Work Daze

You’re a member of management’s inner-circle. You’re pledge master of Chew & Jaw, the loading dock smoking, gossiping and pink slip marching society. You’re the president of your office’s chapter of the Mary Kate Olsen Fan Club. Yet, there is one organization to which you don’t belong – Bob’s Book Klub.

In Bob’s Book Klub we read the latest, hottest and most delightfully useless business books published by Berrett-Koehler, the big business book publisher out of San Francisco. According to their Fall 2007 catalog, BK business books “promote progressive leadership and management practices, socially responsible approaches to business, and human and effective organizations.”

More important, they regularly ship me a shiny, four-color catalog that fits perfectly under the wobbly, northeast leg of my Aeron chair, making it possible for me to lean back and nap through the afternoon without fear of falling over and banging my head on my feng shui fountain. If that isn’t promoting progressive leadership, I don’t know what is.

I’ve been receiving the Berrett-Koehler catalog for years now, and have never given the company its props. With the humiliating disclosure that the editorial staff at B-K has repeatedly rejected my own proposal for a business best seller, “The Coffee Room Cook Book, 316 Low Cost Meals You Can Make With Food Scrounged from Your Company’s Kelvinator,” here are some of the new business books that will be falling like crimson and gold leaves this fall.

“Know Can Do,” by Ken Blanchard, Paul J. Meyer and Dick Ruth is the leading entry in the Fall 2007 catalog and it’s easy to see why. Mr. Blanchard is the “best selling author whose books have sold more than 18 million copies worldwide.” And, let me proudly add, at least six of these 18 million books have actually been read!

“Written in the entertaining fable format Blanchard has made famous,” it’s clear that “Know Can Do” will sit proudly on your desk top, gathering dust for decades, as visitors to your office notice that you, too, are dumb enough to have shelled out $19.95 for a book as thin as Mary Kate’s thigh, and not half as entertaining.

“You’ll find out how to adjust your brain’s filtering system,” is just one of the promises of this exciting new volume, but who needs that? After years of fine-tuning your brain’s filtering system, it’s already impossible for you to be reached by any management communication, no matter how vaporous. Face it, Kenny-boy – we’ve worked hard to become non-thinking, non-feeling, non-productive robots at the office. Why change now?

“Getting There Early” by Bob Johansen is another exciting and important BK book I won’t be reading this year. Johansen is the “former CEO of The Institute of the Future.” I’m sure Mr. Johansen is a bright fellow, but you have to question why anyone would leave a job that would let you put “The Institute of the Future” on your business cards and baggage tags. The last person to have such a cool title was George Jetson at his firm, Spacely Space Sprockets.

According to the catalog, “‘Getting There Early” describes the Institute’s “three-step Foresight to Insight to Action Cycle that will allow readers to sense, make sense of, and win with dilemmas.” [To further thicken this stew, I should point out that, at the Institute, dilemmas are “recurring, complex, messy and puzzling situations.” Like every time your boss asks you to “step into her office.”]

Frankly, one has to wonder if you need a book to tell you how to “Get There Early.” As a master in the art of career fortune telling, do you really need someone to write “REDRUM” on your cubical wall to know that if you want to truly “Get There Early,” move right now to Bangalore, because, brother, that’s where your job is going to be.

“Gifts from the Mountain, Simple Truths for Life’s Complexities” by Eileen McDargh is the last of the new fall books to attract my attention. This collection of “pithy, profound and practical reflections” is heading straight to the top of my putrid, pathetic, and puerile reading list. Just don’t expect me to be reading Ms. McDargh’s “musings on wild onions or mosquitoes, river crossings or thunderbolts.” I’ll buy this BK business book, because at just 120 pages, it’s just the perfect size to throw at my boss’s head, the next time he cruises past my cube.

Now that’s a simple truth my mosquito-brain boss can really reflect on.