Dear Fellow Reader,

This week’s book is a bit different from my normal reading.  First of all, it is nonfiction, which while not completely out of my norm is still different.  It is also not biographical or history. The full title is Lab Rats – How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. 

And to prove that I can remember to tell you (sometimes) I received a copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review.

Ready for my unbiased review?  I found this book fascinating!  I really did.  It is written in a style that is easy to understand and it holds your attention. There are citations throughout the book so that, in this world of “fake news”, you can check sources if you wish.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section talks about what is wrong with today’s workplace and why things have gone wrong.  Then the book moves into what the author calls “the four factors of workplace despair”. These two sections paint a bleak picture of how companies are being run today and it provides examples and statistics.  There are descriptions of management theories and how they have destroyed companies and how they are still being used despite that fact.

Being honest here, I have not worked in corporate America for a long time.  I am an entrepreneur. I have worked for myself for about 30 years. I found the information in the first two sections of the book interesting and disheartening.  It did not affect me but would and could affect my children and grandchildren.  (It does make you want to contact Jeff Bezos and ask how much money he really needs…) There are many tales of greed and complete disregard for employees.  Some of these were not a surprise. There have been stories for years about the working conditions at Amazon, Facebook, and many other tech companies.

But then we get to section three of the book where companies that are doing well and are good to their employees are highlighted.  So, just as you were ready to throw in the towel, you learn that there is hope.  That there are good companies/people out there. In this section we find out that “social enterprise” classes are doing well in management schools. This gives rise to hope for the future.

I found the book very interesting. There was a lot of information that was new to me and the author sited sources throughout.  So, if you are looking to read about business, how companies are being run and the changes that can be made to run companies better, this is the book for you.

Thanks for reading!

What use is outrage?

Outrage is motivating. It can be unifying. It can even be inspiring. With a little discipline, it can power you enough to produce a first draft of a book. After the first draft, the outrage must be controlled, limited, and shaped if you wish to address anyone other than people you agree with already, or motivate people to participate in a constructive response.

This book has an outrage issues.

It disappointed me because the things that the author is outraged about are, well, outrageous. Some examples: Hard-won improvements to the quality of life of the average person (like health insurance, pensions, and weekends), wrestled from the clutches of the greedy rich a generation or two ago at the cost of life and freedom for many, are now being surrendered back to same with hardly a murmur. Old school corporations who tried (at least sometimes) to treat employees like family are being driven out of business by a culture that glorifies exploiting people (“we're a team, not a family”) before throwing them aside. Work-caused nervous breakdowns and suicides barely raise an eyebrow. Tech companies (using perfectly legal methods) avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes to the jurisdictions tending the infrastructure that helps them profit.

It is a (very small) consolation that many of the people who benefit most from this newly-enhanced war of all against all are themselves too insecure about their own futures to twirl the pointy ends of their villainous mustaches and cackle maniacally nearly as often as they might like. This fear – that you and your company will be soon under the wheel of the next juggernaut of “creative disruption” – drove (and continues to drive) the creation of a large assortment of lunatic management theories, each promising to put you in the best position to deal with the scary mysterious future. Like many forms of spectacular idiocy, many of these lunatic management theories started off in the distant past as a method that worked somewhere, under some particular set of circumstances. However, after the method is filtered through a score of mass-market paperbacks, management gurus, and desperately oleaginous management consultants, whatever resemblance the original idea had to sanity has been completely bleached out.

The author reserves an especially red-hot level of loathing for these vendors of snake-oil management theories, their Powerpoint presentations, and their particular ability to inspire anxiety in the mid- and low-level corporate employees whose ability to stay barely ahead of massive student loan and mortgage debt often hinges on their capacity for faking enthusiasm for absurd theory-generated tasks. The book begins with the author taking a red-hot poker (figuratively speaking) to some poor woman who agreed to meet him to demonstrate (apparently free of charge) how asking groups of educated grown-ups to make a duck out of Legos will somehow improve corporate culture. Further examples come at a furious pace throughout the book.

To repeat, all of the above is worthy of outrage. However, if your outrage causes you to write a book full of outrage (plus occasional sarcasm), then you have failed as a writer, because those whose minds you are attempting to change will use your emotional in-print outbursts as evidence of unreliability. You will seen to be yet another screamer in an age of screaming, and will be disregarded by many people who may otherwise be sympathetic to your argument. Have confidence in your readers: they can recognize idiocy and injustice when plainly presented.

As a result, although I knew the ideas in this book were worthy of attention, I frequently put it aside and it lingered a long time on my Goodreads “currently-reading” shelf as I enjoyed books, some on serious topics, written by authors who did not seem like they were shouting at me off the screen of my ebook reader.

Part III of this book starts off unpromisingly, with yet another appearance of a conference full of “tech bros”, who are the author's favorite punching bag throughout the book. However, it takes a turn for the better about the time (Kindle location 2363) the following quotation appears:

It turns out that a quiet movement has been taking shape, led by people who see how things have gone wrong and believe that business might be the solution.

From there, the book quiets down and talks sense (starting about location 2415) about what people need from work (“Trust, pride, and camaraderie”) and how to get it (“You get the best work out of people when you treat them with respect”). From there on, the book is easier reading, because the people and ideas that appear are not worthy of ridicule, so the author can settle down (with occasional backsliding) to actually telling you interesting things that you don't know, like how companies can be profitable without driving its employees to the verge of suicide (or beyond).

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and Hachette Books.

Lab Rats chronicles the startling decline in technology companys' respect for and treatment of employees and the investor dynamics behind it.

"Two opposing viewpoints are vying for the soul of the corporation. On one side are oligarchs like [Reid] Hoffman and HR mavens like [Netflix's Patty] McCord. On the other side are the companies I call the good guys."

I was always intrigued by 'Disrupted,' but never got around to reading it, so I snapped up the ARC of this new title. It's a critique of how the tech industry has contributed to negative trends in workplace conditions: income inequality, job insecurity, disingenuous proclamations about "culture," and so on.

I am a member of the choir and need very little preaching about problems like lack of diversity and obsession with productivity/profit in tech. However, I was so turned off by the author's black-and-white thinking on the topic (the above quote being just one of many examples) that I finished the book less convinced. And so much of his ire seems to stem from his personal experience at Hubspot that I lost any interest I'd had in his memoir.

Lyons's profiles of changemakers in the industry, such as Basecamp and "Zebras Unite," were the book's major redeeming feature, enabling him to conclude on a hopeful note.