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To celebrate my birthday, I created a Leanpub bundle that makes two of my fiction books that take place in the same universe, available together, for a reduced price, and handed out 100%-off coupons.
What’s this bundle about? Many, many lessons about organizational and professional development.
The world of organizational change and process improvement is a world full of theories, philosophies, N=1 extrapolations, hero worship, generalizations, and wise-sounding advice that’s often sold as evergreen, eternal even. It’s also a world full of hype, promises of change, hopes of transformation and other hard-hitting buzzwords, trainings, and certifications on the latest-and-greatest framework, methodology, tools and–failing all that–mindset.
This bundle consists of two “business fiction” books that are based on my own professional experience in this world, hyperrealistically satirize its all-too-frequent extremes, and expose its negative aspects from two different angles: from the angle of a fictional organization faced with inoculating itself against the latest in a series of miracle-cure fads, and from the angle of a well-meaning individual who discovers and becomes infatuated with one of those fads, proceeding to adopt all of its vestiges, and to turn the fad and its tenents into the core of his newfound professional identity.
The first book of the bundle, The Incredible Story of Deft , is a satirical exploration that aims to inoculate you against the perils of the endless hype, pedantry, hollow promises, and artful manipulation of “business miracle cures”, such as Lean, Agile, Six Sigma, TQM, etc. It casts you in the role of an observer of a 2-day corporate training workshop and its participants’ fun interactions around change and improvement initiatives. It’s a book that focuses on the organizational perils of Deft caused by the cottage industries that sprout with and are reinvegorated by every new of its many iterations.
The second book of the bundle is the first book of the Lo and Behold, X! saga , a tongue-in-cheek pseudo-medieval tale of a young and impressionable scholar who stumbles upon a hallowed anthology of articles describing “X”—a fabulous set of ideas, an array of tenets, a set of methodologies, a cornucopia of tools, a strategy, nay, a veritable model of enterprise and leadership that has the potential to change the world of organizations. You will learn about the motivations of the main character, his allies and his adversaries, and observe the ups and downs of people caught within the aforementioned world.
Together, the books represent more than a decade of experience within this world of organizational design and change, process change and improvement, and fighting against the “dragons” of hype and BS in order to get great things done regardless. They provide an enormous amount of insights on the pitfalls to avoid when it comes to using methods, frameworks and the like, both on the professional and on the personal level.
The bundle is available as PDF and ePub on Leanpub
