Bartleby’s article in The Economist was great reading recently – suggesting that reading The Trial by Franz Kafka, which tells the tale of an ordinary person who is abruptly plunged into a nightmarish world of senseless bureaucracy is less a novel, more an employee handbook!
A memorable workplace reading list can do more than recommend books: it can reveal how an organisation thinks, what it rewards and what it quietly expects from the people joining it.
Companies often use cultural touchstones to explain themselves. Some cite novels, films or leadership books to communicate a desired mindset; others turn these references into informal tests of whether new hires understand the organisation’s rituals. A reading list, in that sense, is less about literature than about the assumptions a workplace wants people to absorb.
The idea is funny because the chosen books can expose contradictions that a corporate values statement would usually hide. A novel about bureaucracy, surveillance, ambition or misplaced loyalty may describe office life more honestly than a slide deck about collaboration and innovation.
Below is a fresh version of that idea: a fictional employer’s unofficial reading list, written as a satire of workplace culture rather than as a reproduction of the original article.
“The Trial” by Franz Kafka. A useful reminder that many workplaces run on processes whose origins have been forgotten. If you can navigate a form that refers to another form that no one can locate, you are already showing leadership potential.
“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller. Essential preparation for any role in which success creates the conditions for more work, and failure creates the conditions for a performance improvement plan. Either way, the system has considered your options carefully.
“The Waves” by Virginia Woolf. Recommended for anyone trying to follow a meeting in which six people agree loudly with one another while meaning slightly different things.
“Say Nothing” by Patrick Radden Keefe. A title that doubles as guidance for the all-hands Q&A, especially when the moderator says there is time for one final question.
“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin. A suitable metaphor for project timelines: today’s deadline becomes tomorrow’s milestone, which becomes next quarter’s strategic opportunity.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. Frequently treated as a warning, though some managers may mistakenly read it as an operating model. The lesson for new starters is to check whether “transparency” means sharing information both ways.
“The Island of Doctor Moreau” by H.G. Wells. A cautionary tale about experimentation without governance. Innovation is welcome, but ideally not in a way that causes the ethics committee to schedule an emergency session.
“Emma” by Jane Austen. A study in confident intervention. It is especially relevant to managers who describe themselves as “hands-off” while editing every paragraph of a team member’s draft.
“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt. Useful for understanding the risks of exclusive circles, charismatic authority and group decisions that become harder to question the longer everyone has gone along with them.
“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel. A reminder that skill, loyalty and political intelligence can take a person far, but proximity to power is not the same as security.
The joke of a corporate reading list is that it claims to prepare employees for the future while accidentally confessing what the present is already like. That is why fiction can be such a sharp guide to working life: it makes familiar absurdities visible without needing to name any particular company.
