“Company,” by Max Barry
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Are you a fan of “The Office”?

If you answered in the affirmative then you’ll love “Company,” a delightfully pointed satire of modern corporate culture.

Drawn from Barry’s tenure at Hewlett Packard, the book is set in the fictional Zephyr Holdings building, which from the outside is a “just another bland corporate monolith.”

Once we look behind the bland façade, we learn that none of the employees actually understands what the company sells, no one has seen the CEO in a long while, and that the entire sales department is embroiled in a controversy over a missing donut.

Here’s the hilariously nonsensical Zephyr mission statement:

Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.

Without giving away too much of the story, I’ll just say that it turns out that Zephyr sells their product—“training”—to other departments within the company. When a bright-eyed new hire decides to investigate this absurd arrangement, things get a little crazy.