Liars, Lunch and Emails: An Unconventional Guide to the Workplace

Liars, Lunch and Emails: An Unconventional Guide to the Workplace

Whether you are just starting your career or have already spent years navigating the professional world, Liars, Lunch and Emails—a witty, unconventional, and highly entertaining introduction to office culture—is well worth reading. For newcomers, it serves as a rare and valuable guide to workplace life; for veterans, it is likely to bring both reflection and more than a few knowing smiles.

If you have worked in a multinational company, the email exchanges in the book may feel especially familiar, and you may recognize the same tones, tactics, and little maneuvers hidden in the back-and-forth messages. Even for people who rarely use email, simply replacing “email” with “WeChat” or “group chat” will produce much the same resonance. After all, whatever tools people use, office workers are much the same everywhere. Even without digital communication, people would still exchange opinions through letters, notes, whispered conversations in hallway corners, or even in bathroom stalls. These informal channels of communication may matter far more in shaping company culture than slogans on the wall or speeches at all-hands meetings.

Written in the early years of the new millennium, Liars, Lunch and Emails is strikingly distinctive in form. The entire book is composed of email exchanges, yet because email is immediate and flexible, it does not really fit the traditional epistolary genre. Instead, it feels much closer to everyday conversation and the casual exchange of opinions. Through these emails, the personalities of all kinds of office characters, the progress of the business, and the company’s internal culture and politics all come vividly to life. No matter how times change, what industry we work in, or what communication tools we use, the workplace culture and stories captured in this book remain enduring and vivid. Even more than a decade later, they are still deeply memorable.

Set in the advertising industry where the author once worked, the book tells the story of the first month of the year 2000 at the London branch of a multinational advertising agency. Beneath the seemingly ordinary routine of day-to-day work, the email exchanges turn the events of that month into a dramatic, fast-moving narrative that is hard to put down once you begin. The book portrays people from every level of the company, from top to bottom—incidentally making very clear exactly how much they earn, from hundreds of thousands of pounds to little more than ten or twenty thousand. There is the branch manager, stubborn, arrogant, foolish, and incompetent; the creative director, once brilliant but now past his prime; the self-important and bureaucratic client services director; the upright and distinctive senior designer; the lecherous, sloppy, but hugely talented design staffer; the secretary who flatters superiors and bullies subordinates; the gossip-loving receptionist with schemes of her own; and even the barely noticed office manager, IT head, and accountant. Every character appears only through email—including one character who steadfastly refuses to use email and is seen only through others’ messages—yet their personalities and the story itself unfold naturally in those exchanges. By the end, one cannot help feeling that it is as if someone simply gathered up a company’s emails over a period of time and published them with almost no editing. Or perhaps many readers will feel that the stories in their own companies are even more dramatic.

In terms of narrative technique, the author makes excellent use of email, which was still relatively novel at the time, especially through devices such as CC and BCC to reveal the fine details of office politics. Intrigue, tattling, passive aggression, and all manner of double-dealing—things that would require extensive narrative treatment in more traditional fiction—are presented through email in a way that is concise, vivid, and effective. The result feels both realistic and penetrating. At the same time, the author also plants foreshadowing and side plots throughout the story. Because the branch manager does not know how to use email properly, messages are often accidentally sent to the company’s Finnish office in Northern Europe. The head of that office, with his distinctive humor and wit, occasionally replies with comments of his own, often to hilarious effect.

The company portrayed in the book is highly influential within its industry, but a closer look at its inner workings reveals a place riddled with tensions and potential crises. Each character in the company appears first and foremost as an individual, with their own concerns and expectations in different areas, moving seemingly at random like air molecules colliding inside a jar. And yet the company functions precisely under such conditions, operating through its own peculiar centripetal force and cohesion. The book focuses especially on the success or failure of three projects: one involving a client that appears insignificant and is therefore neglected by the company; one of enormous value—Coca-Cola—but repeatedly derailed by the company’s internal dysfunction; and an exaggerated, absurd advertising shoot for an adult product. The outcome of each project reflects a different problem in how organizations function, and the full-process, participant-level case studies offered through the story provide valuable reference for any organization.

Even if the narrative includes some exaggeration and coincidence for artistic effect, the organization depicted in the book is, at bottom, simply the normal state of most organizations—neither much better nor much worse than the fictional competitors in the story or the real organizations around us. For anyone in working life, reading this book can lead to a deeper understanding of the company as an organizational form—one very different from what management textbooks provide. It is an understanding grounded in the needs and feelings of each role within the organization, and in the concrete realities of how organizations function and how work gets done. Whatever role a reader plays in an organization, they can find, through the book’s characters, a perspective on the relationship between the individual and the organization, as well as the influence the individual can have on the whole.

In short, this is a book that is both realistic and lighthearted, practical and humorous, and very much worth reading.