A satirical company to launch a best selling author’s new book, Bad Services

The Bad Services Corporation isn’t a real company, it’s satire, but one with a purpose. 

By creating it, we set out to explore, expose and interrogate what makes a bad service. To pull at the threads of what feels like a common experience for many. We spend 15 billion hours on ‘life admin’ every year (in the UK) and despite decades of promises that new technology alone will alleviate us from this burden, we’re left with a question of why are some services still as bad as they are? 

As the book Bad Services says, ‘No one gets out of bed in the morning and sets out to make a bad service’.  The blame for who makes a Bad Services (almost) never sits with one person or team, instead bad services evolve over many years as a byproduct of a lack of purpose, a detachment from our users, a lack of understanding or our materials, inability to take risks, and a structure that doesn’t work anymore.

The driving force behind this counterintuitive behavior as society isn’t easy to unpick. Are we in the fall out of late-capitalism and/or experiencing multiple polycrises? Many of us feel the inequities and absurdities of the modern economy. Or is it a combination of monopolistic corporate power, measurement targets, exponential growth, relentless profit chasing, extractive IT contracts and obsessive technological progress?

Either way, our services exist in economic systems that have set the stage for these bad services to flourish.

A fake company induction

To celebrate the launch of the new book Bad Services, we built an entire fake company, The Bad Services Corporation, and created a series of satirical induction training videos by a fake CEO.

We also shipped a live staff shop with standard issue coats, t-shirts and socks, a useless CEO AI bot that always ends in dead ends and training manuals for staff.

Everything we could to pull the thread of what bad modern day organisations and their services looks and feels like.