ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows the freedom to act and innovate to meet customers' needs as though each of us owned the business. People working in bullshit jobs need to do something. And that something is usually the production, distribution and consumption of bullshit itself. These bullshit workers spend their days with varying degrees of enthusiasm working up, living with and often eating up the kind of managerial bullshit. When the economy was contracting, more humanistic forms of management became fashionable. The book also explains the business bullshit, artisinal bullshit and industrial bullshit. George Gurdjieff's ideas appealed to artists, intellectuals and free thinkers. By the 1980s, Gurdjieff's mystical ideas had found a resonance in the rather strange setting of a large Californian utilities company. Clearly, the senior executives of Pacific Bell found that 'the work' spoke to them.
