Day Job: A workplace reader for a restless age

Jonathan Baird, with additional readings selected by Carol M. Allen

It is difficult to describe this book but it is certainly unlike any run-of-the-mill management text. It is a jumble of text and illustrations; a scrapbook full of pages from a typescript journal, hand-written margin notes, water colour sketches and doodles, press cuttings, quotations from all sorts of sources on index cards. It combines a novel with a critique of management thinking and an exploration of how you integrate working life with the broader expectations of your personal life.

What makes sense of this jumble is the story line. Mark Thornton, a disaffected generation X-er in his first permanent job in a design and repro business, has TQM thrust upon him as the latest senior management good wheeze. Almost as a retaliatory gesture, Mark puts up a proposal of his own - an Inner Destination Journal. Although this is very much tongue in cheek on his part, sold to management as a new idea which will deliver 'bottom-line results', the idea receives official blessing and Mark finds, to his chagrin, that 'a quality push (is) as infectious as apathy and idleness once were'. His career prospects flourish as a result. However, at every stage, the ideas and developments, from the concept of TQM to the prospect of career advancement, come in for some very trenchant and often very funny examination and criticism.

As the story unfolds, Mark explores how one adjusts to the prospect of having to earn a living for a very long time; feeling that you are making something of your life which is more than just collecting a salary or doing the company's bidding; analyses the nature of the abyss between what you are educated to expect and the reality of working life - all of them topics which do concern the young and the not so young but which rarely get a mention in standard works on motivation.

There are snatches of brilliant characterisation like this of Traci Vendler, 'HR Princess':

'Attended everywhere by the faintest smell of wet dog; those around her are aware of nothing immediate but can't escape the impression that somewhere, far off perhaps, there are wet dogs at play.'

Or take this pen portrait of Mark Thornton himself:

• Leading tricky double-life of day worker/bon vivant
• Post-college honeymoon irrecoverably past; now either traversing pre-career threshold or wandering trackless abyss
• Unable to completely embrace or reject the necessity of work
• Waiting here for something better.

It is readers at this stage of life who would probably enjoy and benefit most from this book - perhaps those doing a 'gap' year, those on management trainee schemes incorporating NEBS Management qualifications or the bright and somewhat disaffected candidates who look cynically back as the standard spiel on how organisations work or what motivates people is delivered.

This is an occasionally irritating but haunting book, beautifully and imaginatively produced. In an off-hand way it says some quite profound things about our relationship with work. It is an oddly civilising influence.

Published by and price: Capstone £18

Review from 'Progress' published by NEBS Management, June 1999