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(2001). Driving Digital: Microsoft and Its Customers Speak About Thriving in the E-Business Era.
"If you think about the traditional corporate structure, what determines who's going to be a part of the debate? Simple: the people who are allowed in the meeting room." (p. 78)
"Two issues: Can your senior executive group adjust to a culture in which folks at the most junior levels of the organization have access to all but the most highly sensitive information about the company? And can they adjust to a culture in which they will receive e-mails from those same junior level folks? Will they be open and responsive to those e-mails? Are the managers at levels between the junior sender and senior executive who receives the e-mail going to revolt at not being consulted before the message gets sent, probably not even cc'ed?" (p. 84)
"Two issues: Can your senior executive group adjust to a culture in which folks at the most junior levels of the organization have access to all but the most highly sensitive information about the company? And can they adjust to a culture in which they will receive e-mails from those same junior level folks? Will they be open and responsive to those e-mails? Are the managers at levels between the junior sender and senior executive who receives the e-mail going to revolt at not being consulted before the message gets sent, probably not even cc'ed?" (p. 84)
(1991). Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: How to Overcome the Invisible Barriers to Quality, Productivity, and Innovation.
"W. Edwards Deming tells those who attend his seminars, 'We are here to make another kind of world.' He expresses the broad scope of the goal, and its enormity....
To achieve another kind of world requires a deep understanding of where we are now. The awareness of fear can help us move to this point. In the same way that many organizations have had to face harsh news about waste, scrap, and rework within their production processes, there is also harsh news about fear in human interactions in the workplace. But once past the denial that is so common, the real possibilities begin to emerge. When managers accept the role of facilitator, coach, and consultant, a dramatic shift takes place. Traditional notions of controlling and telling give way to inviting and guiding. Commitment switches to the long term—to the development of quality products and services, to long-lasting, mutually satisfying relationships with customers, vendors, and employees." (p. 240)
To achieve another kind of world requires a deep understanding of where we are now. The awareness of fear can help us move to this point. In the same way that many organizations have had to face harsh news about waste, scrap, and rework within their production processes, there is also harsh news about fear in human interactions in the workplace. But once past the denial that is so common, the real possibilities begin to emerge. When managers accept the role of facilitator, coach, and consultant, a dramatic shift takes place. Traditional notions of controlling and telling give way to inviting and guiding. Commitment switches to the long term—to the development of quality products and services, to long-lasting, mutually satisfying relationships with customers, vendors, and employees." (p. 240)
(1995). Dynamics of software development.
"Scapegoatism is a maladaptive, defensive reaction in which failure and other evils are magically warded off by finding someone to blame. The team will find a scapegoat instinctively as a way of preserving local functionality in spite of a deteriorating general situation." (p. 138)
(2006). Education and its Discontents: Overqualification in America, 1972-2002.
Social Forces. 85(2), 835 - 864. Abstract
"In fact, in the case of hard work ideology, the overeducation effect is actually increasing in strength. That is, overqualified workers are increasingly likely to disavow the "American Dream" of success through hard work alone."
(1993). The Effective Executive.
"But the organization is an abstraction. Mathematically, it would have to be represented as a point—that is, as having neither size nor extension. Even the largest organization is unreal compared to the reality of the environment in which it exists." (p. 13)
(1999). Eliminating Professors: A Guide to the Dismissal Process.
Quoting from a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada:
"A person's employment is an essential component of his or her sense of identity, self-worth, and emotional well-being. Accordingly, any change in a person's employment status is bound to have far-reaching repercussions. The point at which the employment relationship ruptures is the time when the employee is most vulnerable, and hence most in need of protection. When termination is accompanied by acts of bad faith in the manner of the discharge, the results can be especially devastating." (p. 164)
"A person's employment is an essential component of his or her sense of identity, self-worth, and emotional well-being. Accordingly, any change in a person's employment status is bound to have far-reaching repercussions. The point at which the employment relationship ruptures is the time when the employee is most vulnerable, and hence most in need of protection. When termination is accompanied by acts of bad faith in the manner of the discharge, the results can be especially devastating." (p. 164)
(1993). Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.
(1998). Emotional Blackmail : When the People In Your Life Use Fear, Obligation and Guilt to Manipulate You.
