Howard Harrison (3)

Corporate Crap is a book you have to read just because of the title. Everyone has their own battle stories, and I imagine most people will be looking for recognition of their own situations throughout the book. They will be rewarded. Howard Harrison has covered pretty much everything that is bad, wrong, hypocritical and absurd in corporate life.

Harrison keeps it short and easy to digest. So it’s not investigative journalism so much as pointing at the naked emperor. The chapters are three or four pages. They cover hiring, interviewing, firing, bosses, cubicles, pay, reviews, parties, lunch, consultants, layoffs, meetings, brainstorming and many more.

There are memorable passages. The remorseful inventor of the office cubicle calls most installations of the office cubes as “monolithic insanity”. But they’re still a big step up from the open plan.

Meyers-Briggs questionnaires are a perversion of Carl Jung’s theories, and separating employees into extroverts and introverts achieves absolutely nothing. Unless the company is one of those that discriminates against introverts, of course.

People make decisions based on the quality of a handshake. Handshaking is corporate crap at its purest, Harrison says.

What Harrison doesn’t do is the why. Corporate life is basically crowd control. Two guys in a garage can figure out anything between them, but when a company has four levels of management, tens of thousands of employees around the country or the world, and regs to follow, all kinds of idiocy pops up.

Corporate Crap is the kind of book that needs to be preserved for discovery by some future anthropologist. It gives a concise and precise picture of working life in corporate America, evidence for why people were so unsatisfied with their working lives, and important clues to the decline and fall.

David Wineberg… (meer)