Name: Cubed
ISBN: 9780385536578

Nikil Saval

Draws from popular books, movies, comic strips, management literature, and business history to show how the white-collar world came to be, from the mid-nineteenth century to today, and reveals what it might become.

A Secret History of the Workplace

Cubed

Ellen Chisa

I loved this book. Many of the other reviews mention that they found it distracting to wander through various topics - but I loved it. I felt like hearing perspective from films, books, labor unions, architecture, and office culture really added to a holistic picture of modern offices.

The author does take a firm point of view in the book (rather than just aggregating data), but that didn't bother me at all.

I particularly enjoyed learning about some of the things I'd totally missed - I had no idea that white collar workers had refused to unionize because they wanted to feel as though they had upward mobility. Similarly, I didn't realize that work "campuses" had been prevalent before the dotcom era.

(I'd agree that the tagline "secret" is misleading - but I hadn't really factored that into my decision to read the book).

Lance Willett

I enjoyed this in-depth look at the history of workplaces, though there weren't as many secrets as just good old fashioned research. It went down a few social and cultural tangents that were nonetheless interesting. Fun to see GitHub featured at the end, as well as a few coworking spaces like HUB and GRid70. The author's foretelling of working anywhere, anytime — and maybe all the time — isn't so much history as reality for many remote workers already.

Cubed A Secret History of the Workplace

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