ARTS & CULTURE
THE CULT OFWE BY ELIOT BROWN & MAUREEN FARRELL
thrilling businesses of recent times wasn’t actually a shimmeringly successful tech giant. It was nothing more than a glorified estate agent. And if those numbers aren’t already making your toes curl, the rest of the stories will. This book is the result of years of dedicated reporting for The Wall Street Journal , with journalists Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell interviewing hundreds of WeWork employees and stakeholders to discover the answer to one very simple question: how could this happen? While WeWork’s financial downfall was very public, the hidden deals and investments which lay behind the headlines will make your eyebrows shoot up to the stratosphere. Employees were left jobless, investors were left with empty pockets, but the CEO? He left rich… Though no longer headed by the Neumanns, WeWork remains in business (though still experiencing eye-watering losses) and, if nothing else, reading The Cult Of We will be excellent homework for the two upcoming dramatisations of the Neumann tale. One is based on this book,
If you’ve ever stopped outside the shiny new office blocks on Station Road and wondered what WeWork does, this new book is an absolute must-read. A quick answer to the question is ‘spending other people’s money’ – but like all grifts, that’s just the half of it. In 2010, WeWork’s founder Adam Neumann was struggling to sell baby clothes. Less than a decade later, he was CEO of a $47-billion company – one of the highest-valued private businesses on the planet – which provided stylish office space and associated perks to thousands of smaller companies in big cities around the world. Yet behind the parties, the free drinks and chic interiors, on paper, WeWork was an accountant’s nightmare. The business was losing more than $3,000 every minute , which added up to $1.6 billion in 2018 alone. When the company imploded in September 2019, $40 billion of value evaporated almost overnight – resulting in the departure of Neumann and his wife Rebekah (chief brand and impact officer). Everyone finally realised that one of the most valuable, charismatic and
with Nicholas Braun ( Succession ’ s Cousin Greg) as Adam, and the other, Apple’s WeCrashed, stars Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto. Make a bowl of popcorn to stuff in your slack-jawed mouth, and strap in for this car-crash of a ride through what is – as the authors say in their introduction – a truly vital parable for modern business.
BOOM AND BUST Cult of We captures the zeitgeist of modern start-up culture, exploring the greed, charisma and madness of the WeWork saga – and what it means for business
24 OCTOBER 2021 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
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