Sometimes I read books just so you won’t have to. This is one I didn’t enjoy, and didn’t want to finish, but I thought I would see it through. It’s a “business parable” which means it’s a fictitious story about “Brian” and his adventures managing teams, all told so that Brian can reveal his management theory. It’s not as bad as Who Moved My Cheese? but not as good as The Deadline — a book purportedly about managing software development projects, but that I’ve returned to a number of times for its insight on work and team dynamics.
Anyway, Brian’s managerial genius is that three things make people miserable at their jobs:
Lack of measurement, so they can’t see their growth or improvement over 
time.
Absence of any sense of how what they do makes things better for other people.
And anonymity, the feeling that people at work don’t know or care about them as people.
The book’s not wrong about these things. And the point of the book is that managers can and should focus on these three things, and if they do, everything will be better. Employees will work harder, stay longer, and appreciate one another and their bosses.
I don’t disagree. When I think about my clients who have become disillusioned, frustrated, and ready to leave, it is often because one or more of these factors is terrible. (And when they are deeply torn, it is often because one of the other three is terrific.)
Gallup measures and reports and consults on “employee engagement.” Their survey questions track these factors pretty nicely, although they’re using “growth” in a way that this author would likely argue should include “metrics”.
If you are managing others, this is decent advice. And if you’re considering a new job, or choosing between organizations, sniffing around for these three factors in the workplace you’re evaluating is probably a wise idea.
But you don’t need to read this book. I don’t begrudge the author his publishing contract or his path to “thought leadership” and the speaking and consulting gigs that are his income stream, but this could have been an article or a blog post, and there would be a little more shelf space in my local library for other writers and thinkers.
