often corrupt, can be transformed through the practice of asceticism. It suggests that business asceticism embraces and masters the discomforts of business life through a disciplined and unique approach to the rigors of the competitive marketplace.

Clever as Serpents is divided into two parts -- theory and strategy. Chapters one through five deal with a unique approach to management theory and the behavior of financial markets. Chapters six through ten deal with practical techniques for dealing with the jungle of office politics.

For the many people who experience the workplace as frustrating or unfair, who struggle with office politics -- as well as the question of whether their workday lives have any religious significance or spiritual depth -- this work provides concrete suggestions for practicing an ethics of survival, of success, and of redemption. Intelligent and pastoral in its uses, Clever as Serpents also helps today's lay Catholics know more about how canon law affects their lives.