The Ministry of Common Sense

How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS

De: Martin Lindstrom

Narrado por: Robert Fass

A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves - and our companies - of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plague every office.

You try to reserve a conference room for a crucial client meeting via your company’s new-and-improved computer service, only to find that every conference room is booked - seemingly forever. Your weekly conference call is hijacked by video screens freezing, cords not working, and employees dropping in and out. You then sit through an endless PowerPoint presentation that everyone claims they’ve read, no one has, and that could have been summarized in one page.

What has happened to common sense? And how can we get it back? Companies, it seems, have become so entangled in their own internal issues, and further beset by reams of invisible red tape, that they’ve lost sight of their core purpose. Inevitably, they pay the price.

Best-selling author Martin Lindstrom combines numerous real‑life examples of corporate common sense gone wrong with his own ingenious plan for restoring logic - and sanity - to the companies and people most in need. A must-hear for today’s executives, managers, and office workers, The Ministry of Common Sense is funny, entertaining, and immensely practical.

Narrated by Robert Fass. Two-time winner of the prestigious Audie Award as well as numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, veteran actor Robert Fass has narrated more than 200 unabridged audiobooks by modern and classic fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Joyce Carol Oates, Carlos Fuentes, Jeffrey Deaver, and Lee Child, as well as best-selling and prize-winning nonfiction works in history, politics, health, journalism, philosophy, business, and memoir.

©2021 Martin Lindstrom (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Good

Good listening. I enjoyed the authors explanation about different organizations. I learned to remind myself of common sense!

Spot on!

This book is spot on! Such a good read, highly recommended. I could see my company in every paragraph!

90% frustrated whining 10% useful content

After hearing the author on the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast I was excited to download his book and learn some of his techniques for decreasing red tape and bureaucracy. I am very disappointed to find this is a sarcastic book contains mostly with whining stories and examples of what not to do and only 10% suggestions of what to do.

I think the only way to glean benefit from this book, if you are not someone who enjoys hearing someone else complain, would be to buy the physical book and flip forward through 90% of the pages to the actual suggestions.

A long winded useless book

The author seems to think they're a genius because they have the mystical power of "common sense", where the majority of business executives don't. While there is a core of a valid critique here, the author spends most of his time trying to be a comedian instead of actually breaking down what common sense is and how to apply it. Besides "listen to your customer", there's very little in this book.