Biblio
Printer-friendly version
] Filters: Term is Business [Clear All Filters]
(2001). 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People.
"If you see your work as only a job, then it's dragging you away from what you really want to be doing. If you see it as a calling, then it is no longer a toiling sacrifice. Instead, it becomes an expression of you, a part of you." (p. 98)
(1994). 1001 Ways to Reward Employees.
"Everyone who works for Anheuser-Busch Companies, based in St. Louis, is entitled to two free cases of beer a month." (p. 214)
(2002). 21 Dog Years : Doing Time @ Amazon.com.
"When you work in an office everything becomes an abstraction. The higher you travel up the chain, the less actual work is being done, as everyone becomes responsible for overseeing those below them, who are supervising those below them, ad nauseam. In the Vedic tradtion Hindus believe that the world's firmament rests on four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a turtle. The question always comes: 'What's holding up the turtle?' And the answer is: 'It's turtles all the way down.' Likewise in corporations—it is all turtles, straight to the bottom, and after a while it becomes impossible to feel what is happening at an experiential level. Only lunch meetings persist. Postmodern capitalism." (p. 167)
See also the second chapter titled "Turtles all the way down" in Kantrow. 1
(2007). 30 reasons employees hate their managers: what your people may be thinking and what you can do about it.
"Employment is a form of slavery. This is a provocative analogy and may be offensive to some, but it is key to understanding why employees are often unhappy.
Merriam Webster defines a slave as, 'a person who has lost control of himself or herself and is dominated by something or someone else.' This is precisely what happens in the workplace. Many employees, shackled to their jobs with little freedom to control their day-to-day work or career, feel like slaves." (p. 7)
Merriam Webster defines a slave as, 'a person who has lost control of himself or herself and is dominated by something or someone else.' This is precisely what happens in the workplace. Many employees, shackled to their jobs with little freedom to control their day-to-day work or career, feel like slaves." (p. 7)
(2007). The 4-Hour Workweek : Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.
"The new mantra is this: Work wherever and whenever you want, but get your work done." (p. 209)
(1990). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
"There is the principle of potential, the idea that we are embryonic and can grow and develop and release more and more potential, develop more and more talents. Highly related to potential is the principle of growth—the process of releasing potential and developing talents, with the accompanying need for principles such as patience, nurturance, and trust." (p. 34)
(1995). 7 Secrets for Successful Living: Tapping the Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Achieve Love, Happiness, and Self-Reliance.
"Conforming to a way of life you do not believe in diminishes your power, for you are working against yourself. Although you may accomplish much in the way of outward success, in your core fear and weakness reign. Why do you think many people feel disillusioned when they finally achieve success? Those who do usually say 'something is missing,' and that something is usually their real selves." (p. 22)
(2000). Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead.
In the introduction to the book, subtitled "Letting Go of a Hopeless Ritual", the authors include the following quotation: "The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs."
The authors argue that appraisal ratings produce "unintended consequences—the insidious, destructive, and counterproductive effects of giving people ratings about their work performance. Whether accurate or not, people are psychologically affected by ratings. And except for people rated at the highest end of the scale, the impact is usually negative and consequently counterproductive to the cause of improving performance." (p. 69)
The authors argue that appraisal ratings produce "unintended consequences—the insidious, destructive, and counterproductive effects of giving people ratings about their work performance. Whether accurate or not, people are psychologically affected by ratings. And except for people rated at the highest end of the scale, the impact is usually negative and consequently counterproductive to the cause of improving performance." (p. 69)
(1992). Abuse in the Workplace: Management Remedies and Bottom Line Impact.
"Certain conditions are necessary for creativity to flourish, one of which is the time to play with ideas while in an open mode of thinking: relaxed, expansive, less purposeful, more contemplative (Cleese 1991). Organizationally, this translates into administrative slack. Peter Drucker relates a company's ability to innovate to the amount of administrative slack it provides in its daily operations ('Creativity in Danger' 1991)." (p. 149)
(2007). Action Learning.
