Lab Rats
Tech Gurus, Junk Science, and Management Fads—My Quest to Make Work Less Miserable
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4.3 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author Dan Lyons exposes how the "new oligarchs" of Silicon Valley have turned technology into a tool for oppressing workers in this "passionate" (Kirkus) and "darkly funny" (Publishers Weekly) examination of workplace culture.
At a time of soaring corporate profits and plenty of HR lip service about "wellness," millions of workers--in virtually every industry -- are deeply unhappy. Why did work become so miserable? Who is responsible? And does any company have a model for doing it right?
For two years, Lyons ventured in search of answers. From the innovation-crazed headquarters of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, to a cult-like "Holocracy" workshop in San Francisco, and to corporate trainers who specialize in . . . Legos, Lyons immersed himself in the often half-baked and frequently lucrative world of what passes for management science today. He shows how new tools, workplace practices, and business models championed by tech's empathy-impaired power brokers have shattered the social contract that once existed between companies and their employees. These dystopian beliefs--often masked by pithy slogans like "We're a Team, Not a Family" -- have dire consequences: millions of workers who are subject to constant change, dehumanizing technologies -- even health risks.
A few companies, however, get it right. With Lab Rats, Lyons makes a passionate plea for business leaders to understand this dangerous transformation, showing how profit and happy employees can indeed coexist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this darkly funny journalistic look at the contemporary workplace, Lyons (Disrupted), a former journalist at Newsweek and writer for HBO's Silicon Valley, reveals how the culture fostered by tech firms has created toxic environments in which workers are dehumanized, wages are low, stressors are constant, and job security is nonexistent. Behind the typical tech start-up trappings, such as ping-pong tables and free snacks, lies a drastically reengineered social contract between employers and employees, one in which notions of contributing to social good have been replaced with profiting at any cost. Lyons traces the emergence of this new corporate style to valley titans such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Netflix CEO and chairman Reed Hastings, whose companies reap billions while their workers get an ever-dwindling share of the pie, and further back, to the erosion of the social safety net in the 1980s. Writing scathingly about management fads such as Agile and Lego Serious Play, Lyons shows that much of the hype around the "lean" start-up model is an illusion, premised on inflated stock values and angel investors. He finds hope in companies such as Basecamp, Patagonia, and Kapor Capital, "zebras" that are playing by more human-friendly rules and still turning profits. By turns sardonic and impassioned, this is an insightful and frequently entertaining guide to the increasingly bizarre world of Silicon Valley and the trends it spawns.
