Who Moved My Soap‪?‬

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 26/05/2003

New Yorker and NPR humorist Borowitz, author of the stock-market populism spoof The Trillionaire Next Door, sends up both corporate criminals and business literature in this rather funny book. With tongue firmly in cheek, Borowitz distills platitudes from countless business and leadership manuals and applies them to the context of the maximum security penitentiary. All the cliches are there: the leadership slogans (incarcerated CEO's should"be proactive" by starting riots instead of waiting to be made the cellblock bitch); the relentless positive thinking ("you'll emerge from your time in the joint more productive, more innovative, and millions of dollars wealthier than you were on the day the prison guard first checked you for lice"); the self-improvement schemas ("the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Prisoners"); the spurious soulfulness ("if being in prison is no longer about having fun, then what's the point?"); and the game theory buzz-concepts ("Win/Win" strategies usually lose out in prison to"Win/Die" strategies). Borowitz gives a pitch-perfect rendition of the vacuities of some business books, but given a genre in which Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun was a bestseller, his smart little book hardly seems like a parody.