Man did I miss an opportunity in not posting this review yesterday, because it would’ve been the perfect Groundhog Day book. I love the Ask A Manager blog; it’s the perfect blend of witty and straightforward advice coupled with truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tales of working life. Alison Green answers questions compassionately and intelligently and always manages to make her obvious-upon-reflection answers kind to the questioners. I love this blog so much that I’ve gone back through the archives for old posts, it’s helped me shape my interpersonal experiences at work and it’s just a joy to read. And so was this book. But I’ve read it already.
This isn’t a criticism of Green – a book of wholly new content would be borderline impossible. How many variants of work problems are there once you eliminate the outliers like the boss who shows up to his subordinate’s chemotherapy or the coworker who pretends to be CPS investigating parental negligence in their colleague (both, sadly, real examples from letters sent to Green)?
Hell, even those crazy ones boil down to boundary issues at work. The book is more of a summarization if what issues you might encounter at work and how to deal with them, peppered with individual examples from user submitted letters I’ve just read so much of AAM that I didn’t need the synopsis.
Green does an admirable job creating a how-to for the working world that I highly recommend to those without an encyclopedic knowledge of her blog.