The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

So I was in our weekly Missions Dept/Communications Dept meeting on Wednesday morning, and Kem Meyer piped up toward the end and grabbed a copy of Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind from the top of her book shelf. She asked if i was familiar with Pink, and while i hadn't read New Mind, i had heard his name before from discussions with Ron Martoia. Then she told me that Pink had won an award that landed him a stint in Japan studying Manga (it's basically "print Anime"... but don't call it a comic book), and had produced his next work as a treatise on business survival and market leadership, but using the Japanese traditional graphic representation of it for effect. The end result is a fun-looking new book called The Adventures of Johnny Bunko. There's a hilarious trailer for the book on Amazon.com, but the general jist is that the protagonist (Johnny Bunko) finds himself in a dead-end job with the Boggs Company and little prospects of advancement or satisfaction. During his time there, he discovers (through his interaction with an attractive "career counselor" named Diana), the 6 critical lessons necessary to understand to survive:

* There is no plan.
* Think strengths, not weaknesses.
* It's not about you.
* Persistence trumps talent.
* Make excellent mistakes.
* Leave an imprint.

I'll be downloading the book for my Kindle tomorrow, and will comment here on my thoughts after finishing it (hopefully) this weekend.

The concept, interestingly, reminds me of an actual Japanese manga/anime called Salaryman Kintaro, which has enjoyed considerably popularity in Japan, and is available for viewing (with English subtitles) here in the States via Netflix (if you're a subscriber). In the series, Kintaro is a former gang leader who decides to join a local corporation after losing his wife. In the corporation, he uses his "street smarts" to challenge long-held corporate protocols, and manages to best most of the corporate moguls in the process by blending his savage "gangsta" tactics with simple nobility and a refusal to do the dishonorable. The series provides interesting social commentary into the Japanese psyche and the tensions often held between the underlying morality of the Bushido-based culture and the bottom-line-driven bloodthirstiness of most corporations.