"We thus define action learning as follows:
'An approach to working with and developing people that uses work on an actual project or problem as the way to learn. Participants work in small groups to take action to solve their problem and learn how to learn from that action. Often a learning coach works with the group in order to help the members learn how to balance their work with the learning from that work.'" (p. 3)
'An approach to working with and developing people that uses work on an actual project or problem as the way to learn. Participants work in small groups to take action to solve their problem and learn how to learn from that action. Often a learning coach works with the group in order to help the members learn how to balance their work with the learning from that work.'" (p. 3)
(1998). The Age of Unreason.
"Organizations are not by nature forgiving places. Mistakes are magnified by myth and engraved in reports and appraisals, to be neither forgotten nor forgiven. Organizational halos are for sinners as well as saints and last for a long time. The new manager must be a different manager. He, and increasingly she, must use what, in psychological jargon, is called reinforcement theory, applauding success and forgiving failure; he or she must use mistakes as opportunities for learning, something only possible if the mistake is truly forgiven because otherwise the lesson is heard as a reprimand, not an offer of help...The new manager has to be a teacher, counselor, and friend, as much as or more than he or she is commander, inspector, and judge." (p. 131)
(1973). Aging & mental health : positive psychosocial and biomedical approaches.
"New models of vocational rehabilitation, supported employment, and skill development will need to be developed to respond to the desires of older adults to engage in meaningful activities in late life." (p. 177)
(1997). The Alchemy of Fear, How to Break the Corporate Trance and Create Your Company's Successful Future.
"One would expect that, when a group of bright people come together to make a decision or analyze a problem, their combined abilities would result in a group intelligence greater than that of any individual. Instead, most groups experience exactly the opposite—inverse intelligence. The resulting group intelligence is significantly less than that of any individual of the individuals within it." (p. 80)
(2006). All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity.
"A fundamental characteristic of a healthy work culture is that everyone, regardless of rank, exhibits a questioning attitude. The freedom to challenge any action, any condition, and any assertion cannot be maintained in an environment laced with rankism. Only by continually demonstrating respect for all opinions and those who hold them will an environment be maintained in which a spirit of inquiry can thrive." (p. 54)
(1993). AMA Management Handbook.
"Scott and Hart indicate in Organizational America (Houghton Mifflin, 1979) that unfortunately the degree to which we deny our innate human nature may have already thrown open the door to domination of most Americans by organizational imperatives."
(2000). Americans with disabilities : exploring implications of the law for individuals and institutions.
"The key mediating concept here is self-respect. Suppose we agree with Rawls that self-respect is a vital primary good, something of great importance that any rational person is presumed to want. Now, given actual human psychology, self-respect is—to a considerable degree—dependent on other people's affirmation of one's own worth. And in modern advanced societies, employment, earnings, and professional success are, for better or worse, positively correlated with social assessments of an individual's value. Further, beyond the reactions of other people, work and career identifications form significant parts of some people's conceptions of themselves and their own worth; hence these identifications may contribute directly to the creation and sustenance of self-respect, and their absence will frequently have the opposite effect." (p. 179)
(1973). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
"Power can mean power over people, or it can mean power to do things...Many writers, unfortunately, make use of this ambiguous meaning of the words 'power' and 'control', and in order to smuggle in the praise of 'power over' they identify it with 'power to'. Moreover, lack of control does not mean lack of any kind of organization, but only of those kinds in which the control is exploitative and the controlled cannot control the controllers." (p. 394)
"Being powerless and hence in danger of being enslaved, or having power and hence in danger of becoming dehumanized, are two evils. Which is to be shunned the most is a matter of religious and moral or political conviction." (p. 395)
(1974). Anger.
