Invisible Handcuffs: Business Fetish Run Amok

Before the millennium turned, we thought we had the formula: get the best education, get hired into the most respected companies, and work your ass off. Take a few visionary risks and—with a little luck—wealth, security, and happiness would be ours. Our tidy business solar system was like an elementary school poster. Our all-knowing, all-powerful sun, the stock market was at the center. Only a fool would claim to be smarter than the market. Then it happened. Just when we thought it would go on forever, our sun was attacked by a dark energy, and the planets were thrown out of orbit. Our world tilted on its axis, making our homes worthless, our jobs expendable and even our weather off-kilter. We were changed forever. What’s an entrepreneur-minded MBA to do? Business, of course. Part-self-help, part memoir, all revealing, Invisible Handcuffs chronicles one such soul, Brian Sroub, piloting his way through the world’s best-known companies—Procter & Gamble, General Electric, Sony, Hearst, Cleveland Clinic, and Silicon Valley start-ups too numerous to mention … where he faced down the new business order, fought the good fight, learned way too much about human nature, and eventually came to peace with himself and the modern world.