• My theory is that at least some of the unhappiness at work comes from being herded into silly workshops where people are fed a bunch of touchy-feely nonsense about self-improvement and transformation.

• HR people used to be glorified office managers, but now they get MBAs and are called Chief People Officers. They talk about being “strategic talent managers” who “drive corporate transformation” and are “building the workforce of the future.”

• Agile. Agile has become immensely popular in the corporate world and has evolved into something akin to a religion.

• It turns out that Make a Duck is the best-known exercise in the Lego Serious Play canon, and this is its lesson—that everyone makes a different duck. The duck is not a puzzle, or a brain-teaser, or an IQ test. The duck is a window into your soul. Why did I assume that I had to use all the pieces? Why did I think it was a puzzle, or an IQ test? Why was I so afraid about failing? I hate to admit this, but in less than a minute, with a half dozen plastic bricks, this woman has gutted me like a fish, and laid bare my neuroses.

• Lego workshops are just one example of the nonsense that is creeping into the workplace.

• Some were shunned and ostracized by colleagues, or coerced into “forced fun” activities, like indoor skydiving, ballroom dancing, or trapeze training, and told they were supposed to be having fun.

• A Skinner box, invented in the 1930s by psychologist B. F. Skinner, is a cage in which rats learn that pulling certain levers gets them food and that flashing lights might signal they are about to get a shock through the floor.

• San Francisco, once a city full of artists and hippies, with a vibrant gay community, has become overrun with dipshit tech bros zipping around on electric scooters, complaining about the growing ranks of homeless people, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they—the tech bros—are the ones who created the housing crisis that has pushed so many people onto the streets.

• Now those same mercenary, clueless tech bros who have ruined San Francisco are gaining ever more power and wielding influence that reaches all over the world.

• Previously, the kings of tech were the wizards who invented new products and built companies, like Hewlett and Packard, or Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Jobs and Wozniak at Apple. But now the power brokers include venture capitalists—like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Ventures. They don’t actually run tech companies. They’re just investors. Nevertheless, their profession is depicted as glamorous, and they rank among the biggest celebrities in Silicon Valley. Wired once lionized Andreessen on its cover, calling him “The Man Who Makes the Future.” Young guys moving west after college no longer hope to become the next Steve Jobs; they want to be the next Marc Andreessen.

• From San Francisco to San Jose, house prices keep soaring. But so do the ranks of the homeless. It is surreal to see so much poverty pressed right up against so much wealth. One day in 2017 I ate lunch on the Google campus with some rank-and-file Googlers who explained that even though they were millionaires, they still felt poor, because here at Google they sat in meetings with people who owned jets and yachts and estates in Hawaii.

• Also, many companies are latching on to faddish Silicon Valley management methodologies, like Agile and Lean Startup, because they are convinced that these tech-spawned ideas will make them as nimble as start-ups.

• The new VCs have invented a form of alchemy in which they make a fortune for themselves while skipping the step about building a profitable company. I call it, Grow fast, lose money, go public, cash out. You pump millions (or billions) into a start-up, so that it grows rapidly. You generate hype, flog the shares to mom-and-dad investors in an IPO, and scoot away with the loot. In 2017 I made a list of sixty tech companies that had gone public since 2011. Fifty of them had never made a profit. Some new companies lose incredible amounts of money. In 2017, Spotify lost $1.5 billion, Snap lost $3 billion, and Uber lost $4.5 billion. Yet, as of early 2018, Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Snap founder Evan Spiegel are each worth about $2.5 billion. Kalanick, the founder of Uber, who made such a mess that his own board tossed him out, nevertheless reportedly has a net worth approaching $5 billion. Where else on earth can you run a company that loses billions of dollars—and become a billionaire yourself by doing this?

• Social networks arose: LinkedIn in 2002, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006. From 2000 to 2010 the number of people on the Internet grew from 360 million, less than 6 percent of the world’s population, to about two billion people, just under one-third of the world, according to Internet World Stats, a website that tracks Internet users. By the end of 2017 there were about four billion people, just over half of the world’s population, on the Internet.

• It doesn’t seem to make sense that the same idealistic, altruistic wizards who design beautiful products and deliver exquisite user experiences—who create so much delightion, as my former colleagues at HubSpot would say—should cause so much misery. Yet that’s what is happening. Apple makes terrific smartphones and provides worldclass customer support, but the company also has dodged taxes using a scheme that Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz once called a “fraud.” Amazon Prime is an amazing service, but Amazon abuses workers in its headquarters and warehouses. Customers love Uber, but Uber operates a toxic workplace and exploits its drivers. Tesla makes very sexy electric cars but, by many accounts, Elon Musk behaves abominably toward his employees and has earned a reputation for being less than forthcoming with customers.

• “I don’t believe anything Elon Musk or Tesla says,” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, a disappointed Tesla owner, said in 2018.

• The experiment with the pig iron made Taylor famous. He cited it in books and lectures and during lucrative consulting engagements to big corporations. But as it turns out, Taylor was a quack—or maybe a con man. The story of the pig iron workers never took place, at least not the way Taylor described it. What really happened is that he cranked up the quotas and the workers quit. Bethlehem Steel threw Taylor out, and by some estimates the fees Bethlehem Steel paid to Taylor were greater than whatever savings they achieved through productivity gains. Taylor’s methods were flawed to the point of being ridiculous. He fudged his numbers.

