"There is more truth in [The Virtual Boss] than in all the consultants' babble
for the next 12 months. Oh, how I wish they would put him on the cover of Business Week!"
—David Warsh, columnist, Sunday Boston Globe
"There are shades of Orwell, Kafka, and Woody Allen's Sleeper in The Virtual Boss.
... Its scathing assessment of the corporate mentality is dead-on."
—Wired
Everyone wishes for the perfect manager, but few have their wishes fulfilled. What would happen if a software system were developed to act as everyone's perfect manager?
In the second of his "corporate nightmares" — darkly humorous novels about corporate life — Floyd Kemske has invented a software system that learns each employee's needs and weaknesses, and then exploits them in order to make the employee as efficient and effective as possible. If all you need is a reminder now and then, that's all you get. However, if fear and abuse are what it takes to get you to work, the computer makes your life hell.
The Virtual Boss is the story of three people at Information Accuracy, Inc.: Linda, the software specialist who created the system, but is managed by it; Arthur, whose life is a nightmare of intermittent reinforcement, and punishment; and the company president, Donald F. Jones, whose experiences as a manager were so frustrating and ludicrous, he created a company without any human managers at all.
$19.95 cloth, 237 pages, ISBN 0-945774-22-2. Also available as an e-book.
Now available as a free PDF
Suitable for transferring to e-book formats. Just click here to download.
The Virtual boss by Floyd Kemske is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
To read the first chapter of The Virtual Boss, in PDF format, click here.
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