Cubicles versus corporate America
BACK when thumbscrews and the rack were accepted motivational tools, nobody worried about job satisfaction. You worked until you dropped. Simple enough.
These days, managers usually write a compassionate memo before they reorganize you out of your job. They might even learn your name before sacking you.
It’s a serf-eat-serf world in cubicle-land these days, as Stephen Jones, whose nametag says only “Jones,” quickly learns at Seattle-based Zephyr Holdings. Jones, the protagonist of Max Barry’s “Company,” is a recent college grad. His first assignment is to investigate a purloined doughnut, while more seasoned sales assistants tackle such heady tasks as fudging expense accounts or overusing the company gym.
Jones learns to navigate the rat race that winds among the maze of cubicles as it does in any office where the bosses randomly downsize the cheese. That is, until Jones makes the mistake of asking what Zephyr Holdings actually does.
Nobody knows. What’s more, they don’t care. They’re miserable and underpaid and that’s good enough for them. When Jones tries to rouse enthusiasm for an employee coup, his co-workers would rather play strip poker.
But Jones is so fresh his shoes squeak, and his fellow employees’ cynicism hasn’t rubbed off on him yet. So he sets off to discover how the company makes money.
While the management line to the workers is simply that they are “creating shareholder value,” in reality they publish draconian management handbooks and his co-workers are the lab rats. Uncovering the secret gets him ushered into the company’s inner sanctum, where he’s torn between the slathering greed of the boardroom and loyalty to co-workers he barely knows.
It’s a stretch, considering that Barry keeps personal glimpses of Jones to short, hit-and-run encounters, which means the character’s something of a cipher. Sure, Jones is brash, smart and has good hair, but what makes him tick?
Never mind. Barry’s sarcasm is so tart and his aim so deadly, a few rough patches can be forgiven, especially when he zings corporate neuroses. In the impenetrable recesses of IT, for example, a jury-rigged, oft-hacked computer system is “a deep, dark ravine where things wait with glittering eyes and sharp teeth.”
A co-worker perennially overlooked for promotion is “quick-witted, inventive, and full of ideas, so long as that’s okay with everyone else.”
Barry writes in the present tense, which in less adept hands would come across as affectation. Instead it’s like reading one of those management texts that allegedly reveals how the business world really works, but with the gloves off.
In “Company,” the receptionist drives an Audi, the floors are numbered backward, rumors persist of a mysterious 13th floor, and no one’s ever met the CEO. When a massive computer problem hits one day, “[t]he departments don’t report the problem because a good manager knows the only reason to call Senior Management, ever, is to deliver good news. People who ring Senior Management with problems do not have much of a future at Zephyr Holdings. Senior Management is not there to hold departmental hands. It is there to dispense stock options.”
As with a Dilbert comic, we’re more likely to sneer than cheer for the underdogs when they’re such, well, underachievers. But don’t expect anybody to root for senior management, who get what they deserve, plus stock options, of course.
Anne Boles Levy’s first job out of college was at a publisher of management texts. She writes a children’s book blog at www.bookbuds.net.
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Company
A Novel
Max Barry
Doubleday: 338 pp., $22.95
