Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I identified personally with the author and his story. Dan Lyons was a 53-year-old laid off Newsweek writer who made a significant career change by working for a tech startup. He experiences a vastly different business culture and management style from what he experienced at Newsweek. Lyons found out quickly that his ideas, expertise and knowledge were not as valued as he expected them to be. Lyons was working for a boss about half his age and he was surrounded by other twenty somethings whose worth ethics were significantly different than his own. He was also met with skepticism and condescension due to his age.

Lyons struggles to fit in both with his coworkers, his boss and upper management. He finds it to be a losing battle. Allies become enemies and he can no longer trust those around him. He sympathizes with the plights of the salespeople who face enormous odds in meeting quotas and quickly understands that upper management are more concerned about making money than developing a useful and user friendly product.

This is a cautionary tale for workers over age 40 entering new jobs. The older you are, the less serious you will be taken. You may think that your experience can be useful but your employer and management may find it antiquated.

There is some intrigue at the end of the story as certain corporate forces are concerned about the publishing of the book and the FBI is called in...


View all my reviews

Advice on Working for a Hostile Boss

Employees with hostile bosses experienced less psychological stress and higher job satisfaction when they responded by ignoring their bosses and putting less effort into their work.

Personnel Psychology, Science Daily

No Time To Be Nice at Work

This article in today's New York Times about work incivility really resonated with me... some excerpts below.

Intermittent stressors — like experiencing or witnessing uncivil incidents or even replaying one in your head — elevate levels of hormones called glucocorticoids throughout the day, potentially leading to a host of health problems, including increased appetite and obesity. A study published in 2012 that tracked women for 10 years concluded that stressful jobs increased the risk of a cardiovascular event by 38 percent.

Bosses produce demoralized employees through a string of actions: walking away from a conversation because they lose interest; answering calls in the middle of meetings without leaving the room; openly mocking people by pointing out their flaws or personality quirks in front of others; reminding their subordinates of their “role” in the organization and “title”; taking credit for wins, but pointing the finger at others when problems arise. Employees who are harmed by this behavior, instead of sharing ideas or asking for help, hold back. 

Incivility shuts people down in other ways, too. Employees contribute less and lose their conviction, whether because of a boss saying, “If I wanted to know what you thought, I’d ask you,” or screaming at an employee who overlooks a typo in an internal memo.

Leaders can use simple rules to win the hearts and minds of their people — with huge returns. Making small adjustments such as listening, smiling, sharing and thanking others more often can have a huge impact. In one unpublished experiment I conducted, a smile and simple thanks (as compared with not doing this) resulted in people being viewed as 27 percent warmer, 13 percent more competent and 22 percent more civil.

Smartest Thing I've Read About Work

From the The Friendly Anarchist Website....

"Work is a scam. It’s a forty-year sentence to wage slavery. Who would sign up for that? It turns out, almost everyone.

Belief in the twin lies that “the devil makes work for idle hands” and “work will set you free” is maintaining a terrible status quo, gradually destroying the natural habitats of the world’s diverse and abundant life forms, and trapping the well-meaning majority of us humans into lives of stale drudgery.

If you’re unlucky enough to have a job, you’ll know that work takes up all of your time: when you’re not actually at work, you’re probably travelling to or from work, preparing for work, or recovering from work. Quite often, you find yourself dreaming of work, only to be interrupted by the alarm clock waking you up to go back to work.

Your home–historically a safe haven for relaxation, husbandry and merriment–is reduced to a fuelling station for work. Work, work, work. Would it not be wonderful if we were no longer expected to go to work?...

The reason that the vast majority of us go to work is to make money to pay the rent (on property built on once-common land, no less) and to pay for material goods we’re told are needed for a good life. We do not work because we enjoy it and we do not work because it is virtuous, though maybe some of us have convinced ourselves to vaguely believe in a combination of the two.

Any semblance of dignity or craftsmanship has been bashed out of today’s work by the division of labour, by technology that allows anyone to do anything regardless of their abilities, and by the new consumer economy which preys upon our weakness and fatigue after work, and fills us with insatiable desire. There is no dignity in working for a supermarket or in an office or in a call centre. There is no dignity in finding conniving new ways of selling junk to your fellow human beings.

The majority do not work to grow food or heal the sick or push the envelope of what humanity is capable of. (We will always need farmers, nurses, and scientists and we should reward them better than we do). The majority now are dissatisfied wage slaves, conned or forced into doing what we do so that we can pump wealth back into the system, further feed the obese rich, and have cell phones and cars and cable television and all the rest of the grubby things that help to perpetuate our malaise."