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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-Bair Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Tim Sullivan, editorial director of Harvard Business Review Press.

He's the co-author with Ray Fissman of the for having me. So your book is about as the subtitle says the underlying

logic of the office but reading the book made me wonder if it was more like

the underlying illogic of the office and sort of maybe marvel that these

organizations get anything done at all.

How did you feel as you sort of embarked on this quest to uncover the logic of the office?

And did you end up feeling like this was a hopeful tale or sort of a cynical one?

I think it's ultimately hopeful. I don't think we need any help with our cynicism about offices.

We already feel pretty cynical about the way they operate and in fact

we feel so cynical about it that we read Dilbert and we watch the office and can

completely relate to that.

So I think the idea more was that we didn't want people to feel that it was only their

organization that was dysfunctional.

We didn't want people to think that everything could always be better because I think people think the grass is always greener

Right everything works better at a different organization mine is all screwed up and we want to show people that every organization faces tradeoffs.

And there are actually reasons why organizations have to make choices about the way they operate.

I hope by the time people finish the book that they feel maybe a little bit more Zen about their own

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