Book Report – Disrupted by Dan Lyons

“People just go up in smoke, like Spinal Tap drummers,” writes Dan Lyons in Disrupted, reporting on just a small slice of the weirdness he experienced in his 20 months employed by the Kendall Square inbound marketing tech company HubSpot. Lyons arrived there in 2013 with grandiose ideas about creating corporate journalism, having been laid off by Newsweek (where he was the very happy tech reporter) and then quitting Silicon Valley blog ReadWrite (where he was the quite miserable editor-in-chief/ad sales weasel). As for spontaneous combustion, the head HubSpotters don’t fire people; they see them off to “graduation.” A co-founder invents words like delightation ([dih-lahy-tey-shuhn] v. to make other people happy) and carries a teddy bear as a model for a type of customer to target and please. A co-worker claims e.g. is Latin for “example given” in a blog post about – wait for it – proper grammar. It’s like a playground inside a boiler room teeming with frat brahs on headsets hawking SaaS to anyone who’ll cough up a credit card. And for the author, it winds up an unmitigated disaster.

Lyons was in his early 50’s during his stint at HubSpot, exactly double the average age of staffers there. Things got off to a rather rocky start when, on his first day, no one who had anything to do with his hiring could be found on premises and it dawns on Lyons that his young tour guide – a nice enough eager beaver – is his boss. Or sort of. Nothing is quite clear to as he gets buried on the content team, writing lead-generation copy. Lyons naturally feels duped, doing what he calls hack work that’s “a step down from writing copy for clothing catalogs” instead of filling the newly created role of Marketing Fellow (whatever that is). He gets caught up in what Steve Jobs used to call a bozo explosion, also known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect through which idiots not only don’t sense their own incompetence, they also can’t or won’t see talent around them. What you have are brainwashed, B-level managers who hire dumdums to (a) tell the boss he’s a genius because relatively speaking he is and then (b) hire people even stupider than themselves (and there you have the resulting explosion). It’s bad enough when you have to work with Dumdum, but exponentially worse when you work for him.

Lyons is a skilled, hilarious writer – I had to put his book aside several times as I was cracking up – and he plays perfectly the role of embedded reporter at Morons, Inc. But humor aside, there are frightening revelations. What HubSpot euphemistically calls “culture fit” comes off something much closer to a racist, ageist cult. The author suggesting that “Klan rallies probably comprise a broader swath of the Caucasian population,” makes one simultaneously howl and cringe. A friend advises that the company is clearly “a step away from Jonestown” and that Lyons should high-tail it out of there, fast. And that’s where we find some controversy. While you admire Lyons’ keen perspective and commentary, you’re also welcome to question his motives, namely sticking around for a paycheck, health benefits, an impending IPO, and perhaps book material. Why not just quickly recognize that it was a mistake to come aboard, quit and then move on? Why all the whining about a Kafkaesque office environment? Just go find another job, Well Educated White Man… or so goes the argument, and it’s a fair one to make. Selfishly, I’m glad he toughed it out as long as he did. That Lyons decided to leave a mushroom cloud in his rearview mirror is to his readers’ eternal benefit, because what resulted is easily the funniest business book I’ve ever read, one that can and will be enjoyed multiple times.