ADAPT

A manager ruminates on the best practices for business and parenting.

Venugopal’s book tells the story of Ram, who graduated with degrees from Tennessee Technological and Rice universities and spent 10-plus years at a tech company called InfraT, rising to become an engineering technology lead in the challenging second decade of the 21st century. Ram’s energy is never in doubt (“from the moment Ram had started at InfraT, he dove headfirst into the fast-paced and highly competitive landscape”), and as he assembles his team, they face the challenges of developing new technological devices, everything from hardware to processors and storage. While he tackles the various obstacles, Ram also faces turbulence in his own family. His wife, Gita, is often impatient with Ram’s preoccupation with work. Ram, who is self-aware, acknowledges this shortcoming and tries to give more time and affection to his son, Keshav. He reads the boy bedtime stories, and they often talk as Ram starts a home garden. This series of domestic developments, often the book’s most readable and interesting element, helps to give Ram insight into his workplace problems at InfraT, as when a chat with Keshav about the boy’s New Year’s resolutions firms up his own determination to make work plans with his team. These two narrative threads form a story that often feels like it’s sitting awkwardly between contemporary fiction and business-motivation nonfiction. Ram himself tends to talk in Operations Manual nostrums when at work, saying things like “Communication and collaboration need to be strategic,” and the narration comes straight out of a corporate manual: “Ram had to make sure that, if he was pushing for some job to be automated or delegated to the vertical, he needed to upskill his team to perform new work items in the time saved through automation/delegation process.” This tends to make the book feel distracted as business writing and thin as fiction, although some elements of Ram’s story can be involving.

An odd admixture of family drama and corporate pep talk.