Lab Rats
How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
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Narrated by:
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Dan Lyons
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By:
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Dan Lyons
About this listen
New York Times best-selling author Dan Lyons exposes how the "new oligarchs" of Silicon Valley have turned technology into a tool for oppressing workers in this "passionate" (Kirkus) and "darkly funny" (Publishers Weekly) examination of workplace culture.
At a time of soaring corporate profits and plenty of HR lip service about "wellness", millions of workers - in virtually every industry - are deeply unhappy. Why did work become so miserable? Who is responsible? And does any company have a model for doing it right?
For two years, Lyons ventured in search of answers. From the innovation-crazed headquarters of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, to a cult-like "Holocracy" workshop in San Francisco, and to corporate trainers who specialize in...Legos, Lyons immersed himself in the often half-baked and frequently lucrative world of what passes for management science today. He shows how new tools, workplace practices, and business models championed by tech's empathy-impaired power brokers have shattered the social contract that once existed between companies and their employees. These dystopian beliefs - often masked by pithy slogans like "We're a Team, Not a Family" - have dire consequences: millions of workers who are subject to constant change, dehumanizing technologies - even health risks.
A few companies, however, get it right. With Lab Rats, Lyons makes a passionate plea for business leaders to understand this dangerous transformation, showing how profit and happy employees can indeed coexist.
©2018 Dan Lyons (P)2018 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Dan Lyons's Lab Rats defies easy description. It is hilarious, but not funny. I sputtered laughing and choked crying (literally, not figuratively) as I read it. Yes, to an extreme, Lyons gives Silicon Valley the thrashing that it, alas, largely deserves. But in the final third of the book, he offers us an effectively illustrated way out - an approach to work and business that puts people first, profitably serves customers, and makes the world a little bit better in the process." (Tom Peters, New York Times best-selling author of In Search of Excellence)
"[Lyons] argues persuasively.... A passionate indictment of brutal workplace culture." (Kirkus Reviews)
"I loved Dan Lyons's book Disrupted. With Lab Rats, he takes his critique of the modern workplace to the next level, to show how Silicon Valley's sometimes disturbing ideas about how to treat employees now pervade many workplaces. This is a fascinating, thought-provoking, hilarious, and sometimes harrowing account of current work culture." (Gretchen Rubin, number-one New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Project and The Four Tendencies)
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Story
In 2004 Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join 900 other would-be tycoons on the Harvard Business School's plush campus. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, and work/life balance.
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On one breath.
- By Atkins on 05-17-22
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Small Giants
- Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, 10th Anniversary Edition
- By: Bo Burlingham
- Narrated by: Bo Burlingham, Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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It's an axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a small number of companies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great customer service, making great contributions to their communities, and finding great ways to lead their lives. In Small Giants, veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside 14 such remarkable companies.
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fantastic book for small company builders
- By Amazon Customer on 08-01-17
By: Bo Burlingham
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No Better Time
- The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet
- By: Molly Knight Raskin
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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No Better Time tells of a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet. It's the story of a beautiful friendship between a loud, irreverent student and his soft-spoken MIT professor, of a husband and father who spent years struggling to make ends meet only to become a billionaire almost overnight with the success of Akamai Technologies, the Internet content delivery network he cofounded with his mentor.
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An Overlooked Hero of 9-11
- By Jean on 05-27-16
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The Up Side of Down
- Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success
- By: Megan McArdle
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.
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Good Book
- By Ray on 05-21-14
By: Megan McArdle
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The Intelligent Entrepreneur
- By: Bill Murphy Jr.
- Narrated by: Fred Berman, L. J. Ganser
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.
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Terrible waste $ and a lot of time
- By David on 01-23-11
By: Bill Murphy Jr.
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The Starfish and the Spider
- The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
- By: Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.
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Centralized and decentralized models
- By Chan Meng on 12-07-07
By: Ori Brafman, and others
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Data-ism
- The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
- By: Steve Lohr
- Narrated by: Steve Lohr
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.
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More business case than serious analysis
- By Godfried Gubbels on 06-03-15
By: Steve Lohr
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Ask Your Developer
- How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century
- By: Jeff Lawson
- Narrated by: Jeff Lawson
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Jeff Lawson, developer turned CEO of Twilio (one of Bloomberg Businessweek's Top 50 Companies to Watch in 2021), creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital transformation.
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Two and Half Stars
- By Anonymous User on 12-16-21
By: Jeff Lawson
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Linchpin
- Are You Indispensable?
- By: Seth Godin
- Narrated by: Seth Godin
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.
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I was expecting more
- By Steve High on 04-06-10
By: Seth Godin
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Good to Great
- Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
- By: Jim Collins
- Narrated by: Jim Collins
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
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Good info, over-the-top narration
- By Anaxamaxan on 08-31-10
By: Jim Collins
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Googled
- The End of the World as We Know It
- By: Ken Auletta
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In Googled, esteemed media writer and critic Ken Auletta uses the story of Google's rise to explore the inner workings of the company and the future of the media at large. Although Google has often been secretive, this book is based on the most extensive cooperation ever granted a journalist, including access to closed-door meetings and interviews with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt, and some 150 present and former employees.
