The Time Seller: A Business Satire

The Time Seller, the second book of business fiction from Fernando Trías de Bes—coauthor of the internationally acclaimed bestseller Good Luck—is not your standard business model book nor a “get with the program” corporate drone story. It breaks the mold and offers a funny (and perhaps existential)?meditation on time, work, meaning, and the true costs of “selling out” to the system.?Trías de Bes has written an acerbic commentary that seeks to awaken those bound to a routine that has become the source of alienation.

This deceptively simple story reminds us that the system should take from the individual only the time that is fair and absolutely necessary, and it should, in turn, provide him or her with the means to express love, humanity, spirituality, cooperation, solidarity, and help for others. Well-written and truly original, The Time Seller is destined to become a cult classic.

“An extraordinary example of what happens to an economy when it fails to ensure the free functioning of the mechanisms that balance markets; an example of the disaster that comes of prices not being allowed to move freely, when people are forced to pay for things that should be free and when an unnecessary tax burden is imposed on a society.”
—Xavier Sala-I-Martin, Columbia University of New York and the Umbele Foundation, King Juan Carlos Prize for Economics

“A satire that is a generous invitation to reflection, a call to reclaim our most valuable asset: our time. In other words: our lives.”
—Alex Rovira, author, The Inner Compass; coauthor, Good Luck

“Well worth a bit of your time to read it?and another bit to reflect on what it says.”
—Ferran Soriano, vice president of Finance, Fútbol Club Barcelona

“Combines a vast creative imagination and keen narrative inventiveness with the rationale and rigor of economic cause and effect to give us an allegory, parable, or satire, as the author calls it, of what could happen to us if we undervalue this treasure that is time.”
—Luis de Sebastián, professor of economics at the Universitat Ramón Llull and at ESADE Business School

“Kafka could not have painted a more alienated picture of how we enslave ourselves. Fernando Trías de Bes has woven a plot with endless surprising turns and with a gift for satire, irony, and humor. He gives us a mirror in which we can view ourselves and question our lives.”
—Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management in Chicago