The Acronym Hydra
Every severed initialism grows two more. Every framework is onboarding for the next framework. No one remembers what the first one was for.
Book Two · Available Now
A Workplace Comedy About Impossible Tasks
A satirical novel about what it actually feels like to push the boulder inside a modern organization — and what a leader does when they realize the hill was designed that way.
The opening
Evan Calder arrived at the agency believing public service meant something, that modernization was possible, and that a talented systems engineer could walk into a federal agency and, through sheer competence and goodwill, make things better.
He was twenty-nine then, and stupid.
Now he is thirty-three, and tired.
Sisyphus.gov is a sharp, funny, uncomfortably accurate novel about the mythology of the modern workplace — the contradictory directives from on high, the acronym hydras, the watermelon metrics that look green on the outside and bleed red on the inside, and the quiet competents who keep the whole machine running without ever being thanked.
It is a workplace comedy with teeth. It is also, underneath the laughter, a serious diagnosis of why good organizations break good people.
Field guide to the world of the novel
Readers describe Sisyphus.gov as the rare kind of workplace novel that names things they have felt for years but never had language for.
Every severed initialism grows two more. Every framework is onboarding for the next framework. No one remembers what the first one was for.
Green on the outside. Red on the inside. A dashboard is a story told by the person holding the marker.
Move fast. Be careful. Cut costs. Invest in the future. Be agile. Document everything. Do not ask which of these takes priority.
The quiet competents. The ones who know where the secret latches are, who fix the machines no one understands, who pass institutional memory across generations without being thanked. The reason the organization still works. The people the novel is ultimately on the side of.
Underneath the laughter
Sisyphus.gov is the case study to The Lost ARC's framework. Every failure in the novel — every exhausted engineer, every broken promotion, every meeting that produces nothing but a meeting — maps onto a diagnosis the framework names. Autonomy suppressed. Relatedness fractured. Competence unused. Trust collapsed.
Readers who want the clinical version of the diagnosis will find it in The Lost ARC. Readers who want to feel the diagnosis from the inside — to laugh, wince, and recognize themselves — should start here.
Get the book
Available in paperback and e-book through JRC Productions 323 and major retailers.
Also in the catalog
Autonomy, Relatedness, Competence
The research-grounded framework behind the diagnosis — a synthesis of five decades of motivation and trust research into a single diagnostic system.
Read more The Practice30 Maxims of a Balanced Life
Thirty maxims for the individual who must lead, endure, and stay whole when the systems around them do not cooperate.
Read more All three booksSee how the three books connect as a single body of work.
The catalog