Company

I just finished Company, a novel by Max Barry, and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it. It's not that I didn't enjoy the experience. It's a briskly-told story about a young college graduate named Jones who's just been hired by Zephyr Holdings, which is an obvious stand-in for everything that is wrong in corporate America. I've never worked for a large company, but my wife does, and Barry nails many of the absurdities — the constant reorganizations, the cut-throat politics, and the brutal/comical ways in which employees are treated. At this humorous surface level, Company is a success.

On other levels, though, I'm left with more questions than answers. The story's primary conflict is between Eve, a completely amoral business consultant whose only interest is in maximizing efficiency regardless of the human toll, and Jones, who feels that somehow the employees "deserve better." Via Eve, we are given the standard arguments why corporations should not care about their workers as people, but rather manage them as resources. Bottom line: if companies aren't as efficient as possible (read: wring every last possible erg of work from their employees), they fail, and then everyone is out of a job. Corporate America is the worst of all possible systems, then, except for all the others. So get over it.

Of course, Zephyr itself is meant to serve as the counter-argument. In its endless quest to cut costs and increase productivity, it's become a completely dysfunctional. And I'm with Barry as far as that goes. But I'm still left wondering where he thinks the middle ground is. Is there a conflict between employee satisfaction and productivity? Is there a point where employees just have to suck it in order for the company to be successful? We never really get any good answers.

Complicating matters is the very odd relationship between Jones and Eve. The chemistry behind their "merger" is never made entirely clear, and both characters come off as machines at times, able to turn their emotions on and off at will. Which is fine for Eve, whose not supposed to be fully human, but in Jones' case it just doesn't quite fit.

I'll think about these questions some more in the coming days, and that in itself is the best reason to read any book.