A young man is unhappy and in turmoil over his life. He encounters a wise but mysterious old man who seems to command knowledge that could make all his dreams come true, but for the youth to achieve his goals, the old man demands that he pass the tests and challenges he will put before him.
And it’s also The Go-Giver, a new book that modestly (and accurately) describes itself as “A little story about a powerful business idea.”
It’s pretty high in Amazon’s rankings for business and motivational books, and I would guess that its positive message and its mytho-heroic story are the reasons why.
So, just as Joseph Campbell set forth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that George Lucas used as a thematic blueprint for Star Wars, The Go-Giver begins with a youth who stumbles into a secret world. In this case, it’s it’s Joe, a 25-year-old company go-getter who is struggling to succeed in his sales business. He’s lost the big contract he was after, and so goes in search of the mysterious “Chairman,” who, he thinks, he can use as leverage to win back the big account.
The Chairman lives regally in a “beautiful stone mansion.” (Campbell notes that the first stage of the mythological journey is the “call to adventure,” signifying the destiny that has summoned the hero “and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of the society to a zone unknown.” Campbell says the zone can be represented as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, but it’s always a “place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings.” So too in The Go-Giver.)
The Chairman leads Joe through his journey of initiation, introducing him to transformative characters—the chef, the real estate genius, the teacher-turned-CEO, the coffee goddess, and the ultra-mysterious “Connector.” He imparts to Joe the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success,” and while that doesn’t have the same ring as the Sword in the Stone, the Force or the Nine Rings of Power, I guess stratospheric success will have to do in here in the world of the business quest. By the end of the book, Joe has learned and lived the laws, become the benevolent and successful “go-giver,” and secured the love and freedom of the fair maiden. At then the Ewoks dance with joy. Sorry—I got my quests mixed up. No Ewoks here.
As I said, a lot of people are buying this 132-page book, at $20 a pop, even though its message can be stated, verbatim, in less than 100 words. The writing is pedestrian, and all in all, I’d rather watch Star Wars. But clearly, thousands of Amazon readers are getting something that I’m missing. What is it? Let me know.
There is a trend in business publishing of couching business lessons in parables and stories, and while it may have started with the saga of Sniff and Scurry in Who Moved My Cheese?, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.
I understand why authors use fables featuring mice, horses and even Santa Claus. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.
Call me a grump, but I’ll take my business books straight up, without the cutesy literary devices. If the book has real-life drama that imparts a business message, I’ll gladly read that. You may disagree with some of its conclusions, but Moneyball was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from Conspiracy of Fools.
Occasionally, novels have something to say to readers about business culture, and workforce issues specifically. Two recent examples are Company by Max Barry, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.
The company in Company seems to sell training packages. But like the main character in the book, a newly minted MBA who is about to take a trip down the corporate rabbit hole, you’d never know that from its mission statement:
“Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”
What is really going on at Zephyr is something much more comically diabolical than that corporate doublespeak would let on. If you ever thought your employer was messing with your head as some kind of experiment, you’ll appreciate what’s afoot at Zephyr. The company’s human resources operation occupies the third floor, and since Zephyr has some odd notions about corporate culture, this means HR’s floor is actually third from the top of the building. The first floor belongs to the CEO, who seems to exist only in voice mail. Likewise, HR seems inhuman. There’s just a desk, and a calm, terrifying, disembodied voice that, when it speaks, seems to know every employee’s secrets.
Things are funny in a more realistic way at the failing Chicago advertising agency that is the setting for Then We Came to the End. Everyone is about a day away from being laid off—or, as the office lingo goes, “walking Spanish,” after a Tom Waits song and a pirate term. The anxiety levels are high. The book is told in first person plural, which seems like a gimmick at first, but you’ll find it grows on you—it’s easier than getting used to talking mice or Santa as CEO.
Few books capture a workplace’s intense, hilarious, pathetic and occasionally terrifying atmosphere as well as this one. There’s an honesty to it that cuts through all the malarkey you tend to find in the business books that offer easy answers about complex workplace issues. Take this section, on the complicated nature of a diverse workforce and the bad feelings roiling around a senior art director, Karen Woo:
“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys, especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean, but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her, and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean, but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”
You won’t learn everything you need to know about managing a workforce from either book, but you’ll get some insights that you won’t find among the monkeys and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.
Any time of the year, HR is among the toughest jobs out there—psychically, anyway. But the holidays, as they are collectively called in PC land, might be the worst time of year for the profession: It’s raise time, bonus time, spend-your-vacation-days-or-else time and, perhaps worst of all, office party time. I can’t begin to count how many press releases we get at Workforce Management about how HR should prevent and police bad party behavior. Lucky you.
