Little Book of Bad Business Advice

By Steve Altes

A guide to swift and certain career destruction offers such gems of business wisdom as Never let your career interfere with your hobbies and Put all your calls on speakerphone at full blast. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312962231
• ISBN13: 9780312962234
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Wow.

I laughed. I cried. I peed in my pants. And the earth moved. Okay, the earth didn't move any more than it's usual rotation around the sun, but the part about laughing so hard that I peed in my pants--it's true. All true.

Great little humor book. Makes perfect bathroom reading!

Made me laugh and I don't laugh easily.

Hilarious. Definitely recommend this one!

This yearlong not-to-do list is full of bladder-bursting laughs. Everyone in my office cracked up. Can't wait for the sequel.

A POINTED, PROFOUNDLY REVEALING WORK.

Bad Business Advice goes to the heart of rage and isolation in the American workplace. The hapless inanities of Dilbert make us feel safe in leaving democracy at the office doorstep, and ordinary in submitting to the numbing inevitabilities of corporate fascism. BBA is a more DANGEROUSLY HONEST BOOK. All potent punchlines, no sop to cartoon panel development, in Mr. Altes' litany of gleefully contemplated sabotage we are instead forced to imagine, recognize, and confront ourselves in our real workplace fantasies. We learn that the author is an actor, writer and sometime propulsion engineer - and thus implicitly a real enemy of the structured, undemocratic workplace. Is it not possible to imagine a more democratic society of the workplace, where companies are more fully owned and managed by their workers? Or perhaps envisage more work without a "place?" BBA is warning shot for cubicle lords and dwellers alike: the subjugation, alienation and anger of our workaday lives serves but to safely drain us of any challenging creativity, and to fill us instead with steadily building resentments. This book is NOT A DILBERT PILL to make you feel better about taking your monthly pay for good attendance. This is a WAKE UP CALL about restructuring your life around something that does not lead to the destructive fantasies so nicely articulated in Bad Business Advice. BBA does not belong alongside the all those glam displays for Dilbert Dupes (really now, is a Dilbert mug on your office desk the most you can do to challenge the controlling institution you've yielded your life to?). Put it next to THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN and THE OVERSPENT AMERICAN instead. Snap this gem up (it's a micro book at a micro price), give copies to your colleagues, post-it a "kind of makes you think" note on top and leave one for your boss too. You might want to give `em to the people who report to you and discuss it - better to tackle some of these latent frustrations head on. Better still, give them to! someone you know contemplating an office job or career. And please, take it to heart yourself - Mr. Altes' quips are BRIGHT, FUNNY, AND INSIGHTFUL BUT FRIGHTENING for what we can recognize in them. Thank you, Mr. Altes, for helping us laugh at ourselves and the freedom and self-realization we've so sadly given up for the company paycheck. With luck in a hundred years Dilbert will be but a quaint reminder of a deeply flawed society; appreciating books like BBA might help us get to a saner means of finding and expressing our self worth.

Funny, funny, funny

Cute little book. Made me laugh a lot. Bought one for myself and one for my boss. He liked it too.