If you are looking for a relief from reality, a rose-colored view of the world, blithe inspiration, and sappy-happy endings, Shafted: Cautionary Tales in Business is not for you. Shafted will not put a tear on your cheek, restore your faith in human nature, or give you goosebumps of sweetness and light. They will, more likely, piss you off and make you angry for the rest of the day, if not the week.

Shafted offers you the other side of the coin - unsweetened, dismayingly true stories from real life. Shafted takes off your rose-colored glasses and exposes the mean-spirited, greedy side of human behavior. Shafted is the antidote to Chicken Soup. The tales are not framed in a judgmental mode that bemoans the loss of high moral standards and golden rule ethics of yesteryear. Shafted just tells the stories straight up and true, and lets you come to your own conclusions.

The premise of Shafted comes from the proverb, “Praemonitus, praemunitus,” or “Forewarned is forearmed.” But it probably goes back even further, to the earliest clans of homo sapiens of Eurasia, who were subject to the earliest iterations of human nature, which even then must have enabled those who were forewarned and forearmed to anticipate, survive, and prevail!