Technologically Skwair ▢ blog
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Print by Marian Hardey. We Are All Squares. March 2020.
Print, Books Are Bananas, Mariann Hardey, 2026
AuthorProfessor Mariann Hardey Auditing the digital world for the people it was designed to exclude. This morning, I stood in a lecture hall and asked a room full of undergraduates a dangerous question: “How many of you bought a business book this year because a TikTok influencer told you it would make you a billionaire by twenty-five?” The silence was dense, like velvet. But the eyes shifted. We call this Impression Management. We know the algorithm works; our market data reveals one in three book buyers now cites TikTok as their primary influence, but we hate to admit we are part of the data set. I am teaching a module called How to Read Business. On the surface, it is a course about bestsellers; we dissect Atomic Habits, The Long Win, and Daring Greatly. But really, it is a course about intellectual self-defence. In the same way that Yale and Stanford revolutionised psychology by teaching the Science of Happiness (see Coursera The Science of Well-Being), shifting the focus from treating illness to cultivating well-being, we need a similar revolution in business education. We need to stop teaching students how to follow maps that no longer exist and start teaching them how to survive the uncertainty, instability, and unreliability of voices in the machine. The Stealth Help Economy We are living in the age of the Stealth Help Economy, a global industrial complex now valued at nearly $50 billion. We are buying these books at record speeds, stacking them on our nightstands in a towering, precarious pile of hope. There is a Japanese word for this: Tsundoku. The act of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up without reading them. Why do we do this? Why do we hoard maps to a destination we never visit? The answer is not just fear; it is ritual. In the Stealth Help economy, the book is no longer a text; it is a totem. We place Atomic Habits on the nightstand the way a medieval peasant placed a relic on the altar, hoping that proximity to the object will grant us the virtue we feel we lack. We are buying indulgences for the sin of exhaustion. We feel guilty for not being optimised, for not being a morning person, for not having grit. The transaction delivers a dopamine hit because it promises a future where we are finally fixed. It is a mecha suit we buy but never wear. But as I tell my students: owning the map is not the same as walking the path. And the path is currently underwater. The Map is Not the Territory (And the Territory is on Fire) Traditional business education promises a static reality. It hands students a map and says, “Turn left at Grindset, go straight past Synergy, and you will arrive at CEO.” But business is not a terrain. Business is a weather system. It is chaotic, emotional, and built entirely on human irrationality. One day, the sun is shining; the next day, a competitor launches an AI tool, your funding is cut, or a global pandemic hits. The terrain didn’t change. The weather changed. If you are standing in a hurricane holding a road atlas, you are going to get wet. My course is cutting and blunt about this reality: Business books are autopsies, not recipes. They dissect a success that has already died. Worse, they are written by Unreliable Narrators. When we read a CEO’s memoir, we are not reading data; we are reading mythology. We are reading the bio they wrote for themselves, stripped of the luck, the privilege, and the chaos that actually built the empire. In my course, we place two texts side-by-side to expose this mythology: Ray Dalio’s Principles and Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.
Both authors are Unreliable Narrators. The man claims he conquered the world because he was rational. The woman claims she survived the world because she was disciplined. My students learn to look beyond the authors loose cover biography. They learn that Dalio’s principles collapse without his capital, and Sandberg’s advice collapses without her nanny. We read these books not to emulate them, but to see clearly what they are trying to hide. I teach my students to read a business strategy the way they would read Jane Austen or Sci-Fi. Do not trust the voice telling the story. Look for the gaps. Look for who is excluded. Look for the itchy moment where the sleek narrative of Synergy clashes with the messy reality of human resentment. That friction? That is the only truth in the room. Summary is for AI. Critique is for Humans. This brings us to the elephant in the seminar room: Artificial Intelligence. In 2026, any AI can summarise Atomic Habits in three seconds. It can extract the key themes. It can list the five habits. Summary has become a commodity. I teach my students a hard truth: If you submit a report that simply summarises a text, you are producing a commodity. You are producing a zero. Why? Because the machine possesses a vast library, but it lacks a biography. It has no body. It never sat in an awkward internship meeting where the Synergy failed. It never felt the plastic taste of a corporate value that didn’t align with reality. We do use AI in my course, but we use it as a Sparring Partner. We pitch our messy, human reality, these are our Itchy Moments, against the machine’s smooth logic. To make this concrete, let’s look at the difference between a Commodity Submission (Bad Practice) and a Practitioner Submission (Good Practice). The Commodity (The Zero Grade)
The Critique (The First Class Grade)
The Sparring Partner This is how we use the tool. We do not ask the AI to write the essay. We ask the AI to represent the Textbook Ideal, and then we fight it. We say to the machine: “You say Synergy works. Here is my data from a failed group project where Synergy resulted in resentment. Reconcile these two things.” The machine usually breaks. And in that breakage, the student learns the most important lesson of business: The theory is clean, but the people are messy. And you are hired to manage the people, not the theory. Donald Schön called this the Swampy Lowlands. The high ground of theory is hard and dry, and AI thrives there. But real leadership happens in the swamp, in the messy, confused, unsolvable problems of human interaction. AI cannot survive the swamp. It rusts. You, however, can learn to swim. The Trojan Horse Assessment This is why I tell my students that this assessment is a Trojan Horse. They might view it as a hoop to jump through for a degree. But I view it as preparation for the defining moment of their early careers. One day, they will be in a job interview. The interviewer will ask a generic question about teamwork or leadership. Most candidates will quote a textbook. They will give a map answer. My students will give a weather answer. They will be able to say: “I analysed a specific failure in my previous team. I critiqued the standard management advice using the work of Amy Edmondson or Donald Schön, and I built a new protocol for psychological safety based on the data of what actually happened.” That answer changes the temperature of the room. It shifts them from a student who follows instructions to a practitioner who solves problems. World-Leading Pedagogy Currently, we are witnessing the rise of Quiet Ambition. The media calls it laziness; I call it a rational audit of a bankrupt system. This generation is burnt out before they even begin. They are rejecting the Broken Ladder, the old promise that if they destroy their mental health for a decade, they will be rewarded with safety and status. They have seen the data, and they know the ladder is a lie. They are trading the performative vertical climb of the past for the sustainable horizontal autonomy of the future. And this shift terrifies the Stealth Help economy. Because if you don’t want to be a CEO, you don’t need to buy the map. If you are content with enough, the algorithm loses its power over you. My course is not about teaching students how to climb a rotting structure; it is about giving them the permission to build a house on the ground. To teach them business as usual is a disservice. We must teach them intellectual self-defence. We must teach them to read the wind. This is not just a reading course; it is a survival guide for the post-AI, post-ladder world. We don’t need more map-readers. We need meteorologists. Links and References Section
The Course
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