Customer Reviews

Who Moved My Blackberry?

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have long been addicted to the Financial Times and Lucy Kellaway's weekly column (Martin.Lukes@a-bglobal.com) on the doings and misdoings of Martin Lukes is one of the many high points of this excellent newspaper.

We have all - well most of us - known a Martin Lukes in our own offices as well. Obsessed with himself to the exclusion of all others, he blunders ahead with the finesse of a bull, frequently stumbling into a mess, yet somehow managing to extricate himself unbowed, if a little bloodied. Lucy Kellaway also has Lukes fall for every new corporate fad or trend, be it serious or merely the flavor of the month. Thus Lukes acquires a life coach (complete with the latest jargon), is caught up in corporate re-branding, dabbles with his version of corporate social responsibility and even dips a toe into outsourcing business processes to India. In the process Kellaway has great fun in parodying some of the wilder excesses of these corporate herd movements.

This book is no searching examination of business or corporate life so do not look for any major insights. It is a light-hearted dig, best enjoyed over a weekend or while waiting for a connecting flight. For regular readers of Kellaway's column, there will obviously be some déjà vu - still it is good to have several columns put together in this book. I have reduced a star more out of a personal preference - I found the humor in the weekly columns like a dash of sauce; however reading the book in a few sittings seems to dampen the flavor with some amount of overkill. All in all, a nice read for yourself or a good casual gift to a friend or business colleague.

Incidentally, the US edition cover in garish orange is a disaster and will turn away many readers. I much prefer the understated British cover with the Post-it Notes and comments.

I once read a book (Beyond Beef by Jeremy Rifkin) that claimed the level of bovine excreta was becoming a danger to the planet's environment. Lucy Kellaway is a journalist who has long been concerned about this problem in the corporate environment.

Her creation, Martin Lukes, is well known to readers of the Financial Times. He's an arrogant, selfish, self-obsessed, insecure and ambitious marketing director in the London office of a fictitious Fortune 500 company. By publishing a collection of his emails each week, she allows us to follow his rollercoaster career and personal life, and his adoption of every corporate and marketing fad that comes along.

Martin Lukes compensates for his limited intelligence and talent with unbounded ambition. His relentless clawing up the corporate pole and poor judgement often lead to disaster, but somehow he survives and moves forward.

We all know at least one Martin Lukes. That is why the column has proved to be both compelling and amusing. Lucy Kellaway, through Martin, also introduces us to a collection of recognisable corporate and domestic characters, and fires round after round into the mumbo-jumbo that passes for strategy and public relations in some companies. I mainly cringed, often smiled and sometimes laughed out loud while reading her book.

"Who Moved My Blackberry" is a reworking of Martin Luke's weekly emails into a 13 month December to December book which, like a diary, tells the story of his life over a year. For those who read the weekly column in the FT, it could be a little too much. Whereas one column is an amusing weekly read in an otherwise dry newspaper, nearly 400 pages in book form is probably a bit much. The story has changed enough to make it slightly annoying to those familiar with the column, but not enough to warrant re-reading.

For those who have not read the weekly column, this will be an amusing adventure. The emails are short and are written in conversational English, so the book is easy to read in small or large doses. The characters are come across clearly and are uncomfortably familiar.

The reader must bear in mind that "Who Moved My Blackberry" is written from a British perspective. There are a number of amusing and very unattractive US managerial stereotypes - and none that are worthy of admiration. Having said that, the author is just as harsh on the British side and I can't recall one character who leaves a favourable impression. Thanks to the Lord that Lucy (apparently) hasn't come across many Australians.

The cover to the UK edition is an inspired work of art that sums up perfectly Martin Lukes' work environment. If there is an award for Dust Jacket of the Year, this should be a nominee. For some reason, known only to the publishers, the US edition appears to have a different cover.

There is a bit of Martin Lukes in all of us. Sometimes I'm writing something that has a familiar feel to it but I can't quite place it. The it comes to me: I'm writing like Martin Lukes! So I check myself and start again. And say thank you to Lucy Kellaway for doing her bit to reduce the level of BS in the world.

I got this book for my birthday from my boss, since he knows I'll be graduating from college in less than a year and will enter the real world, finally! I had read Lucy Kellaway's stories in the Financial Times before and knew this would be a very smart, quick-witted, corporate comedy book. I read the prologue and it was all in e-mail format. I thought that was pretty cool. But as I flipped over the pages I noticed the WHOLE book is in email format, and most of the time it's the main character the only one who sends the emails. Some might be put off by this, but as I read on I became hooked on it. To sum it up (and not destroy the ending), the book takes the reader in a modern day office drama. There are several themes in the book that we see spring up so often nowadays, such as the rebranding of the company and the endless motivational programs set by upper management to keep every employee motivated and in line. It also portrays the mid-management employee very well, with his tireless efforts at lobbying upper management to get a better job, while during his journey he gets the help from a professional and personal life coach.

