Wrote, Designed, Published Book "Exec on the Desk"

Exec on the Desk: The Never-Before-Told Story of How the Future of Work Came to Be is a short story that imagines a "future of work" that takes a strange turn:

Organizations deploy millions of "micro" managers to keep an eye on employees, no matter where or when they work.

From blank page to published book took less than 80 hours of work over less than two months. The book was customized for three formats — hardback (published via IngramSpark), paperback (published by Amazon), and ebook (published on Kindle and made free as a separate PDF version on Linkedin).

I executed every aspect of the writing, creation, and publication of this book, down to creating a website using Ghost, save for one piece: I used Midjourney (generative AI) to provide the raw illustrations that were then composed into all the spreads in the book. This process was involved, requiring running ~1700 prompts in Midjourney and then selecting correct outputs, adjusting transparency (or editing the images), and then composing the spreads within the book (including text layouts). While a few pages use only one or two images from Midjourney, some pages use dozens.

This was a unique (fun!) project and an experiment to see how fast one person could execute on an idea.

The concept for Exec on the Desk was an extension of the now popular shelf elf, reimagining that idea for the corporate world. I use the book to talk about what's possible with content and to stand up ideas about remote work, return to office mandates, surveillance, and more. Given time and budget, it would be easy to create an actual "doll" too (but at this time that's outside the scope of what I wanted to do).

Perhaps you'd like to do something like this for your big idea, your product category, your industry. If so, let's ideate together. Maybe I can help.

The book is available at book retailers like Amazon (hardback, paperback, Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (hardback)!