Don’t you want to gouge your eyes out just reading that? Then imagine the reaction among HR people at the American Red Cross, or Boeing, or any of the other companies that have seen their morale, fundraising and maybe even stock price brought low by such romances. (It’s interesting to me that this book is very much geared to women. Maybe the men don’t need the tutorial. Or maybe they’re just looking for playmates, not office mates.)
To their credit, authors Stephanie Losee and Helaine Olen have a chapter called “Don’t Go There,” explaining why sleeping with a married colleague is a bad idea. Chapter 2 is all about HR and is subtitled “Why you should love and adore human resources even though they’re always sending you all those annoying memos.” I’ll let you be the judge of the authors’ “takeaways” from the chapter:
Human Resources, in Office Mate-ese, translates to “matchmaker.”
Human Resources professionals are rarely opposed to interoffice dating, contrary to popular opinion.
As invisible as they seem in the process, your friendly neighborhood Human Resources person is the first person you should thank when you find love at the office.
Anyway, in the spirit of the season, the authors are offering employees tips on how to pursue romance at your holiday party. They give 10 pointers—I’ll edit it to five:
Don’t indicate your interest in a colleague at the office holiday party. An average happy hour on an average Friday night when the work gang heads to a bar together is a much better time. The entire firm isn’t present. And if you’re rejected, you can leave.
That goes double for your boss. No, triple. Your boss is there to relax with colleagues, not fend off requests for raises or juicy assignments or—heaven forbid—advances from a subordinate who has decided the time is right to reveal a long-simmering crush.
Don’t dress sexy. There’s no conceivable benefit to showing more flesh than you would on any other day. Dress up; don’t wear a neckline that’s, well, down.
Don’t go home with a co-worker. Your career is at stake here. The office is a great place to meet your partner in life. Not a sex partner of the one-night variety.
Don’t be the last one to leave. Be an adult. Dress beautifully but demurely, stop drinking after you’ve downed half of whatever someone hands you when you walk in the door. Don’t close down the place.
Not bad advice, really. If your employees listen up, the tips might save you from having to clean up after a failed-romance debacle—either literally or legally. But I can’t vouch for what might happen at your organization in 2008 if your employees all read Office Mate between now and the end of the year.
Dozens of books are written every year about workplace culture. Some are formulas that promise readers the secret for creating a great place to work, abetted by goofy props like stuffed fish or plastic carrots. Others are object lessons on how easily a workplace culture can be destroyed by mistrust, fear or the truly awesome power of the jerky boss.
A new book by Alex Frankel does a fine job describing what workplace cultures really feel like, not to the gurus and the managers and the HR consultants, but to the people on the front lines of retail and service jobs.
Frankel describes what it takes to really bond employees with employer. It’s having a sense of mission and teamwork and that “shared vision” that so many gurus talk about. But the tough part is that he is describing organic company culture, which no guru can ever inject into a workplace and call the job done.
He gives a shout-out to Workforce Management for introducing him to the Container Store, a company he was eager to experience from the inside. But that store, along with Whole Foods and Home Depot, wouldn’t hire him. Frankel thinks he flunked the culture pre-screenings, and talks about the profiles created by Unicru to help companies achieve the right personality match for retail.
Frankel’s chapter on the boot camp that is Enterprise Rent-A-Car is great. Enterprise says its mission is customer service and tells employees not to use the word “insurance,” but it really pushes them to sell “trips,” the internal term for triple insurance coverage. They’re praised and rewarded for it.
Some who leave Enterprise before making the leap to management, where the money is good, talk about having escaped a cult, and the intense training and teamwork has some of those overtones for Frankel. Of one trainer at Enterprise, Frankel writes, “On paper, her job was to train us, but she was also a cheerleader for Enterprise, the brand, and her strongest value to the company was no doubt her ability to proselytize, to bring us into the huddle. Despite my better judgment, I was starting to believe in Enterprise myself.”
At the Gap, Frankel spots, and is afraid he’s been spotted by, now-departed CEO Paul Pressler, who is quietly shopping, sans entourage. Frankel has heart-pounding rush hours behind the counter at Starbucks, but the green apron doesn’t bind him. Turnover is brutal in the stores, and he finds something hollow at the heart of the vaunted barista culture.
