Some months ago I got a nice surprise from blogging about books. A few weeks earlier I’d blogged about Lucy Kellaway’s “Who moved my blackberry?”. A representative of Blood & Treasure publishers had found my review, and sent me an e-mail asking if I’d read one of their books, and maybe write a review about it. Being slightly paranoid I did actually google for both “Blood and Treasure” and the title of the book. As I did find some plausible info about both book and company on the Internet, I said OK. I received the book in the mail a few days later. (Well, if it had been a Nigerian book scam, the scammers had done a pretty good job at making it plausible, anyway.)
So, the book in question is called “Institutionalized”, and written by Fred Smith and Joe Schmoe. At least that’s what it says on the front. Other bloggers share my suspicion of it being pseudonyms. 
The blurb at the back describes it as “From a renegade team of international corporate surveillance experts comes a behind-the-scenes, riveting tale of one of America’s biggest corporations struggling to bring best practice to life in a cruelly competitive business world.” In short, it’s a satirical story about 10 weeks of activity in the company Institutionalized Industries. It starts with Bill Ogé being appointed as CEO, sees the (only) good guy Lance Kirevam getting hired, documents the office politics and ends…. Well, in a fairly surprising way.
Did I say satirical? It’s more a rather blunt spoof than subtle satire. Most of the characters are really two dimensional, drawn with broad strokes. You will know all you need (and want) to know about most characters after having just read the first descriptive sentence. Ok, that means the descriptions are on the spot, but there’s not any more to the characters than that. The only exceptions are Lance and to some extent Ogé the CEO. Lance is a sensible young man. Ogé is just hilarious, in an over-the-top kind of way.
The main focus of fun is the corporate lingo and office politics. Phrases like “Positive and proactive”, “Problem ownership”, “Visiontalk”, “The Vision Matrix” abound. At first I was thinking the authors just made lots of these words and phrases up, but after having listened to the CEO and other top leaders where I work, I got the feeling that the real world is just as bad. Also, I was reminded more and more about the Live Action Role Playing game “PanoptiCorp” that I organized with a group of other LARPers a few years ago. (Evaluation at LARP forum (mostly in English) here.) The point of our LARP was seeing what people would do in the world of PR, if they just left their morals at home. They were pretty inventive. But at Institutionalized, some of the more proactive employees are happily suggesting things that even our Corpers didn’t come up with! HappyZaks, anyone? Also, having the Vice President of HR give a detailed list of who to hire to gain the most PC cred is funny in a slightly disturbing way. “African-American females as a subcategory still hold some appeal, but we really want to start empowering other socially disadvantaged groups.”
The corporate side of the book might be spot on, but I did have some issues about the techie side of things. Off course, they make fun of Microsoft, using names like MicroSloth Windless RIP, MicroSloth Exploiter and PompousPoint. The DULL pcs running Windless RIP hang at the most inappropriate times. But to be fair, they do also make a bit of fun about iPear, the database Prophet and Blueberry devices. But the techie in me reacts to the fact that the IT manager uses an iPear MuscleBook as a backup (as in more dependable) device to manage their IT section. Come on. iPear? To control a Windless environment? They should have used Lunix.
Some of the characters have a lot of fun with the blogsphere, with more or less success. The authors of Institutionalized have had a lot of fun revamping names of Corporate Amercia, with Steve Balmy, Will Grate, McKlooney Consulting, Delight and Douche and Urban Moxley. And I guess Microsoft’s Channel 9 guy Robert Scoble and Media Man Jeff Jarvis has been immortalized by “Institutionalized”.
As for reading and liking the book, I must say that it looked interesting when I got it, and I love free books. I liked the Blackberry book, because of all the stupid and weird things Martin Lukes did. I hoped “Institutionalized” would be something like it, as that was why the guys at Blood and Treasure sent it to me in the first place. I was disappointed. The style was so incredibly blunt. It was like watching Steven Segal being funny after having watched “About a boy”. Cardboard characters and general silliness. If I haven’t fallen for a book after having read the first 50 pages, I usually put it away. I did it with this book, but picked it up out of duty to the publishers. After the first 300 pages I did start to get interested in at least Lance, and finished it. The last page suggests there will be a sequel. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.