How To Work For An Idiot [Paperback]

Much as I would like to have enjoyed Dr. Hoover's book, I haven't found much in it that is worth the cover price - or the time spent in reading it. I marked at the beginning a Major Bad Sign when I saw that Dr. Hoover introduced himself with direct and explicit promises of humor and insight. As a rule, anyone who thinks that he's so doggone funny that he can boast about the jollity his writing will impart is someone who can be reliably expected to provide less chuckles than the Book of Job. Better if he had approached the subject with an air of deadly seriousness, and let the idiocies of American management do the job for him, simply and straightforwardly.

In fields of endeavor where results are measured less by bloviation, misdirection, and "creative accounting practices" - as American business managers have been tracking each other for the past half-century - there are the inescapable marks of objective reality. In medicine, there are the meetings of the Morbidity & Mortality Committee. There are tumor board sessions, QA audits, nervous phone calls from your liability insurance carrier. In engineering, we have Kipling's "The Hymn of Breaking Strain" to keep us mindful of <i>The Strength of Materials</i> and the consequences of irresponsibility. In the education and careers of business managers, however, we have deceit piled upon deception stacked atop fraudulence teetering on delusion that Tower-of-Babels into an ionosphere of grandiose dementia.

With business management - particularly in the big corporations - consisting entirely of megalomaniacs, psychotics, sociopaths, compulsive liars, and dimwits, it's no wonder that in spite of myriad technological advances and skyrocketing productivity among the people who actually <u>do</u> things (ever and always impaired by the suppressive stumblebums who "manage" them), we live in chronic dread of disaster, with no confidence in prosperity or the prospect of getting and keeping a decent standard of living. Saying that "It's the Economy, Stupid" is rather like saying "It's the Beer, Lite." The impact of idiot management is pervasive, pernicious, wide-reaching and earthquake-deep. Along with their counterparts in the political sector of society - yet another bunch of prehensile, psychopathic, and prevaricative parasites - the ex-Business Management majors whose sprawling drunken bodies we used to step over in the college dormitories every Sunday morning are doing damage to the nation on a scale so vast that it conjures comparison with the Black Death.

I had looked to Dr. Hoover's book for some insight on this subject, seasoned with a little of the gallows humor such an issue must necessarily evoke. Regrettably, I got neither. Worse yet, for an author with a bunch of other publications in his curriculum vitae, I found grammatical and orthographical thud and blunder every time I turned a page, with the writer of this book on Idiot Bosses - who claims that he's a <i>recovering</i> Idiot Boss himself - demonstrating all the ghodawful prose style so common among the functionally illiterate management clowns who occupy expensive suits with no more content than costly hot air. Not only was this book written by an idiot, but it was edited by one as well.

There is nevertheless a good and proper reason to add <i>How to Work for an Idiot</i> to your bookshelf, and I would encourage its purchase and reading to anyone studying the pathology of managerial idiocy. If you think of it less as a guide to the subject and more as a <b><i>specimen</i></b> thereof, it's a proper entry into your own personal Mutter Museum of the horribly deformed.
...

Wall Street Journal/March 2004
"Dr. Hoover recommends admitting that you are 'powerless' over the jerks in your life. Otherwise, 'harboring all that resentment is like drinking a cup of poison and waiting for the jerk to die'."

New York Times/January 2004:
"There is no question that 'How to Work for an Idiot: How to Survive and Thrive Without Killing Your Boss' is a subversive book. People will pick it up expecting a tasty blend of commiseration and advice. They will put it down thinking, to paraphrase the famous line from the cartoon character Pogo, "We have met the idiot, and he is us."

Weekend TODAY SHOW/Campbell Brown/January 2004
"'How to Work for an Idiot' contains a lot of humor, with plenty of good information as well."

FOX NEWS/Neil Cavuto/January 2004:
"Dr. John's 'How to Work for an Idiot' is very funny stuff, with some stinging jabs in there."

The Miami Herald/January 2004:
"As amusing as his vignettes may be, the proffered advice is pretty sound and includes solid steps for coping and surviving a daily dose of determined and authoritative stupidity without committing any capital crimes. Hoover closes with a bibliography that includes three of the author's own books, so maybe he's not as much of an idiot as he claims to be."

Dallas Morning News January/2004:
"[Dr. John Hoover] is creating a New Year's buzz with his just published 'How to Work for an Idiot'."

Bloomberg Television/December 2003:
"If you have the unhappy experience of working for someone you think is a real jerk, Dr. John Hoover says there is hope."

Bloomberg Radio Network/December 2003:
"Dr. John's book about working for idiots is so cleverly disguised; you might think you're reading Norman Vincent Peale."

CNNfn/December 2003:
"...an irreverent and realistic look at what people must deal with every day at work."

Philadelphia Daily Local/December 2003:
"Hoover, a self-acknowledged idiot boss himself in recovery, says American workers should stop whining about their clueless bosses and learn to make the most of it."

Minneapolis Star Tribune/December 2003:
"There's more than humor in this fresh look at the perennial problem of incompetent leadership at work."

Orlando Sentinel/December 2003:
"Idiot bosses are so common, writes John Hoover, that he shortens the term to I-Bosses in How to Work for an Idiot."