How Work Kills Us
25th July 2018
Review of a new book.
A giant of business scholarship, Mr Pfeffer teaches one of Stanford’s most popular courses, on office politics and power. His early works looked at organisational design and how it sapped employee productivity rather than enhanced it. His previous book in 2015, “Leadership BS”, examined the gap between what companies say and how they act. He reprises these themes in his latest work, bringing a trove of original data to make his case.
And it still won’t matter a damn.
Nothing is more commonplace than a book about a problem that no individual can fix. Why people buy these things is beyond me. I remember my manager at EDS twenty years ago encouraging everyone to read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which we all dutifully did. So far as I could tell, it made not one shred of difference either to EDS or to us as individuals.
July 25th, 2018 at 09:04
LOL! The company I work for is pushing us to take a 2 month long discussion course in “Seven Habits….”. The irony abounds.
The only books that really explain how corporate America works are the Dilbert compilations.
I’ve had people come in my office with a new Dilbert cartoon and tell me that Adams must have a spy in our company because the exact same conversation just took place in the conference room down the hall last week.