• The corporate world now teems with consultants; there are more than six hundred thousand in the United States alone. Like Taylor, these folks are mostly full of shit but also blessed with the special gift of being able to remain supremely confident even when they have no idea what they’re doing.

• An old joke goes that a management consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time—then keeps your watch.

• After Frederick Taylor came Peter Drucker, an Austrian-born intellectual whose thirty-nine books, including Concept of the Corporation (1946) and The Practice of Management (1954), established him as “the father of modern management.” Drucker was a trained economist and respected academic who coined the term knowledge worker. He loved Taylor and ranked him above all other business thinkers. He shared Taylor’s love of quantification and data gathering. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” is perhaps Drucker’s most famous quote.

• Two new forms of Taylorism attempt to do that. The biggest is Agile, a management fad that has swept the corporate world and morphed into what some call a movement but is more like widespread mental illness. The other is Lean Startup, which has its own cult-like following but is less popular.

• Agile is about working in small teams, keeping projects short, and collaborating more. But as Agile spreads, its meaning keeps getting diluted. There are many different versions of Agile. Some of them directly contradict each other. Nobody seems to agree on what Agile actually is, or how to do it, including all those experts who write all those books.

• Talking to Fowler about Agile is like meeting Saint Paul to talk about Christianity and having Saint Paul tell you that most of modern Christianity has nothing to do with what he envisioned when he wrote those epistles back in the first century AD.

• One would-be intrapreneur was Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, who read Ries’s book in a single day and said it struck him like a thunderbolt. GE is a sprawling, century-old conglomerate that at that time generated about $150 billion a year in revenue. Immelt’s empire employed three hundred thousand people, who were arranged into so many divisions that even Wall Street analysts struggled to understand how all the pieces fit together. In other words, GE was about as far from being a start-up as any company could be. Yet Immelt wanted to be more like a start-up. He aimed to transform GE into a tech company. He opened a software development center in Silicon Valley and set out to hire one thousand software engineers. As Immelt saw it, this was a matter of life or death. As Immelt recounted in an essay for Harvard Business Review, he told his managers, “Guys, if we don’t become the best technology company in the world, we’re doomed. We’re dead. There’s no Plan B.”

• In fact, in 1917, when Ford was the same age as Tesla is now, the company cranked out seven times as many cars as Tesla does today—and that was without robots or computers or software.

• Sitting in the audience, I was having PTSD flashbacks to my last few years at Newsweek, when the magazine was dying and we all knew we were doomed, but we didn’t want to admit it. We could not stomach the fact that shitty websites like Huffington Post and BuzzFeed were the hot new thing, and we were yesterday’s news. Every few months our CEO would get up at a company meeting and pretend that things were getting better, and we would pretend to believe him. Many of us loved Newsweek. We were proud to work there. We hated to see it fade away. I’m sure a lot of Ford employees feel the same way about Ford.

• At a time of unprecedented social and economic change, at the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the American people had elected a chimp with a machine gun.

• Countless studies show that these nightmarish hellholes called “open offices” destroy productivity and make people miserable. Yet companies keep inflicting them on us, coyly pretending that the goal is to “foster collaboration,” when really it is to squeeze pennies out of overhead by packing more people into fewer square feet of floor space.

• “Fuck that, fuck you, fuck this, this is bullshit” is how a top Apple engineering executive reportedly responded when he was shown the floor plans of the company’s $5 billion ring-shaped “spaceship” headquarters in Cupertino, California, and realized his group would be put into open-office spaces. “Fuck this, my team isn’t working like this,” he said. Because his engineers are vital to the company—they design the chips that power the iPhone—Apple built a separate building for them, where they would not have to use the open-office plan, according to John Gruber, a blogger with tight connections at Apple.

• Some companies now offer “unlimited” vacation policies, but paradoxically in such arrangements a lot of people end up taking less holiday time, not more. Some people never take a vacation at all.

• There are no managers, but there is a role called lead link, which is kind of like a manager, only it’s not a manager, except that it kind of is.

• The first thing the new guy did was throw it all out. “Holacracy,” he says, “is the illusion that the natural state of things is reverse entropy. If you just leave things and people alone, they will become more ordered and efficient. There is some cosmological evidence to the contrary.”

• “I think an office should be more like a library and less like a kitchen,”

• There are tech companies where you have this weird thing and people are just brainstorming all the time. We brainstorm once a year, and then we spend the rest of the year doing it.”

• But everybody in the company has to work on the support desk. Typically they will put in one day every six weeks, “so everyone can hear directly from customers and understand the pain points, what frustrates or delights customers,” Fried says.

• Same goes in his personal life. Teran lives in a low-income co-op in Brooklyn that he bought when he was first out of college. “I don’t need to live in a nice place,” he says. “I’m characteristically very low maintenance. My father was a carpenter. He told me the number one way to accumulate wealth is to live within your means.”