Before Steve McKevitt's Why The World Is Full Of Useless Things, there was City Slackers, which is an equally funny book.Written with lots of humorous anecdotes, it is an indictment of the "new economy" that has created slacker jobs in public relations, marketing and the media where measurement of productiveness of an individual is virtually impossible.
Output productivity is not dependent on how much work gets done, but how successful a campaign or product is after its launch. Such results, of course, is pretty much left to the hands of chance sometimes, with some results doing better than others. A process producing a lot of misses accompanied by a few major hits.
"City slackers" is a term used to describe the workers in such fields who get away with doing minimal work and taking the most credit, and trying their utmost to further their own careers. Companies apparently bear the brunt because what they are paying for can be nothing more than hot air and employees with very nice stories to tell: The all-talk-and-no-substance phenomenon.
This new economy, by the way, incorporates the much lauded knowledge and information sector that is supposedly burgeoning into a limitless frontier.
This optimism in unlimited upper bound success reminds me of scalable careers mentioned in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan. The down side is that there is just so many mediocre campaigns and products out there and no systematic way of telling the good from the less good that everyone is deluded into thinking that they are producing great stuff.
Delusion, I tell you.
