I have had no experience with highly successful people in the entertainment industry or in government bureaucracies

I am just starting The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray. Murray is one of our most settled, cautious, gentlemanly scholarly voices who speaks truths that drive some people nearly crazy. His has been an odd and difficult karma which he has carried with grace.

In The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead he unleashes himself a bit. He comes out of the corner punching. On page 17, his first piece of advice is, Don't suck up.

Let's assume that you're going to work for a quality organization in the private sector. Within that organization, some of the people who run the place will be extremely good at what they do, some will be merely competent, and some will conform to the Peter Principle ("Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence"). It's not a good idea to suck up to any of them.

By sucking up, I mean flattering supervisors, pretending to agree with their bad ideas, or otherwise unctuously trying to ingratiate yourself with them. Sucking up is usually thought to be a great way to get ahead, so this advice requires some explanation. My career has brought me into contact with many highly successful people from the corporate, financial, publishing, journalistic, and scholarly worlds. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I have to go by my experience:
Just about all of the highly successful people I've dealt with have been impressively skilled. I cannot think of
any who got to their prominent positions by faking it.

Caveat
I have had no experience with highly successful people in the entertainment industry or in government bureaucracies, where my advice may not apply. In politics, sucking up is part of the job description.

If the highly successful people in your organization are like that, trying to tell them they're wonderful will be a disaster. They will recognize what you're doing and disdain you for it. And it's not going to work much better with other supervisors. You don't want to suck up to the less competent or the incompetent, because (1) they probably are not in a position to help you much anyway, and (2) there's too much danger that the people you really want to impress will observe your sycophancy and remember it.

The flip side is that highly successful people tend to value honesty and courage. I'm not recommending that you go out of your way to disagree with them or otherwise show your independence. It's appropriate to be tactful if you're a junior person working with a senior person, and you certainly don't want to be abrasive. Just don't trim your views if they go against the grain of the discussion. Express yourself forthrightly, and the odds are that you'll get points for it.

If I'm wrong, and you find yourself in an organization where sucking up is in fact a good way to get ahead, look for a new job. It's not a quality organization after all, no matter how glittering its public reputation may be. Life is too short to work there.

I agree. But that Caveat is a sharp jab.