Going Corporate

Though they promise to provide advice on how to successfully enter the corporate life, Embree and Shapiro spend most of their book rehashing Dilbert and Drew Carey while dispensing a mish-mash of familiar tips and debatable advice. Trying to decide if a potential boss is winner or a loser? Check out the placement of his or her family photo, they say:""If it's there for the whole world to see, that's a good sign ... If it's only facing the boss--bad."" Such guidance makes the corporate world seem as confusing and trivial as""The Office,"" and it's often hard to tell if the book aims to be a useful guidebook, a corporate tell-all or a self-promoting standup routine. Among the guffaws, Embree, who works for a film production company, and Shapiro, a writer for Star magazine, do offer some useful ideas for raisings readers'""promotion potential"" by clueing them in to the imperceptible trip-wires underlying most offices. But mainly they dwell on strategies for avoiding doing much work at all. They boast of writing their book, creating a Web site and a film on company time, with company computers, in between bouts of instant-messaging their buddies and checking sports scores. They encourage lying on resumes, having friends crank-call bosses to get raises and admit to handing out jobs (internships) based on how frequently an applicant contacts them--saving them the un-hip effort of picking up the phone themselves. Culminating in a list of the""Top 10 Things You Will Hate About the Corporate World,"" this book is as bitter as the last dregs of free coffee in the company kitchen.