An amusing primer that makes serious and useful points about navigating difficult workplaces.
A business coach and consultant shares his experiences with a bad boss and his method to assess and handle various work situations in this humorous guide.
Brown recounts his time working for an unnamed marketing services company and “Stan the Bad Boss,” who “acted like he cared about us, but really only cared if people liked him.” At first, the author’s co-workers were demoralized and despondent. Then, thanks in part to Brown’s energy and actions, the group bonded by playing goofy games, including “Hallway Assassin,” and eventually created a “Gold Meddle Delegation” worksheet, among other strategies, to counter Stan’s horrible management. Brown channeled Jim from The Office TV seriesas his “virtual mentor.” Later, the author created a virtual “council of elders,” consisting of management gurus like Michael Hyatt and Donald Miller, as “a system for learning and developing myself” that made him feel that he had “taken control of my future—and it looks a lot like hope.” Brown then shares his system to “WIPE yourself”: ask yourself two questions (Are you aligned with the company’s mission? Are you able to do your job?) and determine if you are a Winner (aligned and able), Intern (aligned and not able), Prisoner (not aligned and not able), or Expert (not aligned and able). Next, you should decide whether to push (“Stay and work for growth”), go (“Get out of Dodge”), or sit (“Hold tight and hope something changes”). Brown is a talented comedic writer, with his entertaining, often wincingly relatable anecdotes serving to demonstrate and support the workplace survival strategy that he espouses. Readers will find it exciting to experience a system that promotes having fun on the job, with the author rightly noting that “my stupid antics rallied us together—and somewhere along the way, survival became growth.” His WIPE system is a helpful rubric for readers to assess their own workplace realities, in which leaving the job (as Brown eventually did) is the preferred option if they can’t endure the toxicity of their particular Stan and position.
An amusing primer that makes serious and useful points about navigating difficult workplaces.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2023
ISBN: 979-8988422907
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bright Browns, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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