Soul Assassins

The posters started appearing in 1998 or so, parodies of classic inspirational motivational kitsch. They were sly, mordant pinpricks aimed at corporate America's healthily inflated self-image. Under a photo of two executive-class hands gripped in a manly handshake, there appears an aphorism -- Consulting: If You're Not Part of the Solution, There's Good Money to Be Made Prolonging the Problem. Below a beautiful photo of a silvery salmon vaulting up crashing rapids into the open mouth of an awaiting golden bear, we see this legend -- Ambition: The Journey of a Thousand Miles Sometimes Ends Very, Very Badly. Beneath a shot of a small circled group of race-and-gender-diversified workers performing a basketball team's traditional hands-in ritual, we read this reminder -- Meetings: None of Us Is as Dumb as All of Us.

There are dozens of these posters, all of them dedicated to the proposition that the emperor is a lot nuder than he thinks he is and expressed in an unmistakably sarcastic voice -- not of the goofy class clown, but of the smart, somewhat dangerous class malcontent. That voice is the product of three men: two brothers, Justin and Jef Sewell, and E. Lawrence Kersten, all now of Austin and its environs. They are the founders of Despair Inc., purveyors of novelty items of insidious intent.

The trio has carved out a profitable niche that services the subliminal resentments of silently seething office parkers. But Despair's next move is more than a pinprick at the workplace and its discontents; it's a shotgun blast. Based on their experiences, Kersten has formulated a philosophy for workers and companies that's incendiary to anyone who (still) believes that work is personal and that companies can bring happiness to their workers' lives. Kersten's manifesto is variously hilarious, outrageous, insightful, insulting, perceptive, and, from time to time, windy (or perhaps on those occasions, I've just missed the joke). In The Art of Demotivation (Despair Ink, 2005), which was just published, Kersten and Despair have unlocked what's at the heart of why so many people are miserable at work and unable to do anything about it. The reason? You.

With The Art of Demotivation, Kersten takes aim at books such as Who Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal With Change and Win! (Putnam, 1998) and Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results (Hyperion, 2000). He doesn't parody them, perhaps because parodying books about mice named Sniff and Scurry and fishmongers named Lonnie seems like the sort of exercise that would be assigned to the Junior Satirists Club at your local high school. Kersten is bent on undermining the multimillion-dollar motivational industry -- "Big Boost," one might call it -- that every year persuades America's corporate managers to lay out big money to try to get employees to work harder, feel better about their jobs, and have a better damn attitude.

"What executives fail to realize is that the life-changing insights sold by the motivational industry are the source of their problems rather than the solution," Kersten writes. "The primary objective of the motivational industry is to stoke the fires of your employees' narcissism so that they fall in love with themselves all over again, just as they did when they saw their own beauty in the distorted reflection of their mother's adoring gaze."

For Kersten, the heart of the problem lies in what he calls the "noble employee myth," a product of what he dryly calls the "motivational educational-industrial" -- or "ME-I" -- complex. The central elements of this myth are that employees are good and productive labor is natural for them. Management is responsible for creating the circumstances that unleash employee motivation and should be blamed when employees fail. Profits should not be pursued at the expense of employee satisfaction. On it goes -- the very kinds of things you'd expect to read if Jean-Jacques Rousseau happened to be unleashed in an HR department.

This is all a myth, Kersten argues, because employees aren't noble. In fact, they're the source of most corporate problems. Employees make bad decisions. "[They] possess a capacity for bad judgment that is beyond comprehension," he says. They alienate customers, lack maturity, exploit their employer's generosity, and steal ($21 billion in the retailing sector alone, he cites).

And if belief in this myth is bad for business, why, it's terrible for employees, too, causing them to suffer an elevated self-image that their abilities cannot support. The result: "They demand more income than they merit, more respect than they have earned, more autonomy than they can handle, and more leisure time than they need."