Dying For A Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance - and What We Can Do About It by Jeffrey Pfeffer

BATB score: 7.7/10 💸

Is the 'price' for career success (for exceptional levels of income and responsibilities) extreme work stress? Are you literally dying for a paycheck? ☠️

Best to: it's a dissertation thesis paper on the economic cost of work stress, the behavioural economic at play from the employer in creating and the employees at consenting and enduring work stress, the socio-economic impact of work stress, and the recommendations to try to make things better

Best for: very interesting topics - 'karoshi' is japanese for dying from overwork, 'magic roundable' is english for a taxi taking you home waiting for you to shower and taking you back to work - yet, it's a research paper not a book so be wary

BATB lingering thought: let's go work 👩‍💻 and surf 🏄‍♀️ at Patagonia Inc! aka the only company that the book acknowledges as acceptable

Best as: did you know that 'Black Monday Syndrome' is the fact that more people have heart attacks on Monday morning (maybe because they are back at work after the weekend) than at other times during the week?

Best quote: “Today, higher-class, higher-earning individuals actually work more than their lower-income counterparts. In a perverse twist, longer work hours have become a status symbol – a marker of how important, indeed indispensable, someone is.”

"Aren't you good enough to make it here?"

"Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves."

"The leader of the company did not believe in taking care of himself. He really believed in sacrificing his health for the success of the company, and that trickles down."

"So one simple but important reason that people stay in harmful work environments is that they are too psychologically wounded and too physically stressed and overwhelmed to muster the energy to leave."