Fiction Book Club Selections for the Training Department

During a break in this morning's team meeting, I had a great idea.  Thinking about ways to bring what I love to our department, I thought--wow!  Wouldn't it be cool to have a book club!  Given the inclinations of the others in the department, though, I would have to find a way to make sure we didn't drift toward nonfiction.  I know!  We could arrange our selections thematically to correspond with the classes we teach, or topics we promote, or--even better!--to correspond with our "certificate programs," which bring everything together (classes, philosophy, whatever).  Unfortuately, when I started brainstorming, this is what happened:

• Web Design - Burning Chrome by William Gobson
• Desktop Publishing - The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
• Personal Development - The Hunger Games trilogy
• Office Administration - "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville
• Diversity - Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Communication Styles - Ulysses by James Joyce; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; The Stranger by Albert Camus

Yeah... Perhaps I'll wait to propose this.  Indefinitely.

Doing What you Love. . . Or Not

Lately, this article has been circulating among my friends on Facebook.  Titled, "In the Name of Love" and printed first by Jacobin Magazine and then by Slate, the article is a timely response to the job market and unemployment crises.  It traces our job angst and the exploitation of professional labor to bad job advice--namely, "do what you love."

Blaming the individual for explotation is a "blaming the victim" model.


1. Graduate and professional programs and the workforce are full of people who are in it for the money.

2. Being saitisfied with your work is an ROI for employers--and not for the reasons you think.

In HR, we focus on knowing your strengths, and helping supervisors identify talent and nurture growth. Why?  Because even if the bottom line is not your fulfillment, a satisfied employee is a productive employee.

3.  Salaried office jobs are "salaried"--that is, non-hourly--to allow for the employee to work overtime without compensation in order to get projects done.  It's not just teachers and academics.


4. Doing what we love on our own time is great in theory, but rarely practical.


5. If we don't do what we love--or at least like--we allow work to kill our souls.

What about a vocation?
Isn't it a little socialist to just do what society requires of us?

--making a job out of what you love is not necessarily the problem--the problem is how you frame "doing what you love."