'Laziness beats working any day'

LONDON - Hard work just doesn't pay, so it's far better to be a slacker, a French author says. "The work you do is fundamentally pointless," says Corinne Maier in Hello Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay. "You could be replaced any day of the week by some idiot off the street. So do as little work as possible."

In the author's native France, her slackers' guide to management has been a huge hit, racking up more than 12 reprints and selling more than 150,000 copies.

An economist for the electricity giant Electricite de France, the author of nine books and a practising psychoanalyst, Maier writes in a bright and breezy style and offers many insights into modern business.

And, perhaps more than she realises, she tells a good deal about France, and why that country is struggling to get its groove back.

Granted, plenty of other people have thought that corporate life is mostly a sham - and many of them are sitting behind desks in their suits and ties right now.

Still, the point is the wit with which she pursues her hapless, self-important prey.

"Once in the middle of a meeting on motivation I dared to say that the only reason I came to work was to earn my crust: 15 seconds of total silence followed and everyone looked embarrassed," she writes.

"Work derives from an instrument of torture - in French (travail) at any rate - but it is still de rigueur to say you work because you are interested in your job."

Indeed, pretence is one of the main activities of business.

"Only communist regimes have churned out more jargon than modern business," she writes. "George Orwell was the first to realise that the jargon of the Soviets was not just the usual waffle - ludicrous but inoffensive - but a genuine metamorphosis of language for political purposes."

Along the way Maier has some razor-sharp insights into corporate life. She explains companies' obsession with hiring young people by observing that they don't mind talking contradictory nonsense - the main thing their employers expect of them. And companies say they want their employees to show originality, yet are terrified of anything unfamiliar. Like small children, they say they want something but really don't.

Maier's very French outlook extends to her 1960s, monolithic vision of big business. In her world, corporations are big, industrial combines with few women or minorities; hierarchies and wage structures are rigid; nobody takes risks and new ideas aren't welcomed.

The French are not naturally lazy people: if they were, they'd settle for fewer varieties of cheese. Yet French business is stuck in a 1960s cul-de-sac. Maybe when it breaks out of it, writers like Maier will see that business doesn't have to be quite as pointless as she thinks.

- BLOOMBERG