Failed history scholar-turned scribe (zero original research here!) re-packages his formula columns from the Economist concerning some aspect of the effects of the Second Machine Age on the modern workplace. The introduction is the best part of this unexpectedly disappointing book. One would have thought the author of a compendium of his work would have taken the oppty to add to or at least edit previously published material as a real writer would. Nope. Wooldridge somehow believes that his editorship of the rather pedestrian Economist gives him special privilege to replace the hot, weary work of original creation with that obnoxious, superior English irony provided in the usual clipped journalistic style. One can easily imagine the spoon-fed PR drivel from which his commentary derives. Efforts to be provocative become tiresome and even annoying absent actual research. There is a place for this kind of slack commentary, I suppose, but more work would have made such broad, pop generalizations truly useful. In underachieving, the author exudes precisely the kind of complacency the book criticizes among CEOs who fail. Perhaps it's time for the Economist to find a new, less comfortable editor.