Books are always a welcome present. (Hint.) And it was a nice surprise to get the present of an advance copy of Alain De Botton's forthcoming 'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work' from the nice people at Penguin books.
I read it over the Christmas holidays and really enjoyed it. It's an engaging and idiosyncratic look at the world of work, written in a knowingly arch tone, a bit like a cross between Stephen Fry and Allan Bennett only with more frequent allusions to renaissance art and classical philosophy.
The book's theme seems to be that though work is central to most of our lives, we don't often consider why we do what we do or what we do it for. Each chapter explores a different aspect of this. One follows the processes by which a tuna makes its way from the sea in the Maldives to a dinner plate in Bristol, another looks at corporate life in a big accountancy firm, and so on.
The chapter most relevant to readers of W2O is the one that deals with the manufacture and marketing of biscuits at United Biscuits. I hope it's OK for me to reproduce a small sample here:
Through effort and subterfuge I had secured an appointment with the Design Director at United Biscuits, a man named Laurence…
Laurence had formulated his biscuit (McVitie's Moments) by gathering some interviewees in a hotel in Slough and, over a week, questioning them about their lives, in an attempt to tease out of them certain emotional longings that could subsequently be elaborated into the organising principles behind a new product. In a conference room in the Thames Riviera Hotel, a number of low income mothers had spoken of their yearning for sympathy, affection and what Laurence termed simply, with aphoristic brevity, 'me time'. The Moment set out to suggest istelf as the plausible solution to their predicament. While the idea of answering psychological yearnings with dough might seem daunting, Laurence explained that in the hands of an experienced branding expert, decisions about width, shape, coating, packaging and name can furnish a biscuit with a personality as subtly and appropriately nuanced as that of a protagonist in a great novel.
(Somehow I doubt that Laurence would have made this claim in such terms, but regarding the business parks of Slough through the horn-rimmed lenses of a bemused academic is all part of De Botton's schtick.)
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called The Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
Well, that's my 25 years in this business pretty much summed up. However, don't abandon your career just yet, marketing professionals. De Botton concludes the chapter thus:
Modern commercial endeavours may not be of the kind that we have been taught to associate with heroism. They involve battles fought with the most bathetic of instruments, with two-for-the-price-of-one specials and sticker-based bribes, but they are battles nontheless, comparable in their intensity and demands to the tracking of furtive animals through the deadly forests of prehistoric Belgium.
Anyway, I found it an amusing and at times thought-provoking read. it comes out in April.
