The premise of the book is that it follows the life of a recently retired CEO as he develops a theory on what makes a job miserable. To him (and by extension, to the author), this doesn’t mean low pay, but instead means a job that is extremely unsatisfying. According to both, the three main signs of a miserable job are:
Anonymity:
- This is when those around you, and especially your manager, do not know you as a person.
Irrelevance:
- This is when it is unclear who your job affects, be it a customer, another employee, or your manager.
Immeasurability:
- This is when it is not possible to rate your own performance, good, bad, or otherwise.
With that said, what are the pros and cons of this work? Moreover, is it worth you time, money, and attention? Read on to find out.
Pros:
- The work makes reasonable points about how to be a better manager, and how to seek out meaningful work (or, failing that, how to create it for yourself)
- The work presents said points in a digestible way (especially in the last quarter of the book)
- The work is short, clocking in at about 4.5 hours
Cons:
- Despite the short run time, the same points could be made even more succinctly. I still hold that you could listen to the last 45 minutes of the book and still get virtually the same experience
- The dialogue feels wooden and unrealistic
- The chapters on the audiobook make no sense, and are few and far between
- The author shoehorns in god at the 90% mark, and mentions how “god made humans this way.” This felt really out of place, and is really only mentioned two or three times in the last 10% of the book.
- There are one ore two especially cringe-worthy bits of writing in the book, like when the MC jokes about being diagnosed with schizophrenia as an explanation for his actions. Yikes.
- This work was written from the manager’s perspective, and clearly does not consider the myriad of things that might make a job valuable or fulfilling to an employee.
- What about serving their community? What about supporting their family? Or, what if they simply see a job as a means to an end, a transaction that provides a paycheck and nothing more?
- If I wanted to be really cynical, I could point out that all of these points could be manipulated in management’s favor.
- Anonymity: The better a manager “knows,” you, the more they can blur the lines between work and personal life. I’ve worked at far too many companies who call employees “family.”
- Irrelevance: Who gets to decide what is and is not relevant work? For most people, this is determined by the company / the job, so how can it be held over a worker’s head?
- Immeasurability: While I absolutely see the value in measuring one’s performance, who determines the metrics? It’s one thing for it to be determined by the employee; it’s another thing entirely when these things are used by management to squeeze as much productivity out of people as they can
Conclusion:
The excessive run time for the content presented and the clunky writing kept this work from wowing me. There is still some value in the message, though, insofar as it provides one possible framework for pursuing higher levels of job satisfaction.
Ultimately, I think you are better off reading some of the summaries / reviews on Goodreads. You’ll get almost all the content without the clunky dialogue or the need to spend hours listening.
Check it out here.
You may also enjoy…
- “The Dip,” by Seth Godin
- “Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich
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