Thirty Two. Employee Engagement 2.0: How to Motivate Your Team for High Performance by Kevin Kruse
2012, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 90 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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The self publishing revolution that various digital platforms have heralded, certainly helped democratise the process of delivering a book to potential readers and letting them decide whether it is useful or not, and through their purchases, decide whether it should be successful or not. Aspiring writers who do not want to go through the gruelling trial by fire of attempting to submit their manuscript to publishing houses and having it rejected, sometimes regardless of the merit of the actual work, have a myriad methods of reaching their fans and delivering their creative output — be it through crowdfunding projects, physical self publishing platforms or the Kindle platform.
But every means of progress has its downsides, and some obstacles on the road to a more egalitarian world of prose are probably there for a reason. Publishing houses, for example, have a threshold of quality that they want to maintain. They determine that threshold and abide by it, and it is their prerogative, as they provide the funding which allows authors to reach their audiences, and members of those audiences will sometimes pick up a book only because of the publishing house that had released it. And once publishers have selected your work to be printed, there are editors — staff members of the publishing house who will work alongside you to make sure the work is presented in the best possible way. That also includes a set of standards that your novel or non-fiction work has to abide by, before any other consideration is made.
Self publishing strips away all of these from the process of writing and releasing a book — the threshold, the standards and the editing. In some cases, there are books that really have slipped through the proverbial cracks of the publishing houses, and usually they, or their successors, finally do get picked up by the remorseful publishers and escorted back into the mainstream. But other books are a great example of why the more traditional route of publishing is still successful.
This book is an example of the latter variety. It is a relatively short endeavour — less than 100 pages long — and so its damage is negligent, but within these ninety pages one can find a variety of violations of the way a good non-fiction book should be written. Not a single, errant reference can be found in the book, which has several interesting and useful suggestions regarding engaging the employees in your company, but lacking references, can be considered more of a manifest, and less of an academic work that actually has some evidence behind its claims; an Appendix C is suggested in order to retrieve more information about the research involved, but is not actually found in the book (I’m assuming the author meant to point the readers to appendix B, which does contain a link to a website that has a list of research material); there are, in abundance, quotes from various dignitaries which may or may not have been taken out of context (again, no references). It is a pity because the ideas themselves are interesting and useful for the most part, and with the correct amount of unique research and thorough referencing, could have been treated more fairly and given their place in the mainstream. But without the proper vetting, these are just ideas. And everybody has ideas.