"Some people unfortunately sacrifice their health and happiness on the altar of justice. Justice is an elusive ideal. If a situation bothers you, the best thing to do is to make the changes necessary for your own comfort. Insisting that blame be placed where it belongs and that the person at fault must be the one to change may only lead to further unhappiness." (p. 124)
(1998). Anger Kills: Seventeen Strategies for Controlling the Hostility That Can Harm Your Health.
"By allowing yourself a range of strategies—both asserting and deflecting options—you can balance your twin goals of preventing petty matters from riling you and remain focused on your legitimate rights and those of others. Sometimes you may choose to take a stand for what is right; at other times you may prefer to tune out the situation. Real injustices do exist in the world. The goal in learning to control your hostility is not to become insensitive to all injustices but rather to become more focused and selective." (p. 148)
(1989). Anger: the misunderstood emotion.
"The anger that fuels revolt does not arise, therefore, from objective conditions of deprivation or misery. As long as people regard those conditions as natural and inevitable, as God's Law or man`s way, they do not feel angry about them. So sociologists speak instead of 'relative deprivation,' the subjective comparisons that people make when they compare their actual lives to what might be possible. Alexis de Toequeville observed that 'evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested,' and the freed slave Frederick Douglass put the same idea more passionately. 'Beat and cuff your slave,' he wrote, 'keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog, but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately, surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom intrude.'" (p. 261)
(2001). The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook: A Step-by-Step Program for Curing Yourself of Extreme Anxiety, Panic Attacks, and Phobias.
"lt has been my repeated experience that clients experience relief from anxiety as well as phobias when they come to feel that their life has meaning, purpose, and a sense of direction. Until you discover something larger than self-gratification—something which gives your life a sense of purpose—you may be prone to feelings of boredom and a vague sense of confinement because you are not realizing all your potential. This sense of confinement can be a potent breeding ground for anxiety, phobias, and even panic attacks." (p, 40)
(2003). The Anxiety Book.
"Have compassion for yourself and others. Rational responses should not only be more truthful than core negative thoughts, but also be kinder. When you magnify your own weaknesses, your cognitions become skewed toward disaster because you don't believe in your ability to handle stress or challenge. When you magnify the weaknesses (or dark sides) of other people, your relationships are characterized by mistrust, and you'll never feel safe in the world. You don't have to expunge awareness of your own imperfections, or whitewash the fact that people can be malevolent, in order to cultivate compassion. A compassionate worldview acknowledges all our multifaceted complexity but is purposely skewed toward the positive: You look for the good in yourself as well as in others." (p. 98)
(2002). The Anxious Organization: Why Smart Companies Do Dumb Things.
"In organizations where anxiety is often expressed as blame, to avoid being blamed becomes a constant preoccupation. People attempt to preempt blame by sending each other memos recapitulating who did what and when. Their attention shifts from avoiding a potential problem to avoid being blamed for it." (p. 145)
(2000). Applications in Human Resource Management: Cases, Exercises, and Skill Building.
"This article (in Business Week) identified a number of family-oriented policies and programs followed by 24 leading companies. Among the most significant of these were modifications in the company culture, executive development to enhance 'sensitivity', child care, sick care, women on the board, career development policies, family-leave policies, maternity leave with partial pay, modified work and family benefits, flexible benefits, hiring a 'pluralistic' workforce, job sharing, mentoring programs, and part-time professional and/or executive positions...
In response to employee criticism and the potential for negative publicity, the board of trustees made a decision to establish a 'Task Force on the Work / Family Interface.'" (p. 87)
In response to employee criticism and the potential for negative publicity, the board of trustees made a decision to establish a 'Task Force on the Work / Family Interface.'" (p. 87)
(1997). Arnold Economics.
Interview with Gordon Tullock:
"I am a very fortunate man to be paid a high salary to pursue my hobby." (p. 560)
"I am a very fortunate man to be paid a high salary to pursue my hobby." (p. 560)
(C)2014 CC-BY-NC 3.0, workcreatively.org