Not So Hidden, Yet Authors Explain In Ways Perhaps Others Have Not Considered. This is one of those books that reads as though you've always known exactly what the authors are presenting... you just never considered actually breaking it out exactly like this. Part Corporate Leadership, part Corporate Ethics, and part Self Help, it is a guide to thinking ethically even in tough situations - lest you find yourself and your company embroiled in scandals as infamous as the ones detailed herein (and others far less famous, yet impactful).

Speaking as someone who *has* worked in one of the largest companies in the world (a global megacorporation generally in the lower half of the Fortune 50 the entire time I worked there), this is one that corporate leaders are going to *love* so that they can claim they are doing something about corporate ethics/ education... so we'll see how much those same companies really take to heart the actual message of this text and truly make changes across the board, rather than just dictating to crew dogs some (usually not completely thought out, at least at the lowest levels) written in stone and just as hard to adapt rules to follow that will change with the next corporate ethics book Leadership reads. Hell, maybe they can even save some money and just buy a lot of copies of this book rather than hiring expensive "consultants" to tell them the exact same thing... *because they read this book*.

But seriously, having been involved in the mentorship program at that employer as a mentor to more junior colleagues, this is absolutely a book I would have recommended they read, and indeed even in my current role where I also help mentor a junior colleague, I'm absolutely going to recommend this book to both my boss and my colleague. It really does lay things out quite clearly, at least so far as its framework goes.

The one criticism I have, though not rising quite to the level of a star deduction, is that its application of its framework can feel at times forced and at other times a touch too heavy handed or even myopic. Yes, it *technically* fits with both Enron and Theranos as described... but there were absolutely other factors in both of those situations that were just as critical to their scandals that *don't* fit the overall framework as neatly which were ignored or explained away with essentially a hand wave.

But read this book anyway. It really is quite solid, and it absolutely gives off the "I always knew this" impression... even when you clearly didn't think of it in these exact terms or framework, and these exact terms and framework may indeed help you to be a more ethical worker and leader.

Very much recommended.

“Context can be stronger than reason and stronger than values. It can distort people’s perception of reality to such an extent that they can no longer see the ethical or legal dimension of their decision.” (13)

Thank you to NetGalley and Hachette Book Group for an Advanced Reader Copy of The Dark Pattern. This book is incredibly timely and important and there are points where it reals simultaneously like a manual for corporate ethics and also a self-help book (which I mean as a compliment). I even started wondering if this should also be advertised as a self-help book if it's not already. The examples used were compelling for their argument and I found I learned a lot more than what I had known previously about the scandals presented - especially the Uber case.

My biggest issue with the book was the introduction, I'm not sure it had the style or intrigue present in the rest of the book. This was quickly remedied in the following chapters.

I really enjoyed the callout boxes presented throughout the book. The boxes were helpful in reminding me the overarching concepts that the authors were pushing and I think that this should be a feature in other books of this style. The callout boxes also made me think that this could be a really cool way to interact with the book in a website format, almost like a choose your own adventure of "how many of these things do you see in your own work place."

(3.5 ★) The Dark Pattern is a meta-analysis of corporate scandals and wrongdoing, focusing on why and how the ostensibly otherwise decent people involved could do the things they did. The book is a sandwich of case studies of different corporations, surrounded by the framework with which the authors analyze them. The case studies focus, for the most part, on some of the more notable corporate scandals — Enron, Theranos, Wells Fargo, Boeing, etc. I felt that especially for those that have full books already written about them, the case study analysis in this book felt a little flat. I think that the chapters about the framework of analysis were probably the strongest in the book. Digging into the actual framework, I think that while it is useful, the authors’ application of it goes a step too far at times. It is one thing to say that there were contributing and mitigating factors to the Theranos scandal, and another entirely to say that there were no bad apples present.