"Fear of Disapproval
This fear may sound insignificant, but believe me, for many people it is excruciating. The fear of disapproval is much deeper than cringing if someone goes 'Tsk-tsk' over something you've said or done. It is interwoven with our basic sense of self-worth. If we allow other people's approval or disapproval to define us, we set ourselves up to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us whenever we incur displeasure." (p. 225)
This fear may sound insignificant, but believe me, for many people it is excruciating. The fear of disapproval is much deeper than cringing if someone goes 'Tsk-tsk' over something you've said or done. It is interwoven with our basic sense of self-worth. If we allow other people's approval or disapproval to define us, we set ourselves up to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with us whenever we incur displeasure." (p. 225)
(2000). Emotional Intelligence at Work.
"What is so curious about setbacks is that they undermine motivation, yet it is precisely motivation that is needed to overcome the setback." (p. 104)
(1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.
"When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly. As one management consultant put it, 'Stress makes people stupid.'" (p. 149)
(1991). The Emperor's New Mind.
(1994). The Empty Raincoat.
"If we are not machines, random accidents in the evolutionary chain, we need to have a sense of direction." (p. 263)
(1993). End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization.
"Freedom and democratic self-managment remain the foundation of hope, not only in nations but also inside institutions where people spend their daily lives. Choice is the basis of community if relationships are both egalitarian and collaborative and if there are participative ways for everyone to share responsibility." (p. 231)
(2002). The End of Work As We Know It.
"The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health tells us that stress is becoming the biggest reason for workplace disability claims."
(1994). The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era.
"NEARLY FIFTY YEARS AGO, at the dawn of the computer revolution, the philosopher and psychologist Herbert Marcuse made a prophetic observation—one that has come to haunt our society as we ponder the transition into the Information Age: Automation threatens to render possible the reversal of the relation between free time and working time; the possibility of working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time. The result would be a radical transvaluation of values, and a mode of existence incompatible with the traditional culture. Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility." (p. 221)
(1994). Enlightened Leadership : Getting to the Heart of Change.
"When playing the corporate game of seeing who acquires more power, who is most right, who has the best ideas, and who is going to look the best, we become reluctant to take the risk of having people do anything outside of our direct control. Therefore, we become hesitant to delegate responsibility, and stifle the creativity and effectiveness of our people. We also become less likely to take risks ourselves and tend to rely on the perceived safety of the 'way we've always done it around here.' We seek the comfort of the established methods, policies, and procedures. We lock ourselves in our own boxes." (p. 218)
(2006). The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors.
"The inching-out process is at once structural (affecting the target's social location in the workplace) and psychological (changing the targets conception of self). Structurally, the shift involves the target's increasing absense from social gatherings, and more important, a reduction in the number and importance of positions held in the workplace." (p. 177)
"Far from being merely cognitive, the inching out process encompasses the whole of the target's being. It is a sense of growing ontological apartness from the workplace. When the target is physically near the eliminators, he or she commonly experiences sweating, dizziness, trembling, shortness of breath, dryness of mouth, or heart palpitations—symptoms of stress that usually disappear once away from the workplace." (p. 194)
(1994). Escape From Freedom.
"The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours." (p. 288)
(1992). Ethical Theory and Business.
"Those who question the legitimacy of the modern corporation altogether because of the evils of excessive corporate power usually believe that the corporation should have no right to decide how things are going to be for its constituents. While we believe that each person has the right to be treated not as a means to some corporate end but as an end in itself, we would not go so far as to say the corporation has no rights whatsoever. Our more moderate stance is that if the modern corporation requires treating others as a means to an end, then these others must agree on, and hence participate (or choose not to participate) in, the decisions to be used as such." (p. 78)
(2001). Ethics for the New Millennium.
260. Abstract
"And whereas a vision properly motivated—which recognizes others' desire for and equal right to happiness and to be free of suffering—can lead to wonders, when divorced from basic human feeling the potential for destruction cannot be overestimated." (p. 72)
(1999). Ethics on the Job: Cases and Strategies.
"To act ethically is, at the very least, to strive to act in ways that do not hurt other people; that respect their dignity, individuality, and uniquely moral value; and that treat others as equally important to oneself. If you believe these are worthwhile goals, then you have reason to strive to act ethically. If you do not believe these are worthwhile goals for human beings to pursue, then you may believe it is not important to act ethically." (p. 7)
(2009). Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things.
"If individual human beings can form forceful and persistent mental models, organizations or groups of people seem to be able to do so on an almost unimaginable scale. A person has secret doubts and fears. An organization has the emotional life of a reptile." (p. 93)
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