As he prepares for his next undercover op, he writes, “After the stint at Starbucks, I’d hoped to land at a workplace that has a strong culture but did not expend so much effort in building what amounted to a fake sense of belonging.” He finds it at two companies that, on the surface, don’t seem to have much in common: UPS and the Apple Store.
“At UPS,” Frankel writes, “I gained a strong sense that I was a part of a ticking clock, that I was a part of the thumping, beating heart of capitalism. UPS was the only workplace where I felt as if I was actually learning a craft and helping shape the final product, instead of acting the part of a craftsman. UPS was the company that had best married back-end technology with what I came to think of as the company’s human front end.” As an employer, you couldn’t hope for more of a workforce endorsement than that.
What’s so engaging about the book—and, in a way, so tough for an HR reader—is the realization that there is no instant formula for creating an inspired and inspiring workforce. It’s as hard as being a UPS delivery person on December 23, and as Frankel tells it, it is just as rewarding when it happens.
In the foreword to a new collection of essays, Silence Kills: Speaking Out and Saving Lives, Karen Feinstein of the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, which funded the project, offers one of those smoking-gun statistics. Half of doctors, nurses and administrators surveyed by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses say they have witnessed serious medical mistakes, broken rules and incompetence. What is more troubling is that only 10 percent ever speak up about it. Another 25 percent say they’d rather quit or leave their profession than confront these problems.
Each story rightly implies that silence in the face of a medical misdeed is as bad as bad medicine itself. Systemic failure is unavoidable when the system is built on the vagaries of human decision-making and the many frailties of human nature.
As Feinstein notes, it is in vogue to develop systemic approaches to reducing errors. This is known as “human-proofing” health care, a worthwhile conceit but, in most of these stories, a conceit nonetheless:
There’s the doctor whose intuition told him a patient was having a heart attack, though tests came back negative. His efforts to admit the patient are thwarted by another physician bent on keeping hospital admissions down that night. The patient dies at home a few hours later.
There are times when it’s clear that systemic change, like the curbing of influence peddling, could do some good. A lab technician knew a doctor’s prescription was based not on the interests of the patient but on the fondness for the pharmaceutical company that paid for his fishing trips. But the tech says nothing and when he eventually quits, the satisfaction is hollow.
There are the moments when it’s hard to see how anything but human fallibility is to blame. An ever-cautious ophthalmologist somehow fails to diagnose the cancer growing on his granddaughter’s retina. Was he blinded by fear? When the cancer is eventually diagnosed, it is too late to save the girl’s eye.
In most of the stories, there is a crossroads. Had the ethical or medically prudent course been taken, the patient, the doctor or the family member would have been spared suffering. But the essays make clear that while most errors are small, all are cumulative. Each decision entails a set of choices and each choice must be made successfully to get patient care right in the end. The complexity is astounding, almost scary, especially when so many decisions are left to the whims of circumstance.
Solutions are not the realm of this book, and they shouldn’t be. In the United States, one person’s problem is another’s business opportunity, as any employer trying to improve the health of its employees knows.
This is the third collection of essays devoted to health care edited by Lee Gutkind, founder of the journal Creative Nonfiction. To be effective, these collections must be focused, since health care is too broad to cover without some kind of theme. And each book has increasingly followed this course. Still, if there is a fourth book on health care, and I hope there is, I would suggest it capture some of the other perspectives in the field. Surely there is the pharmaceutical executive, the benefits administrator for a large employer, the health insurance salesman who has the literary chops to tell his or her own story of health care malfeasance, indifference or greed.
Honest health care stories may cause embarrassment or risk getting someone in trouble, but authenticity is what makes these stories compelling. What makes them necessary reading, however, is their ability to help doctors and hospital administrators better understand patients. The stories also can help employers appreciate just how complex a doctor’s task is—something they should keep in mind as they embark on efforts to rate physicians for the care they give.
= Member Only
, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.
and even 
. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.
was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from 
.
by Max Barry, and 
by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.
and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.
Any time of the year, HR is among the toughest jobs out there—psychically, anyway. But the holidays, as they are collectively called in PC land, might be the worst time of year for the profession: It’s raise time, bonus time, spend-your-vacation-days-or-else time and, perhaps worst of all, office party time. I can’t begin to count how many press releases we get at Workforce Management about how HR should prevent and police bad party behavior. Lucky you.
Dozens of books are written every year about workplace culture. Some are formulas that promise readers the secret for creating a great place to work, abetted by goofy props like stuffed fish or plastic carrots. Others are object lessons on how easily a workplace culture can be destroyed by mistrust, fear or the truly awesome power of the 
In the foreword to a new collection of essays, 