Biblio
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(1989). Getting Unstuck: Breaking Through Your Barriers to Change.
"Cooperation increases when your criticism decreases. If negative criticism worked, you would not spend so much of your time nagging, complaining, and repeating yourself. The next time you feel the urge to criticize—STOP. Instead, ask yourself: Will what I am about to say really help the other person? Will it really get me more of what I want? Is the damage it might do to my relationship in the long run worth the short-term benefit of being right or feeling superior to the person I am about to criticize?" (p. 212)
(1998). The Gift of Fear : Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence.
"The loss of a job can be as traumatic as the loss of a loved one, but few fired employees receive a lot of condolence or support." (p. 177)
(1999). The Gift of Wounding: Finding Hope and Heart in Challenging Circumstances.
"Balance is the key to truth rather than one rigid position or judgement. Balance can be experienced only after examining many different sides of an issue, and measuring their worth and integrity. We begin that process by recognizing from the outset that there are other sides and perceptions and that we want to learn from these, as well as from our own knowledge and experience." (p. 48)
(1973). The Great Jackass Fallacy.
"People will avoid, evade, escape, deny, and reject both the jackass assumption and the military style hierarchy, for few people can tolerate being a jackass in a psychological prison without doing something about it." (p. 13)
"...then the managerial task becomes one of alliance with the ego ideals of employees one supervises rather than fighting the individuals or manipulating them in the psychological prison that is the contemporary hierarchical environment." (p. 105)
(1989). Group Psychodynamics: New Paradigms and New Perspectives.
"Sifneos coined the term alexithymia or 'the absence of words for feelings'. He described alexithymic patients as having an impoverishment of fantasy life, a constriction of emotional functioning, and a tendency to describe endless situational details or symptoms." (p. 171)
(1988). Growing a business.
"Like canny investors, employees know exactly how much of themselves they will invest in a given work situation before they feel taken for granted or ripped off. For pragmatic reasons of productivity and employee satisfaction, if for no other reason, I advise employee ownership. Nevertheless, it is not a panacea. lf it is instituted as a 'technique,' it has no meaning and can backfire. There is no point in sharing equity if it does not stem from your sense of fairness. If you are not a fair person, don't fake it. Employees resent hypocrisy more than greed.
Fairness is something people feel. You cannot fool workers with fancy titles, by calling people 'associates' or holding pep rallies, or by convoluted profit-sharing schemes that vest on the seventieth birthday. So often in business literature the question comes up as to what is the best way to treat your employees. It is a question with no meaning. The question you should always ask is what do you think of your employees. What you think about the people you work with will decide how you treat them, and will determine how you structure your company." (p. 114)
Fairness is something people feel. You cannot fool workers with fancy titles, by calling people 'associates' or holding pep rallies, or by convoluted profit-sharing schemes that vest on the seventieth birthday. So often in business literature the question comes up as to what is the best way to treat your employees. It is a question with no meaning. The question you should always ask is what do you think of your employees. What you think about the people you work with will decide how you treat them, and will determine how you structure your company." (p. 114)
(2015). The Growing Degradation of Work and Life, and What We Might Do to End It.
Abstract
"Corporations have used all of the control mechanisms at hand, techniques that have become both more sophisticated and punishing, to get fewer workers to convert ever more of their labor power into actual effort. This is true not just for manufacturing concerns like auto companies, which pioneered modern Taylorism, but by all private businesses (and public sector establishments such as colleges and the Social Security Administration), including especially today those in the service sector."
(2007). The Gulag Archipelago Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.).
"So, what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared?
What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: 'My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.'
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.
Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory."
Not to make light of Solzhenitsyn's very real and horrifying account, this passage reminded me of the following quote from Pritchett1: "Visionaries have to come to work willing to be fired. That's the price you must pay. You've got to be willing to take chances, to speak up, to rattle cages, to challenge the basic premises, to suggest a better way of doing things."
What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?
From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: 'My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.'
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogation will tremble.
Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory."
Not to make light of Solzhenitsyn's very real and horrifying account, this passage reminded me of the following quote from Pritchett1: "Visionaries have to come to work willing to be fired. That's the price you must pay. You've got to be willing to take chances, to speak up, to rattle cages, to challenge the basic premises, to suggest a better way of doing things."
(1990). Handbook of Computer Communications.
(1991). Hands-On Turbo C++.
(2013). Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management.
274. Abstract
"As Dennis Bakke reminds us in his book Joy at Work, life is not just about performance, effectiveness, and efficiency.1 The very essence of being a sentient human being is the ability to make choices and take actions—to be responsible, in control of at least some aspects of our own life, and engaged in actively creating the world in which we live. To cede those tasks to others, even others who are benign and possibly wiser than us, is to deny the full experience of being fully human and alive." (p. 199)
(1995). Hard Landing.
(2006). Harry Levinson on the Psychology of Leadership.
"When people in defeat deny their angry feelings, that denial of underlying, seething anger contributes to the sense of burnout.
If top executives fail to see these problems as serious, they may worsen the situation. If a company offers only palliatives like meditation and relaxation methods—temporarily helpful though they may be—victims of burnout may become further enraged. The sufferers know that their problem has to do with the nature of the job and not their capacity to handle it." (p. 29)
If top executives fail to see these problems as serious, they may worsen the situation. If a company offers only palliatives like meditation and relaxation methods—temporarily helpful though they may be—victims of burnout may become further enraged. The sufferers know that their problem has to do with the nature of the job and not their capacity to handle it." (p. 29)
(2004). Head First Design Patterns.
(2000). Headhunters Confidential.
(1996). The Heart Aroused : Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.
"Corporations, for their part, have been engaged in a willful battle against the very grain of existence. Like the good Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, they have spent enormous amounts of energy putting in place systems that attempt to hold back the shifting, oceanic qualities of existence. The complexity of the world could be accounted for, they fervently hoped, by a simple increase in the thickness of the company manual." (p. 10)
(1968). The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil.
"The very need to achieve something creative makes it necessary to leave the closed circle of group solipsism and to be interested in the object it wants to achieve." (p. 94)
(2002). The Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness.
"Boredom is the failure of the search for external fulfillment and refusal to look at what drove the search. Boredom is deep-rooted resistance to experiencing emotions after all efforts to distract attention from them have been ineffective. The root of boredom is resistance to painful emotions. This is the root of workaholism and perfectionism, also. In some cases the root produces boredom first, and then an escape into workaholism or perfectionism. In other cases, the workaholism or perfectionism comes first, and then boredom." (p. 193)
(1999). Helping Someone with Mental Illness.
"Work fulfills many needs. It creates structure and meaning in our lives, gives us a sense of accomplishment, provides income and security, and also affords us the chance to socialize with friends and colleagues and to feel as if we belong to a community." (p. 102)
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