The following post is an independent review of my book done by Jon Rutter, staff writer for the Lancaster PA Sunday News Aug 04, 2012. To see the actual review link here.
There’s a reason the corporate world described in William Bouffard’s book is larded with sociopaths, sycophants, blabbermouths and the just plain idiotic.
Corporations mirror society.
“We are by nature evil beings” motivated mostly by ego, writes Bouffard in “Puttin’ Cologne on the Rickshaw: A Guide to Dysfunctional Management and the Evil Workplace Environments They Create.”
It’s a funny but savage indictment of humanity and its vaunted money-making organizations.
Funny because of Bouffard’s blunt, strip-the-clothes-off-the-king delivery.
Savage because the author has a relentlessly dark take after 40 years of toiling for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s.
As Bouffard related by phone from his home in San Diego, Calif., he began his career as a machinist and industrial engineer and gradually ascended to “dog-eat-dog” operations management in the defense industry.
“As I grew more cynical,” he says, he started sharing top-brass anecdotes with his employees. “I had a number of people say, ‘Jeez, Bill, you should write a book about this.’ ”
Now, as a 65-year-old retiree, he has. He’s also published it himself; the 394-page paperback is available for $29.95 at Amazon.com.
The evocative title is borrowed from a witticism from a colleague and refers to any insincere attempt to make grunt work sound sweet.
Bouffard proposes no panacea in these pages, though he does call for companies to forgive mistakes more readily and encourages employees to at least “pick up on these [corporate] behaviors and find humor in them and move on.”
Nor is the book a tell-all.
Bouffard, an independent consultant –– and self-confessed former “job hopper” with 23 companies in his rearview mirror –– doesn’t name names or describe specific real-world scenarios.
“I was trying not to crucify every company,” says Bouffard, who acknowledges that some enterprises are relatively free of dysfunction, especially ones that haven’t been around long enough to institutionalize and petrify.
He dives instead into corporate psychology, citing copious sources from Plato to cartoonist Scott Adams of “Dilbert” comic strip fame.
“I reflect back on what drove my behavior every day,” Bouffard says, namely not getting blamed for somebody else’s screw-ups.
Face saving and “constant fretting” about short-term profits to the detriment of long-term survival is in a nutshell the executive mindset, he contends. Bobbing to the top are the typically extroverted, risk-taking “pyros” and “sociopaths,” perceived to be uber-achievers often as not because of the noise they generate rather than any innate talent.
(Interestingly, Bouffard brands workaholics as sociopaths because they often bully more centered workers into matching their needlessly grueling work “ethic.”)
Much of the potential of average employees, meanwhile, gets trampled by rigid corporate hierarchy.
All eyes are diverted from the real prize, effectiveness, to a bogus one, efficiency, Bouffard says. That oft-praised ideal, “teamwork is doomed because bringing together intelligent people into a group takes real work to effect.”
Bloating the vacuum are pie charts and parsings of every sort, including the much-reviled performance review.
Bouffard positively loathes performance reviews, writing that their sole purpose is to build a case against workers a company might have to ax.
But he’s not excusing all underlings and shy guys. (He considers himself an introvert who tried to empower his team but nevertheless sometimes fell into the very behaviors he criticizes.)
The typical unsung worker can accomplish much with scant oversight, he says.
Others are indeed lazy and conniving and must be managed in “command and control” mode.
But that’s human nature.
“Do people and their lunatic behaviors forge the workplace environment,” Bouffard asks in his book, “or does organizational life beget the lunatics? … The answer, of course, is both.”
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