Announcing our latest book! It takes most of the cartoons from our three previous books, adds dashes of color and salts it all with some extra absurdity and even some learning points.
The Kindle version is here: US • UK. Price is $8.99.
Business and art are rarely combined, except in the art business. This is easy to understand. Artists are creative people. They provide us with new interpretations of the world around us. Their most surreal or abstract paintings are often revealed to be self-portraits. Business people are rarely creative. Indeed, having more than one truly creative person in a business team often prevents the team actually achieving anything.
This new book puts absurdist line art into the service of business. Let’s face it, business can be absurd. If you work for a large company, you will certainly have witnessed substantial disconnects between what leaders say and what they do. Employees are sometimes told what a great employer they have, while facing layoffs and other cost restrictions. Companies say their customers and employees are their most important assets, and then fail to mention any related investments in their formal business strategy or quarterly earnings communications.
Business books can be absurd too. We know, we have written three before this one. Many business books present things as “obvious” that have no science behind them. The most obvious is the supposed (but non-existent) relationship between employee and customer happiness. As employees, we are told we are all “So happy here.” That happiness is supposed to infuse our customers with the same emotion. We covered the science of employee and customer happiness in an earlier book, using illustrations that are included here. Indeed, most of the illustrations have appeared in the books or on our Customer Strategy website.
Now we are attempting to communicate some business messages in an innovative, somewhat absurd way. At its simplest level, we think of this new form of business messaging as ‘show and tell’. The drawings show concepts to the reader, supporting messages told by accompanying text. We hope you will enjoy the artwork, and learn something useful for your business too. We promise this book is unlike any other you have read.
