A boss can be mean, irritating, strict, brilliant, amazing, or all of these before lunch. I have had the best one and the worst one, and in my years as a banker, each of them left a mark. They honed me not only as a professional but as a person, and some lessons arrived far more gently than others.
So when I picked up Angry Junglee Bosses by Cross, I felt a flicker of recognition before I had turned a single page.
The premise is deliciously strange. The book is set in a world where COVID-19 has wiped out every human being and ushered in the Age of Animals. Teh animals now inhabit offices, systems and hierarchies built, perfected and grudgingly tolerated by the humans who came before. And here is the irony: they have inherited the politics along with the furniture. The corridors may be different, but the whispers sound exactly the same.
I will be honest. The book starts a little slowly. A world run by animals needs explaining, and the author must lay that groundwork so the reader can follow without stumbling. Be patient. A few pages in, the scaffolding falls away and you find yourself immersed.
At the centre is Mr Fox, who could be any one of us. He is diligent and does his best work, and his performance is good, even great. Yet it is forever being undermined by colleagues who do not want him to succeed, and who would be quite content to see him gone. As someone who has spent years around audits, controls and compliance, I read this as a study in operational risk of the human kind. No system can fully control for envy. Nothing in a policy manual protects an honest employee from a whisper campaign.
What Cross does well is show, slowly and without melodrama, how office politics erodes a person. It rarely arrives as one dramatic blow. It comes as a withheld email, a credit quietly claimed by someone else, a meeting held without you. If you have ever been the one bullied, you will wince. If you have ever been the one who bullied, and let us be honest, many of us have been on the wrong side of this at some point, you may feel a small, uncomfortable tug of conscience.
The satire carries a lighter thread, too. The humour keeps the book from becoming a grievance, and the chosen animals fit their roles with a wry precision. There is also a quiet undercurrent on conservation beneath the corporate satire. At 226 pages, it is a quick, easy read. And the inspiration behind each employees’, err.. animals’ name is given in the glossary at the end. Don’t miss it.
Where did it fall short for me? The slow opening, mainly. And I wanted a little more depth from some of the supporting cast, those who plot against Fox, to understand what drives them beyond plain ambition. A richer motive would have made the villains more unsettling.
Still, the book works. If you are a corporate employee, you will find yourself in its pages, whichever side of the desk you sit on. If you are not, you will enjoy it simply as a clever, sharp-toothed story.
My rating: 3.5/5
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