"There is more truth in [The Virtual Boss] than in all the consultants' babble
for the next 12 months. Oh, how I wish they would put him on the cover of Business Week!"
--David Warsh, columnist, Sunday Boston Globe
"There are shades of Orwell, Kafka, and Woody Allen's Sleeper in The Virtual Boss.
... Its scathing assessment of the corporate mentality is dead-on."
--Wired
Everyone wishes for the perfect manager, but few have their wishes fulfilled. What would happen if a software system were developed to act as everyone's perfect manager?
In the second of his darkly humorous novels about corporate life, Floyd Kemske has invented a software system that learns each employee's needs and weaknesses, and then exploits them in order to make the employee as efficient and effective as possible. If all you need is a reminder now and then, that's all you get. However, if fear and abuse are what it takes to get you to work, the computer makes your life hell.
The Virtual Boss is the story of three people at Information Accuracy, Inc.: Linda, the software specialist who created the system, but is managed by it; Arthur, whose life is a nightmare of intermittent reinforcement, and punishment; and the company president, Donald F. Jones, whose experiences as a manager were so frustrating and ludicrous, he created a company without any human managers at all.
$19.95 cloth, 237 pages, ISBN 0-945774-22-2
Order from your local bookstore via Book Sense
To read the first chapter of The Virtual Boss, in PDF format, click here. There's also a very short excerpt below.
By the time he assumed the presidency of Information Accuracy, Inc., Jones had reflected a great deal on his development as a supervisor. Nobody had ever really taught him how to manage, except perhaps the people he had managed. It was that way for most managers, and Jones thought it was a terrible situation for the people who unwittingly (and mostly unwillingly) did the teaching. His wupervisory mistakes, he was convinced, had left a path strewn with the wreckage of broken dreams and misguided careers.
Nevertheless, he learned well the lessons all those poor wretches had taught him. The most important one was that it's impossible to get people to do what you want just by telling them to. The manager-subordinate relationship is essentially one of mutual manipulation. You might dress it up with "Theory Y" or employee participation, but it is basically a situation in which one person tries to control another person, and the other person reacts by resisting, usually under a pretense of cooperation.
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