About the Authors
Two psychologists who spent forty years teaching businesspeople to manage the damage, and the Account Lead who carried their book through a decade and seven companies before coming back to help rewrite it.
Two psychologists who spent forty years teaching businesspeople to manage the damage, and the Account Lead who carried their book through a decade and seven companies before coming back to help rewrite it.
Paul is a partner at Inertia Labs and a veteran infrastructure leader who has deployed hard infrastructure in more than 25 countries and co-founded seven technology ventures, two with successful exits. He first met this book as a young Technology Lead in one of Mark and Steve's workshops, carried it through a decade and seven companies, and built his "Relentless Pursuit of Excellence" training around it before returning to help rebuild it for today's remote, AI-driven workplace.
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Steve is founder and principal of Fedorko Group and has spent 25+ years helping people reach full potential at work without sacrificing the life around it, from medical practices to Fortune 500 companies, and as a digital strategist at Tribal DDB and Wunderman. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and has published on the effects of stress and the value of preventing it.
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Mark is Professor and Program Head of the Media Arts and Design program at the University of Texas at Dallas. An experimental psychologist who left a tenured faculty post for private practice, he joined the early Internet in 1995 and has since led large teams of engineers, designers, and account leads at Tribal DDB, imc², TM Advertising, Bottle Rocket, and Tandem Theory. Every principle in this book is tested human behavior rather than theory.
LinkedIn →My Client is the Devil was written in 2015, the product of forty years of Mark McKinney and Steve Fedorko working together to help businesspeople manage the pressure of client relationships. Paul M. Drew first encountered their ideas as a young Technology Lead sitting in one of their workshops, and spent the next decade carrying the book with him through seven companies, assigning it to his teams, and building his own leadership training around its core ideas.
The world those ideas were written for has changed since then. Remote work has become the default arrangement for many teams. Collaboration now happens across time zones and cultures in ways the original edition never had to address. The gig economy has blurred the lines of accountability and loyalty that used to hold teams together. Artificial intelligence has moved from a future concern to a present reality that is reshaping how work gets done and who does it.
In the summer of 2025, Paul brought a decade of notes, updated examples, and new challenges that needed naming back to Mark and Steve. What started as a conversation about updating a book became an invitation to write the next one together. The core framework has not changed. What is new is the world it now has to operate in, and the tools this edition offers to meet it.
Mark and Steve's original three rules of account service, coined by a group of project managers at the first company where they worked, still hold: you will never make everyone happy all the time; technology, sooner or later, will betray you; and sometimes, drinking is the best answer. All joking aside, there is great truth here, and the rest of the book is about what to do with it.