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Audio production could have been better
- By David on 11-12-09
By: Ken Auletta
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Plutocrats
- The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
- By: Chrystia Freeland
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but in the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Alarmingly, the greatest income gap is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but within the wealthiest 1 percent of our nation-as the merely wealthy are left behind by the rapidly expanding fortunes of the new global super-rich. Forget the 1 percent; Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at break-neck speed.
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Good Storytelling but ... analysis is "eh'
- By Susan on 11-04-12
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Willful Blindness
- Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
- By: Margaret Heffernan
- Narrated by: Margaret Heffernan
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Margaret Heffernan argues that the biggest threats and dangers we face are the ones we don't see - not because they're secret or invisible, but because we're willfully blind. A distinguished businesswoman and writer, she examines the phenomenon and traces its imprint in our private and working lives, and within governments and organizations, and asks: What makes us prefer ignorance? What are we so afraid of? Why do some people see more than others? And how can we change?
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How Not to Be the Blind Leading the Blind
- By Cynthia on 06-29-13
What listeners say about Lab Rats
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gerardo A Dada
- 02-23-19
A much needed perspective on humanizing work
I was a Dan Lyons since he was writing Fake Steve Jobs. He is witty, direct, and mostly right. Disrupted was a great read. I know a number of people who work at HiubSpot and his story is candid, fun to read, and insightful.
When I started reading Lab Rats I was expecting a follow-up to Disrupted. It's not. but don't be disappointed. This book is even more important. It's about the need to make work more human. It's a call against greed, and for socially-responsible capitalism (even though the author does not use this term).
It's a fun read, as I expected. Dan's message is important. One everyone that should be mandatory for every startup executive. Dan is right about what is wrong in Silicon Valley, and to an extent, across the US.
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- William J Brown
- 10-27-18
Loved “Disrupted”, and this starts strong, but…
“Disrupted” was such a triumph in indictment of nonsense business models, frat boy culture, “this time is different” thinking, and ageism, all of which ran into the author like a buzzsaw. Of course, there was also two seasons righting for “Silicon Valley” and all the other landmark work (“not Steve Jobs”, etc), so when I first noticed I could pre-order “Lab Rats”, I was likely among the earliest to do so.
And, it starts out really strong, with a continuation and updated skewering of Amazon, Netflix, Reed Hoffman, Reed Hastings, Jeff Bozos, and so many others. His general thesis is fantastic — that old line businesses, desperately wanting to remain relevant, have been porting “practices” (such as they are) and film-flam management techniques, grafting these onto their certainly challenged business models (like Ford, as a good example).
But the last 3-4 chapters or so squandered all this good momentum. Dan’s antidote to amoral bro culture and Uber-like practices that dehumanize workers is … a floor cleaning business, or something, that gives its employees “true vacations” and “an opportunity to grow into senior management”.
Dan fails to recognize structural changes occurring in the way work is done, and no, we aren’t all going to pivot and launch mopping startups.
I may revise this later, but having just finished the audiobook, I was left uneven with the entirety of the effort.
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9 people found this helpful
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- DeWayne
- 05-28-20
It's a book about feeling as facts
I had originally left a negative review, but by the second act, the author redeemed himself. It turned from a woe is me to a real dissection of corporate America. I still wish I had more meat on its bones, rather than simply knives out. But it does correctly identify the current Zeitgeist.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kaarlis
- 07-11-19
Sometimes it seems like the author still has some unresolved resentment
While overall the book is balanced and author explains his statements well, sometimes he seems to have blind fits of rage where he just hurls insults or rants without much explanation and facts.
This book has encouraged me to look deeper into Basecamp and stuff by their owners.
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- fjv
- 03-22-19
An eye opener
This is a great book for managers and entrepreneurs alike. Truly valuable and insightful views on the value of creating great workplaces
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- Maio
- 04-09-19
Not even close to his last book Disrupted.
So I read Dans previous book Disturbed and loved it.. Love it so much, I purchased his new book Labs Rats. I think the difference between the books is striking.. Dans last book was a fantastic story of what really happen to the new .dot working world.. His Lab Rats book not a story at all, just a sting of complains about employers ad and how bad all the new tech companies are and how bad they treat their workers.. Nothing entertaining about it.. Constant complaining about the big techs like: netflix, amazon, linkedin, uber..... Come on Dan, give us a story that is funny, and interesting.. Not babble about how bad every company on the planet is..
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1 person found this helpful
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- Duck
- 02-02-21
great breakdown of the I.T. world & affected world
The book does a great job of describing how the IT contract world and lack of job security has provided more instability and unhappiness in work environment. I wonder if the next book will delve into the decline of unions in pensions and its effect on the increasing availability of good work
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- J. Scott
- 11-09-23
The right idea but based on questionable assumptions
Biggest gripe is the Author doesn’t substantiate many assumptions, though many are probably right. Nothing groundbreaking but decent points
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- Heidi
- 11-02-19
Leftist drivel
Leftist drivel and opinion overwhelms a reasonably simple business philosophy: take care of your employees who will then take care of your customers.
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5 people found this helpful
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- A. Mackenzie
- 05-31-19
Nice polemic - just wait till he talks about something you have experience with
Companies struggle with Agile. Yes they implement in stupid ways. Does not mean that Agile is bad, or that it’s not better than the waterfall method. To me it means it’s a new way that is not well understand. Also when old school execs try to implement something new, it doesn’t always work well - no shocker there.
His talks about stress and the high tech environment are more balanced and better informed.
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2 people found this helpful