Martin Lukes

Martin Lukes is a fictional character in (and putative author of) a satirical column in the Financial Times. Lukes was also the subject (and putative author) of the spinoff novel Martin Lukes: Who Moved My BlackBerry "cowritten with Lucy Kellaway". The column appeared to have ended in January 2008, as detailed below, but returned on 7 January 2010.

The column and book are written as a sequence of e-mails usually comprising Lukes' end of a series of running correspondences with other characters in Lukes' business and private life. The book is therefore a modern example of an epistolary novel.

The column has chronicled Martin Lukes' ups and downs in his career at a-b glöbâl, a multinational based in Atlanta whose business (or even market sector) has never been made clear. Initially a middle manager of the UK subsidiary, he eventually became its Chairman before finally becoming CEO of the multinational in late 2007.

The novel chronicles a year in the life of Martin Lukes. Although it is never completely clear what this job actually entails, he advances his career by embracing every management fad around. Since this leaves little time for other activities, he communicates – in order of importance – with his coach, colleagues, wife and children by e-mail.

Martin Lukes is a pastiche of every management fad and is an antidote to the orthodox management style taught in most MBA programmes and routinely lambasted by Lucy Kellaway in her business life column. The reader never knows what he or his company actually does. Lukes is constantly engaged in a battle for others to understand his Creovation™ concept (a portmanteau of creativity and innovation in true management school style), apply Integethics™ (integrity and ethics), and engage in Green Sky Thinking™. He is constantly disappointed as famous managers fail to reply to his emails.

Though one can easily discern Martin's lack of popularity within a-b glöbâl's management team, he manages to maintain his position or even rise through the company due to his superiors' own incompetence and the fact that his superiors are usually fired before they have the chance to fire Martin themselves.

The column appeared every Thursday in the Financial Times for a number of years prior to the book being published, and continued to appear each week until December 2007. The fact that FT columnist Lucy Kellaway was author of the column was never disclosed openly until the time of the book's publication and is still never mentioned within the column.

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Wikipedia