Biblio
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(1978). Conceptual blockbusting : a pleasurable guide to better problem solving.
"Most people are not happy with criticism and, to make matters worse, are somewhat unsure of the quality of their own ideas. They therefore require a supportive environment in which to work."
(1993). Communicating at Work.
Basics of conflict resolution include: supportiveness, positiveness, equality.
(2000). Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week.
"So the trick, with subordinates, is to keep them happy, productive, hopeful, and—above all—subordinate." (p. 36)
(1993). Crazy Bosses: Spotting Them, Serving Them, Surviving Them.
"Today, American workers exist in the most primitive form of group, one that is tradition-free and free of loyalty. Such an environment generates tremendous fear in people, fear of loss, of death, of dissolution and shame. Fear that drives people together. Fear that keeps people apart. It is a fear produced by the incessant demand for short-term results and the feeling of danger supplied by a variety of villians. And it is not irrational. It is real. It is sane." (p. 94)
(1996). Changing the Bully Who Rules the World: Reading and Thinking about Ethics.
"We serious readers like to meditate upon villainy when we find it in life or in books. Such meditating makes us feel philosophical. Helping professionals are less peaceable. They think of human cruelty as something to study with the unswerving goal of getting rid of it. They interest themselves with, among other subjects, a spectacular specialty of villainy that would have made the poet Tom McGrath prick up his ears—that is, the villainous cunning by which a few human beings condition whole enclaves of other human beings dutifully to commit large-scale cruelty. They regard cruelty the way physicians regard a bacterium or a virus: first, they identify it as fast as they can—get its measure, so to speak, figure out its lifestyle and habitat of choice—and then second, they devise for it the most hostile environment that their technical prowess can invent. We would be furious if our doctor looked into our sore throat, drew back, and then cried out, 'How utterly fascinating! How extraordinary, really, the way those germs writhe and thrive in the host's dark vault of throat!' We want the doctor to be a confrontational agent of change, not an aesthete. If our doctor won't get rid of those squatters we'll find another doctor who will." (p. xxii)
(1994). Coping with Difficult Bosses.
"There are certainly times when honest spontaneity is the key to improved human relationships, but while you are being harpooned by a hostile boss is not one of those times. It is then you need to do what actors do—communicate emotions you do not feel." (p. 20)
(2007). Coffee with Oscar Wilde.
(2010). Can Being Creative Improve Your Health?.
"Highly creative individuals have long noted the salutary effects of creative activity on both physical and mental health. Many types of creative work can relieve stress and enhance positive mood, two major factors in promoting good health."
(1991). The Corporate Negaholic: How to Deal Successfully With Negative Colleagues, Managers and Corporations.
"The alternative action was to look at the inequities and the resentments and find solutions which would create a win-win outcome. Unless everyone wins, no one really wins." (p. 91)
(2003). Career Warfare: 10 Rules for Building a Successful Personal Brand and Fighting to Keep It.
"Organizations that value you only for your business skills—a lot of Wall Street firms fall into this category—are very antiseptic. They tend to be built on addictions, but not loyalties: addictions to the money, addictions to the process. They are a bit like galley ships. The overseers don't care about the relationship. They just want you to keep rowing.
This is fine when times are good, but if you should ever fail to handle your oar well, you are overboard. Such firms will have no compunction about firing you and even ruining your reputation, if it serves their purpose." (p. 54)
(1988). Changing Ways: A Practical Tool for Implementing Change Within Organizations.
"A basic axiom of any change effort is that 'the further away the people defining the change are from the people who have to live with the change, then the more likelihood that the change will develop problems.'" (p. 59)
(1998). The Critical 14 Years Of Your Professional Life.
"What are the bosses' strengths and weaknesses?
We all have them. Usually, our weaknesses outnumber our strengths. When you do a strengths/weaknesses 'audit' of the boss, be prepared for the weakness column to extend beyond the strengths. Once I got savvy about the world of bosses, I considered it a major strength that the executive simply was breathing. The higher you put your standards for how bosses should act, the harder you're going to fall when a particular boss doesn't measure up. Remember breathing—it's a major strength." (p. 60)
We all have them. Usually, our weaknesses outnumber our strengths. When you do a strengths/weaknesses 'audit' of the boss, be prepared for the weakness column to extend beyond the strengths. Once I got savvy about the world of bosses, I considered it a major strength that the executive simply was breathing. The higher you put your standards for how bosses should act, the harder you're going to fall when a particular boss doesn't measure up. Remember breathing—it's a major strength." (p. 60)
(2002). Creating Sustainable Work Systems.
If one is to believe history, intensity of work has been a central issue in management science ever since the start of industrialization and a problematic one at that, as it captures the essence of the antagonism between the person who does the work and the person who wants it done; sometimes formulated as a conflict between capital and labour, inherent in the capitalistic industrial system. This perspective does not indicate many remedies apart from a proletarian revolution—still there would be conflicting interest." (p. 15)
(1908). The complete works of George Eliot....
"Perhaps here lay the secret of the hardness he had accused himself of; he had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite of foreseen consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to get enough patience and charity towards our stumbling, falling companions in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way in which a strong, determined soul can learn it—by getting his heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share not only the outward consequence of their error, but their inward suffering." (p. 309)
(2003). Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal with People Who Try to Control You.
"Other people's definitions of us are not just absurd—if unchallenged, they erect prison walls around us. As they rise higher, the light of awareness fades. The world darkens. We lose freedom, safety, confidence, conviction, and sometimes ourselves." (p. 77)
(1982). The Computer Establishment.
"Computing is a technology with many paths to follow; at each fork there is vigorous dissension among the brightest practitioners. We need to preserve that dissension, to offer scientists and businessmen a reasonable chance to pursue whatever goal seems promising and customers the greatest possible opportunity to choose their supplier." (p. 408)
(1986). Communication and Community: implications of Martin Buber's Dialogue.
"Shunning has been used for centuries as a paradoxical technique of collectively disciplining a person to bring him or her back into the group. This method may be the lesser of evils, however. As one my friends keenly observed, shunning is better than death, which has been used in some groups to eliminate the deviant. Given these two bleak choices, most of us would probably choose being ignored, But we should not minimize the pain one can feel from such exclusion. As William james stated, there is no more fiendish behavior than to act as if 'another did not exist.'"
(1993). The Creative Spirit.
"'Love is not a word people talk about easily', says Larry Wilson, 'Yet, increasingly, we're seeing that people are wanting to know that somebody cares about them, that they are not just seen as some interchangeable part. Real leadership is about demonstrating that your intention is to care for people and support their growth.'" (p. 139)
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