Summary: Written by former Yale Professor of Anthropology David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs is a philosophical exploration of the deeply flawed work culture that has prevented high-income societies from otherwise letting their people prosper with a 15-hour work week.
What exactly is a bullshit job?
If you believe that your job does have value, then it, by definition, is not a bullshit job.
According to Graeber, Bullshit Jobs mainly fall into the following 5 categories:
Flunkies: They exist to make their boss look good (e.g. receptionists for a manager who rarely receives calls)
Goons: They exist mainly because other people (e.g. competitors) employ them, and generally have an aggressive element (e.g. corporate lawyers or many soldiers)
Duct-Tapers: They exist to fix problems that shouldn't continue to be problems (e.g. manual reviewers for review tasks that could easily be automated)
Box Tickers: They exist so an organization can claim that it's doing something it's not actually interested in doing (e.g. many corporate social responsibility officers)
Task Maskers: They exist to assign and supervise tasks to subordinates (and know that the subordinates do not need supervision) and/or create bullshit tasks to keep their subordinates (needlessly) busy.
What is the solution?
The author explicitly states that the book is focused on exploring the problem and does not want the book to be tied to particular solution. In the end he does propose a universal basic income as a possible solution. Why? Because this will help our society separate the idea of income from work, and people will become more motivated to follow whatever they believe provides a sense of purpose vs. seeking income.
He recognizes that this solution probably requires much more exploration (if it is even the best solution), but again, solutions are not the point of this book.
My Thoughts and Recommendations
Bullshit Jobs is, by far, the least enjoyable book I've reviewed for this blog. It feels like the first draft of an academic paper that badly needs to be reviewed for concision and excessive anecdotes. I suspect that he and his publishers thought that a risqué title and tons of anecdotes from people venting about their bullshit jobs would make a sufficiently entertaining book. They were wrong.
I cannot recommend Bullshit Jobs simply because I assume most readers (including HR Professionals) will get bored and give up.
Actionable Recommendations
Many of the writer's ideas absolutely do have merit, and so Bullshit Jobs has inspired for me the following recommendations for organizational designers, planners, and leaders:
Review your current workforce to seek out and transform (or eliminate) all roles that fall into any of the bullshit job categories above. If a role isn't clearly advancing the organization's mission and goals, it should not exist.
Review and adjust the cultural incentives that may have led to the creation and perpetuation of those bullshit jobs. If you do not change the incentives (i.e. the root cause), then more of these jobs will appear in the future.
Example: If your organization rewards managers based on their headcount (vs. their team's impact), then you will incentivize managers to increase their head count unnecessarily instead of prioritizing positive impact.
For any roles identified as duct tapers, transform those roles into scale-uppers and automators of processes (so that they will now focus on longer-term and much-higher-impact solutions)
Ensure that your overall performance management strategy and programming consistently focus on rewarding positive impact toward org goals— not effort or activity.
As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions about how to translate these recommendations into concrete actions. And instead of reading this book, do something today that will actually make you feel purposeful.
