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."
