Surviving the Daily Grind: Bartleby’s Guide to Work

In this chipper send-up, Coggan (More), who wrote the Economist’s Bartleby column on work and management until 2021, provides an irreverent accounting of how overlong meetings, noisy office plans, incompetent managers, and other exasperating eccentricities of the modern workplace burden employees. “Bartleby’s law states that 80% of the time of 80% of people in meetings is wasted,” Coggan writes, blaming “Buzzword Bills” and “Cliché Charlies” for making vacuous comments that prolong such gatherings, and recommending that managers hold fewer meetings and specify their purpose in advance to keep participants on task. Corporate jargon’s primary purpose is to create the impression of expertise, Coggan contends, devoting a full chapter to lambasting such buzzwords as “blitzscaling,” “disintermediating,” and “blue-sky thinking” (“This is the kind of phrase used by managers who have no idea what to do next but would like to demonstrate that they have intellectual flexibility”). Coggan sprinkles in some actionable guidance, advocating for the commonsensical positions that “treating... workers with fairness and empathy” is good for business and that “awayday” trainings should only be required if necessary. However, the focus is largely on ridiculing the inanities of contemporary work, and though the subject has been exhaustively covered by numerous other volumes, Coggan’s cheekiness buoys the familiar criticism. The result is a pleasantly peppy lampooning of the plight of the modern professional. (May)