Can you grift your way to the top?

This is accurate.

You can get away with doing nothing other than the following things:

- Being incredibly likeable/outgoing
- Being great at selling yourself and your accomplishments (or tying yourself to others' accomplishments)
- Going out of your way to CYA often
- Having a lot of face time presence
- Rubbing elbows with the higher-ups; kissing ass
- Being conniving and disparaging/discrediting anyone who challenges you and your authority
- Lying

Doing these things can take you very far at a company and life in general without needing to produce. But even that is not quite true though, because being likeable, being able to sell yourself and your company, getting in face time, etc. are all valuable to your company. For example, when interacting with other parties, you're able to instantly demonstrate competency and rapport, which leads to business. And that's without providing any intial value.

I'm not one of these people but my boss is. There are a few cons I see with this "strategy" of moving up. For one, it's probably a stressful way to operate. My boss is constantly worrying about what other people are doing and saying and how he is being perceived. It certainly doesn't take more work or effort, but it does take a higher stress tolerance that's probably unsustainable for most. Another con is that your position is unstable. People like this aren't trusted or kept close by the colleagues and people who know them best. Their authority/power carries them and if that's ever called into question, they can find themselves ousted pretty quickly. That's in contrast to the person who isn't immediately well-liked, but always does good work, is collaborative and dependable, authentic with others, and does what's good for the group. This person will typically be seen as more and more valuable in the long-run because they produce consistent results just as a part of who they are, whereas the well-liked guy's act is likely to crumble at some point given enough time getting to know him. (Not sure how true this is for larger companies with more distance between colleagues, but it's very true for smaller companies where people work closely together)