RCRG
Syndicate
] "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)
"Everyone who works for Anheuser-Busch Companies, based in St. Louis, is entitled to two free cases of beer a month." (p. 214)
"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]
References
"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
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)
"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)
"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)
"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. 131-132)
"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)
"As workplaces become dignitarian, rank becomes less rigid and fixed. While care must be taken not to assign it to someone lacking the necessary skill and competence, rank is likley to change on a task-by-task, or even hour-by-hour, basis. Faced with ever-shifting missions and circumstances, companies and organizations can reassign ranks to facilitate each new undertaking. There is no favoritism shown toward those temporarily serving in positions of high rank, and care is taken to protect the rights and privileges of those lower down on the totem pole." (p. 56)
"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."
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)