Stumbled across this in the second hand bookshop and given dissatisfaction with an office job its title popped off the shelf.
One of my all time favourite books is Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, and so it helped that this was described on the back cover as a next-generation version of that classic.
It didn’t quite live up to that (admittedly very high) billing but was thought provoking nonetheless. A central plank of the thesis is that much of modern work has been abstracted away from reality and so has very vague targets and measurements. Whereas the trades have concrete success metrics – a working light, a smooth running engine, a perfectly square doorframe.
The arguments are neat and pretty persuasive but I do feel the narrative is perhaps a little coloured by the author’s own bad experience of desk work. I’ve personally had some fantastically satisfying office jobs, they do exist!
I have for a while, however, thought that the satisfaction of creating real physical things of quality is likely higher than the outputs of the thought economy. And the so book has definitely achieved its aim of making me think hard about work…
