Americans waste an estimated 25 billion hours a year in meetings and brainstorms. That equates to $37 billion in waste for people to talk past one another. And worse, it's burning people out and causing them to quit.

This isn't a remote work problem-this is a collaboration problem, remote and in person alike. The reason is almost too simple: nobody ever taught us how to collaborate. Robert Berris asked over 100 leaders the same question: has anyone ever trained you how to collaborate? And the answer was always no. Companies say it's critical for success but leave it entirely to chance.

I Hate Working Here argues that great collaborators are built, not born. Berris treats collaboration as a model you can take apart, understand, and rebuild on purpose. Inside you'll learn how to:

• Understand the power and personality dynamics to see what's steering team decisions
• Turn vague company values into principles that people choose to follow
• Design meetings and conversations worth attending (and cut out the ones that aren't)
• Diagnose where your team's time is going and spend it more deliberately
• Treat strategy as a hypothesis to test, rather than a plan that needs defending

Each section includes workshops, canvases, and scripts that Berris uses with his teams and clients, alongside honest accounts of his own failures.

Collaboration is the connective tissue that helps companies run. But it's also the experience of your workday and the people you deal with every day. Fixing how we collaborate is the secret to helping people love coming to work instead of dreading it.