An Accidental Manager

‘Pungent;’ ‘pithy;’ ‘irreverent;’ ‘hard-hitting;’ ‘hilarious;’ succinct;’ ‘wittily subversive;’ ‘entertaining;’ ‘compulsive reading.’ These are some of the epithets used to describe ‘An Accidental Manager – tales from the corporate jungle,’ Roger Collis’ new book, distilled from decades of experience as an international marketing executive and as a renowned newspaper and magazine columnist fighting the corner of road-warriors across the world.

The author brilliantly captures the absurdities, pretensions and jargon of the business jungle, and will quickly have you chuckling at the way he unfailingly spots the bogus and the modish. The reader will enjoy meeting the cast of characters who come to life in many of the stories: the Chairman; the devious Welshman; Guratsky, the author’s putative alta ego; his secretary, the bitch-goddess Helen; Mel Geist; Sammy Kalbfleish; and Stanley Zilch, the crazed soothsayer of the Blue Skies Research Institute in Broken Springs, Colorado. The witty, self-deprecating tales of the author’s travails of daily life in the South of France are a delight to read.

The book contains 134 fairly short easy-to-read columns, great for just dipping in to or as a long entertaining read.

About the Author

Roger Collis has been described as ‘the dean of business travel journalists in Europe who created the template for business travel columns in newspapers worldwide’, largely through his weekly column ‘The Frequent Traveler’ in the International Herald Tribune, (1985-2008) and as a contributing editor at the New York Times.

After University, the Army, and a stint in patent law, Roger conjured a job as copywriter with Colman, Prentis Varley – the largest British international advertising agency – on the fragile promise of a slim volume of poetry! He later became European marketing director and managing director at the Europe headquarters in Lausanne of the U.S. multinational Miles Laboratories; then spent four years as vice president, marketing and business development, with Cederroth, a Swedish healthcare group based in Geneva. He was headhunted in 1980 for his last corporate job as marketing and sales director for Merck, Sharp Dohme, British subsidiary of U.S. giant Merck Inc., before retreating to the South of France in 1980 to ‘reinvent’ himself as a journalist and broadcaster with local radio and the BBC World Service. Based once again in England, Roger now works as a voice artist and narrator.