Definitely a strange book. The prose is esoteric. The story, just plain weird, and frankly not much happens. I don’t think I’ll be continuing with the series.
Karen Phelan is sorry. She really is. She tried to do business by the numbers—the management consultant way—developing measures, optimizing processes, and quantifying performance. The only problem is that businesses are run by people. And people can’t be plugged into formulas or summed up in scorecards.
Phelan dissects a whole range of consulting treatments for unhealthy companies and shows why they’re essentially fad diets: superficial would-be fixes that don’t result in lasting improvements and can cause serious damage. With a mix of clear-eyed business analysis, heart-wrenching stories, and hard-won lessons for both consultants and the people who hire them, this book is impossible to put down and impossible to ignore. Karen Phelan and other consultants may have “broken” your company, but she’s eager to make amends.
Who Moved my Holy Hand Grenade? Everything I Needed to Know in Business, I Learned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (The Corporate Drone’s Handbook) is a humorous journey that covers everything you need to know about business from management fundamentals, like corporate culture and competitive strategy, to real-life skills, like how to suck up properly. Using Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail as an analogy for the pursuit of corporate success, readers will learn about such mythical creatures as the ideal leader, the break-through strategy, and the perfect plan. But this isn’t just any version of Arthurian legend, it’s the Monty Python retelling! So it’s chock full of phony models, mock quizzes, cartoons, and fake vocabulary because, to be honest, most business books are dreadfully dull, and this one isn’t! Beware, though, this handbook isn’t just a primer or a parody, it draws from the current thinking in science and economics to challenge some conventional management practices. Funny and sarcastic, yet pragmatic and intelligent, this book is for people who want to succeed in business without losing their sanity or their sense of humor.
