Alice in Corporate Wonderland

R.T. Talasek, Ph.D.
PublishAmerica, LLP (2005)
ISBN 1413796818
Reviewed by Cathy Yanda for Reader Views (5/06)

Having met Lewis Carroll’s Alice when I was a child, it was fun to be re-introduced to her now that she has an Ivy League MBA and is beginning her first job in corporate America. R.T. Talasek brings together characters from the original “Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland”, other children’s stories, movies and rock-n-roll. “Alice in Corporate Wonderland” begins with Alice studying for her finals and nodding off to find herself at Wonderland, Inc. for her first day on the job. Alice, in typical fashion, gets separated from everyone and is lost in a long hallway.

She decides to quiz a group of vertically challenged men, bearing a strong resemblance to the Seven Dwarfs, she runs across in the hallway. She discovers they are blindly loyal to the company and simply do what they are told. As she quizzes further…”But don’t you know how your assignments tie to the goals of the company? How do you activities tie to the long-range strategic plan of the organization? How do you know when you are successful in completing your task when you don’t know what your goals are?”…the men are perplexed and reply, simply…”Now, we must return to the assignments that our supervisors have given us, because we know that it is imperative to the success of the company, and that we will be rewarded for our efforts..."

R.T. Talasek weaves many more valuable lessons into this brief volume of corporate adventures. At one point, Alice is told by Castillo Erpillar (Cat), her mentor at Wonderland, Inc., that she would read “Sun Tzu: The Art of War” is she wants to learn how to be successful at Wonderland Industries. Alice recalls that this is not the first time she has been advised to read this book.

Perhaps in the next adventure of Alice she will have picked up a copy and applied some of the wisdom. She reflects on some wisdom later, “Better to retreat and live to fight another day…” not sure whether it was from Sun Tzu or Top Gun. She decides at that point that maybe Cat had been right about the book. “Alice in Corporate Wonderland” is a well-written, concise volume which would be a valuable asset to anyone newly entering the corporate world. It also offers a fresh perspective to those who have been there for years.

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