Office Exposé

During 2013 and 2014 I was always thrilled when my in-box pinged with an e-mail from my friend Dan Lyons. A former colleague and a longtime technology journalist, he had left the magazine business to join HubSpot, a Boston-area marketing software company, but the job was instantly and obviously a bad fit. Although he’d been hired by the founders as a “marketing fellow,” his supervisors didn’t know precisely what to do with him. His forte was writing smart analyses of tech strategy, while the coin of the realm at HubSpot was posts like “35 of the Best Free Fonts You Should Download Now.” Then 52, Lyons was working with a gaggle of 20-somethings who regarded him as a strange old man. To blow off steam, he occasionally forwarded his boss’s inane memos to me or sent tales of other idiocies. Once or twice he mentioned that his surreal experience would make a great memoir. I figured he was kidding. He wasn’t. In Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, Lyons skewers the culture of HubSpot in particular and start-ups in general—the office Nerf gun battles, the focus on growth over profits, the young employees’ naive belief that they’re “changing the world” when they’re really just peddling B2B software. He also explores the tech world’s ageism. “This book is about more than HubSpot,” he writes. “[It’s] about what it’s like to try to reinvent yourself and start a new career in your fifties, particularly in an industry that is by and large hostile to older workers.” His new desk was outfitted with a yoga ball instead of a chair. Some of his male colleagues met in the lobby at noon each day for a push-up contest. Lyons was the only employee reluctant to dress in costume on Halloween. This humorous and well-crafted memoir is part of a proud literary tradition: the disgruntled ex-employee tell-all. It’s a genre that includes classic nonfiction accounts such as John DeLorean’s On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors (detailing the carmaker’s decline in the 1970s) and Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker (describing life at Salomon Brothers during the 1980s boom). It also features thinly veiled romans à clef such as The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and the recently released Opening Belle, Maureen Sherry’s fictionalized account of life on a Wall Street trading floor just before the 2008 global financial crisis. Readers love this genre for at least three reasons. First, journalists may try to write knowingly about companies from the outside, but insiders have an unrivaled ability to layer on details and capture workplace absurdities in Technicolor. For example, in the opening to Liar’s Poker, Lewis describes the CEO of Salomon strolling around the trading floor and casually challenging a subordinate to wager $1 million on a game that involved serial numbers on dollar bills. Sherry, who spent 12 years at Bear Stearns, depicts a workplace rife with sexism and harassment: Men feel free to boast about their families, whereas women feel compelled to hide family photos; and Belle, the main character, endures daily groping from colleagues and come-ons from clients. (Reese Witherspoon will play her in the movie adaptation.) Tell-alls also constitute a form of revenge against bad managers, something that appeals to the downtrodden Dilbert in all of us. Consider Barton Swaim’s well-regarded 2015 memoir, The Speechwriter, which chronicles his years working as an aide in South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s office. On his first day a colleague told Swaim, “Welcome to hell,” and this account does paint Sanford (now a South Carolina congressman) as a type of demon—cheap, slovenly, mean, inarticulate, and self-centered—even before he became famous for a five-day disappearance to “hike the Appalachian Trail” when he’d actually gone to Argentina to carry on an affair. Finally, memoirs like these provide comfort and reassurance to anyone who’s occasionally unhappy at work. They’re a polished version of an art form that many of us know well: the whining that typically takes place over drinks after work. Reading these admittedly one-sided accounts of life at HubSpot and Vogue and GM, one can’t help thinking, Hey, at least my employer isn’t that messed up. To be sure, some of Lyons’s misery was self-inflicted. He antagonized and mocked colleagues and made little effort to fit in. When Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, lauded its youth-oriented culture in an interview with the New York Times (“In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated”), Lyons wrote an angry Facebook post alleging age discrimination, which went viral. Companies in the crosshairs of a tell-all have no effective defense, because any attempt at refutation inevitably draws more attention. Some subjects try to be good sports. Anna Wintour, for instance, attended the red-carpet premiere of the movie based on her former assistant’s book. (Yes, she even wore Prada.) Other companies fall back on the etiquette that’s prescribed when someone passes gas in public: Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen. When Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s former contributing editor Toby Young wrote the unflattering memoir How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Carter said, “You’re forced into playing it cool, when all you really want to do is throttle them.” At HubSpot playing it cool wasn’t the first impulse. In July 2015 the company’s chief marketing officer was fired for attempting to steal a copy of Lyons’s draft manuscript—an incident that sparked news stories and an FBI investigation, giving the book an unexpected promotional boost. (Halligan was fined by the board for failing to report the incident.) In the winter, when I asked HubSpot if it wanted to comment on Disrupted for this article, Halligan responded with a statement praising his company as a great place to work—never once mentioning Lyons or the book.

Office Exposé

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