Customer Reviews

Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay

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This is a great book and a "going-to-the-shrink" experience for those of us who are surrounded by incompetent and cowardly co-workers. Also inspiring - ever wondered when is the time to climb up the ladder - well, «since you spend all day doing the job of the person above you, the higher up you are, the less you have to do», says Corinne Maier - so hurry up!. However, she also notes that "it's better not to be too high up either, since you spend all your time performing...., in plain view".

I must also compliment the translator of this book from French - Sophie Hawkes did a great job!

This book is good if you hates enterprise environment. It describes some problems of this environment in a little bit amusing way.

The problem is, the book is not funny if you have never experienced the enterprise from inside. (It is not like Dilbert, which is funny almost for everyone.)

But if you work in the enterprise and has a feeling that something is not right, this book can help you find that you are not alone. It is also sarcastic and depressive. It doesn't try to find any solution, it just states, that enterprise is bad in general. But it is better than nothing.

This book isn't funny if you work in business. The author tries to ridicule business behavior, but she does it out of context. Early in the book she satirizes "business jargon". She says its "all nonsense". But it's not nonsense, it's just technical language that takes training to understand. Example: she quotes a couple sentences from a corporate strategy guide for a computer conversion. But when i read it, it really did make sense, it did describe what the project plan's goal was. Now, she may not have understood it, because she's not trained in computers. But that doesn't mean it's nonsense.
She also makes fun of how companies aren't really democracies, that they exist solely to make a profit. Well, i thought, um, yeah, that's true. And the point of a farmer investing in fertilizer and water is to grow food. If the workers endlessly discuss "strategy" and "fairness", we'll starve. Does she have better plan? No. She just implies what is, stinks.
I'm not a corporate apologist, but her satire isn't effective. Go with Scott Adams or "The Office" or the movie "The Corporation".

I picked up this book, hoping it would be amusing. It wasn't. Perhaps it is funny if you're French and work in a large company, a description that doesn't fit me. But I doubt it's funny even then.

It has to be said that the author has a talent for witty headings (such as in the title "Bonjour Paresse", a drift with the classic "Bonjour Tristesse" by Francois Sagan). In the actual text, however, she tries to be clever and elegant but fails.

The bulk of the book is a lot of whining about everybody else being an idiot in different ways. She's upset about business people speaking nonsense using fashionable-but-meaningless buzzwords. Heard that one before, anyone?

I was also provoced by the hypocrisy of the author. I'm sure she doesn't want her "do nothing useful at work" philosophy to apply to her childrens' schoolteachers, her doctors or her taxi drivers, for example. In the same vein, she claims to have read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein, but has nothing to say about people in poor countries working in sweatshops while rich people in France bear the fruits of their labour while pretending to work.

OK, I realise the book is meant to be ironic. But the irony doesn't catch. For actually entertaining criticism of office life, I suggest reading some Gaston Lagaffe comics, or the book "Random Acts Of Management" by Scott Adams, which the author lifts a number of funny lines from. Another book she quotes, by Michel Houellebecq, seems promising, I hope I have better luck with that one...