The Force

If you want to know how America’s business wars are waged in the trenches, The Force is for you. A gripping book.
–Newsday
SKILLFULLY REPORTED, INSIGHTFUL…Dorsey lights up our vision of the American salesman with his own sharply reported eyewitness account.
–People
In this fascinating book, reporter David Dorsey turns a year on the Xerox sales force into an emotionally charged human drama. The Force tracks Fred Thomas and his sales team from the shiny glass office building where work starts at dawn to the rolling green country clubs where they woo customers, from the smoke-filled bars where they unwind to the plush suburban bedrooms where they try to forget the pressures of the day. And as the year unfolds, we get swept up in the burning question at the center of all of their lives: will they make their quota?
Meet Fred Thomas. He’s a real person, working in a real job in a real company. And he’s the hero of The Force, David Dorsey’s brilliant chronicle of life in the real world of contemporary business. Dorsey’s book draws a picture that is as intimate as a great novel. It is a book that captures in the most essential details and the most sweeping prose the cross-wired paradoxes that lie at the heart of the New Economy. Fred is Us. He’s the next-generation Willie Loman working in a world put into hyperdrive…Fred is the salesman as Everyman.
–Harvard Business Review

From the Trade Paperback edition.