Going Corporate
Jared Shapiro, Brad Embree. St. Martin's Griffin, $12.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-312-33427-7
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.
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Reviewed on: 09/01/2004
Genre: Nonfiction