When MBA hot shot Ben Stillman is fired, he has the chance to find out. Ben jumps head first into turning his former business school into world-class madrassa of capitalism. In ten days he needs to rescue the launch of the school’s spectacular new tower, and his own career—as well as confront terrorist plots, undercover police, the extravagant demands of the super-rich, and the only woman who can save him from this madness. A satirical thriller, a love story and a wry look at modern management ideology rolled into one.
A must read for anyone who enjoyed Franzen’s Freedom or Eggers’ The Circle. MBA challenges and amuses with equal measure and makes you wonder about the impact of the Anglo-American dream.
Felicity Wood, deputy features editor, The Bookseller
Good books are the ones you want to finish and send to your friends. So this ground-breaking concept in publishing puts 90 per cent of ‘MBA’ in your hands, copiable and for nothing. Try it now — in EPUB, Mobipocket and PDF formats.
opening quoteBen is a very nice young man. Of course on a bad day that’s three strikes down – nice, young and man – but today he is our absolute hero.closing quote
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Douglas Board has produced the next installment of a great literary genre: the campus novel. Instead of following thwarted historians, faux-radical sociologists or cynical literary scholars, Board uncovers a cauldron of corporate clap-trap, hubris and hard lessons which anyone who has been to business school will instantly recognise.
Professor André Spicer, Cass Business School
opening quoteThe Prime Minister stopped taking water into his lungs and Greg made more progress lugging his catch to shore, where two sets of flashing lights raced to meet them.closing quote
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When the mindless, probably male, manager in your life puts you down, pick this up. Hilarious and spot on.
Sandra Burmeister, CEO and headhunter
opening quoteThe day before Connie had lambasted men for being either wimps or bastards. Potentially the same was true of king prawns. Too often they turned out either to be wimp prawns that were barely worth eating, or unnaturally macho prawns which had been using gym supplements on the side.closing quote
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Given their role in shaping and propagating the ideas that govern all our working lives, business schools have for the most part unjustly escaped the attentions of fiction writers. All the more refreshing, then, to read Douglas Board’s wonderfully enjoyable dissection of the swirling currents of ambition, dissembling, power and fortune that are all too often rationalised away in textbook accounts of ‘leadership’. Witty and deeply informed, Board’s rich satire is nearer the bone of business than a lot of people would want you to think.
Simon Caulkin, management writer in Management Today
Douglas has done what many great artists do: reveal truths accessibly. Read MBA once for the fun of it, and then again to ask yourself the hard questions it poses about leadership and success.
Fields Wicker-Miurin OBE, Board director and social entrepreneur
Board’s hilarious fiction debut might be required reading for anyone considering an MBA – if it weren’t for the fact that it might result in laying most MBA programs to fallow.
Allison Roy writing for the American Library Association (April 2016)
No - philosopher Aaron James’ book ‘Assholes: A Theory’ explains why. Better than Sutton’s ‘The No Asshole Rule’.
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