A great page turner. I read the book on a DUB-JFK flight, in less than 6 hours. I would give this book 6 starts, if it were available.

Lucy Kellaway's fictional 'Martin Lukes' character is the delightfully vapid, narcissistic director of marketing at a-b global who appears in Thursday editions of London's Financial Times newspaper. This book compiles a year's worth of Martin's columns in a series of e-mails and text messages. Instead of doing actual work, Martin flatters superiors, flirts with personal assistants and offers unsolicited self-promotion to everyone. He hires CoachworX! for an Executive Bronze Life Coaching Program to 'achieve performance levels that are 22.5 percent better than the very best I can be.'
a-b global's CEO gives a speech to staff and investors from a golf course as the share price plummets and signs his e-mails 'I love you all'. The firm spends over $20 million on Project Rebrand and hires 12 rebranding consultants from Beyond the Box, but eventually obtains its new name from employee suggestions generated during a corporate 'on line jamming session'. Martin then spearheads the ill-fated Project Boxer Shorts to publicly donate obsolete corporate apparel featuring the old logo to homeless shelters.
I enjoyed this book so much that I finished reading it within a day. Hopefully another year's worth of material will be collected into a sequel.

If you've read this far in the reviews you already know this book is a satire on corporate work life. But as a connoisseur and practitioner of sarcasm and anything black that can possibly poke fun at Life's Absurdities I have to tell you this book is one of the funniest things I've seen or read since Seinfeld or the original Saturday Night Live series.

If you are frustrated and disgusted with lazy bosses, full-of-themselves co-workers and clueless subordinates this book, about Martin Lukes, the quintessential Bozo of All Workplaces, was written just for you.

Read it and weap...? Nah, read it and laugh. Out loud.

Thank you Lucy Kellaway. I think I can make it through another day at work now.

I know these people. Every one of them has a counterpart in my world. The management job titles, corporate initiatives, etc. are straight from the IBMs, Mercks, and marchFIRSTs of the country. I love how the funniest parts are what's NOT said . . . the inferred communications between the emails. The writing's top-notch.

Encore! Encore!

There were a few laughs early in Lucy Kellaway's lightweight corporate parody. The jargon wielding life-coach, the cringe of over-enthusiastic corporate re-branding, and anti-hero Martin Lukes' negotiation over how much he is prepared to commit to being "better than the best he can be," make for some grins in the first few chapters.

However the same basic device has been used before, and is better executed, in Matt Beaumont's "e," and as the book developed, it reminded me more of a grown-up Adrian Mole, though without the comparative subtlety of that series, and lacking the capacity to reflect naivety of the main character in the way that Sue Townsend (and more recently Mark Haddon in "The Curious Incident...", ironically fleetingly referred to in this book) achieved.

I was ultimately disappointed in this book because, although it does not position itself as anything more than light humour, it has to work hard to get to that, and it offers nothing more.

After working for a company whose favorite morale boosting word was "Improvation," and being surrounded by "Big Rocks" and the "<Company> Attitude" which was the basis of our performance reviews that rated you 1-5 based on how you lived the principals over the past year (you couldn't actually get a 5, according to management, because that would put you in the same realm as God, and no one is perfect!), I have to say that this novel is absolutely on target.

If you think that people like Martin Lukes don't exist, and that they don't get promoted for sucking up rather than results, you haven't lived in Corporate America. (I know the book is set in the UK, but I have no personal experience there.) I will recommend this book to all of my ex-coworkers (who, at this current date, are going through a "reduction in force" so several of them will have a bit of free time coming up.)

I find I can take Martin in only the tiny doses that appear in the Financial Times. It is sort of a Comics Page satire without pictures in the mode of Bloom County or Doonesbury. I picture Martin Lukes as an English Steve Dallas.

Martin is the self absorbed Corporate Elite that we see in our own office. No one knows what he does other than take up a space on the very steep managerial pyramid. He is a male chauvinist, homophobic, selfish, witless, boor. He is so wrapped up in himself he has no real relationships with anyone including wife, children, mum, sis, and mistress. I found myself cheering when it seemed as if he was about to get the boot, but as in the real world like the proverbial cat he landed on his feet(Mum or Dad must have had a portfolio at 10 Downing Street at one time.)

Most of the book is told via email. This can get very tiresome as we only get those from Martin's end except for the paid brown-nosing by his 'coach' Pandora. Once you get used to the flow of things (and the British slang if you're an American) you find there is a very funny story.

Anyone who works in the corporate world will find this book hilarious. The rebranding and repositioning sections really are spot-on.